Give the Anarchist a Cigarette

by Mick Farren

  The evening after surgery, just as my isolation was starting to get to me, I heard a commotion somewhere beyond the confines of my patient’s perception. A voice I recognised was raised and authoritative. ‘I’m not interested in your rules, lady. I don’t care that it’s not visiting hours. I’m his manager, and he’s my goddamned client, and I need to see him right now. My time’s valuable and you’ll find that screwing me around is very bad idea.’

  Danny Halperin was a previous-generation New York beatnik, a Lenny Bruce contemporary who will be played by Sydney Pollack in the movie. Although it could be said that I was one of his clients, he definitely wasn’t my manager – just doing a pretty fair impression of Allen Klein to get past the ward sister. Such were Danny’s resources of bluff and bluster. He was a graphic designer with ties to Atlantic Records, who rented a studio in the back of Joe Boyd’s office, and when Steve Sparks and I were hanging out there, plotting the ‘Disposable’ phase of the Deviants, we’d become pretty friendly, to the point that, one Friday afternoon, he’d turned me on to my first line of cocaine, a highly educational experience that made me wonder how come I’d been missing out for so long and caused me immediately to make sure that Nat Joseph gave Danny the commission for the cover of Mona.

  Su Small was also a regular visitor at Danny’s studio, picking up record-company artwork in her capacity as IT’s advertising director, and shooting the shit as a friend. Sometimes these ‘tea party’ afternoon gatherings in Danny’s studio would grow to as many as five or six in number, with the addition of Anthea Joseph, an old revered folkie mate of Dylan’s, and Judy Collins, whom Joe had hired as a governess for Fairport Convention. Heather Wood of the Young Tradition might show up, having slid by to see Anthea, and now and then Sandy Denny would put in an appearance. When the party reached these proportions – and Danny was a mighty teller of tales and a great raconteur with whom to waste a few hours – Joe Boyd would be forced to show his face. He essentially disapproved of hanging-out as counter-productive, and not what went on in a ‘real office’, but we had him so outnumbered that he was forced to smile nicely and participate and, on occasion, behave just like a human being.

  When Danny had been informed, probably by Su, that I was languishing in the infirmary, he cabbed it over to the Scrubs. The end of Danny’s day was well past visiting hours, hence the tussle with the ward sister. With the starched dragon vanquished, he entered bearing magazines and a Philip K. Dick novel. ‘I should probably have brought you a bunch of daisies.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have appreciated it.’

  ‘Didn’t think you would. I also thought of a bottle of Scotch, but I decided it wasn’t a good idea.’

  ‘I’m on antibiotics.’

  ‘So I was right?’

  ‘That you were.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I think I’ve decided to live.’

  Danny didn’t stay too long. The ward sister hovered, and both he and I knew he wasn’t going to win round two. Even though brief, the visit encouraged me. To see anyone from the outside world was a massive relief. After Danny had left, the idea of lying around in a hospital bed for a few days recuperating seemed positively attractive, if people came to visit me and brought me stuff. That was not, however, how Hammersmith Hospital played it. I was informed by the dragon sister that they were throwing me out in twenty-four hours. My visions of peeled grapes were abruptly snuffed out and, instead, I was faced with the prospect of being back on the street, no longer accredited as sick, and on my own, to figure out what the hell to do next.

  Ragged Company

  So this was the Seventies. From my immediate perspective, I figured you could keep them. I was cold, damp, miserable and penniless. The snakeskin was wearing thin and the velvet was tatty and threadbare. After coming out of the hospital, I had grown a beard by way of compensatory displacement. It had started as long stubble when I couldn’t shave around the dressings, but after a few weeks I looked like Phineas of the Furry Freak Brothers. Steve Took and I stood on the Broadwalk in Kensington Gardens in a fine drizzle, smelling, as he put it ‘like old dog beds’ and attempting not to face the fact that, by February 1970, we’d become too wretched for it to be funny. At that grievous, eight-o’clockish time of the morning, decent people are going to work and all hope fails for the lowdown and disconnected. Right then. Took and I were sufficiently disconnected to be walking from South Kensington to Ladbroke Grove because we didn’t have the cab fare, and to take the tube in the rush hour would have been too emotionally damaging. This route march at such an ungodly hour was all Took’s fault. After a perfectly reasonable night of drinking and drugging, he had gracelessly picked a fight with his girlfriend Angie and she’d thrown him out of the apartment she shared with her flatmate Chrissie. Of course being his buddy, pal and partner in crime of the moment, I had to go with him. The only possible refuge was my gaff in Chesterton Road, and we were walking because, when Took added insult to injury by asking for the cab fare, Angie had thrown a vase at him.

  I still occupied the back bedroom at Chesterton Road. When Jamie returned, a repeat confrontation took place, but Ace backed down even faster than Joy. It worried me slightly that he’d caved in so fast, and then it occurred to me that, without any tangible occupation except managing the remaining rump of the Deviants, he was probably glad that I was there to help pay the rent. For a few weeks I bided my time, wondering where to move, and when; then keeling over and winding up in hospital put the brakes on any ideas of immediate relocation.

  Not that my own situation was very much better than Jamie’s. With my solo album being viewed as a symptom rather than a masterpiece, the entertainment industry was far from beating a path to my door. The first plan was that Twink, Took and I would put some kind of band together. Calling ourselves the Pink Fairies, we even performed something less of a gig and more of a protracted harangue to a confused and increasingly angry crowd at Manchester University. In later years some chroniclers tried to compare that act to the early and messy shows by John Lydon and Public Image Limited. I can’t comment. The show was so unthought-out and unprepared that I resorted to getting blind drunk before the train even arrived in Manchester, and remember nothing of it.

  Took, Twink and I supposedly went back to the drawing board, although Took and I weren’t aware that, even as the three of us sat around at Chesterton Road, plotting future moves, nefarious phone calls were being exchanged setting up a completely different scenario. Twink, in cahoots with Jamie Mandelkau, was seeking his own salvation with a scheme to form a band with Rudolph, Sandy and Russell when they got back from the US, and to call it the Pink Fairies. I guess he hoped to capitalise on whatever minimal momentum and fuckhead profile the old PF drinking club might have garnered. Twink’s duplicity disappointed me. Had he been upfront about what he was doing, I think I would have accepted it. I fully understand that a man must examine all his options, but he should have called Took and me to the pub and said, ‘Look, lads, I’m talking to the three ex-Deviants, and we might get something together. Sorry, but that’s what I see as my best shot right now.’ Instead, he seemed to feel the need to choreograph an absurd fight with Took over what the music papers euphemistically called ‘creative differences’, and then ran off into the night claiming we were ‘freaking him out with our negativity’. In a day or so, the Pink Fairies scheme was made public. Having experienced what I subjectively perceived as two back-stabbings in the space of three or four months, I began to have grave doubts about the whole rockband business and, at about the same time, I was presented with a salutary example of the price that might have to be paid for the privilege of conducting said business.

  Sweet Gene Vincent

  The Blackfoot tribe have a proverb that goes ‘When legends die, there are no more dreams, and when there are no more dreams, there is no more greatness.’ Sometime in the aftermath of Mona, while re-examining my own dreams, I saw one of my personal legends for the last time. When I heard that Gene Vincent would
be playing at the Country Club in Belsize Park, backed by Brit-rock revivalists the Wild Angels, I couldn’t decide whether I was excited or dismayed. I already knew that he was in failing health and pretty much on the skids. John Peel, Kim Fowley and Jim Morrison had played their own parts in arranging that Gene should make what would turn out to be his last respectable studio album, but an aura of defeat seemed to cloak him like an ominous thunderhead.

  For more than fifteen years, even before he had an international hit with ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’, Gene had been living a regime so profoundly destructive that it was a near-miracle he even made it to the end of the Sixties, let alone was attempting yet another European tour. As those of you who know the legend will be well aware, Gene had seriously injured his leg in a motorcycle accident in the mid-Fifties while on leave from the US Navy. ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ had set him off on a treadmill of one-night stands, and the shattered bones were never given time to heal. This quickly led to a significant painkiller habit; the painkillers made him slow, so he took speed to get back in gear; the speed made him edgy and he drank to mellow out. In the morning he’d wake with a hangover and his leg would still hurt. The cycle was repeated daily, a process that gradually eroded his heath, talent and stability. By the time he was scheduled to play the Country Club, osteomyelitis had set in and amputation seemed only a matter of time.

  Of course, I wanted see the man, whatever condition he might be in. Although Elvis Presley may have been my most cherished, rock & roll, teen-lifestyle influence, Gene was a close second and so much more accessible. Gene Vincent at the Brighton Essoldo in 1960 first convinced me of the awesome power of live rock pushed to its outer and ultimate limits. He manifested the menace of a Stephen King creation. Morrison would later talk about rock & roll as a demonic shamanism. Gene simply and inarticulately conjured it. He looked like a man in the grip of some dark, wrenching religious experience. The contorted figure in the black leather suit stood with one leg forward, knee bent, and the other, held rigid in its steel brace, thrust awkwardly out behind him. The stance was unnatural – all but unholy – body twisted, almost tortured. At peaks in the act, his whole frame would vibrate as he clutched the microphone stand with his gloved right hand and naked left, desperately, as though it was the only thing preventing him being borne away by rage and passion. His corpse-pale face was framed, Dracula-style, by the upturned collar of his leather jacket, and a sweat-soaked bunch of grapes had collapsed on his forehead. His eyes were raised to an imaginary point, high in the auditorium, higher even than the cheap seats in the upper balcony, as though he was staring into some unknown place, seeing both the horror and the glory.

  Back in those days, us kids got around on Southern Region commuter trains without corridors. On that train back home, my hands were all over my date’s body and hers were all over mine. No alternative, and damned if we wanted one. We had just been part of a dark invocation of post-Fifties teenage lust, backed by the loudest electric guitars we’d ever heard in our young lives. We had passed childhood’s end, but would kick and scream bloody murder before we’d allow ourselves to be forced into what was currently being promoted as maturity. Shoot the works for rock & roll.

  To see him again, at the Country Club, a joint that held maybe 400 max, and where the Deviants had played time without number, made it hard to ignore that this was the humiliating depths to which the ‘rock & roll Richard III’ had sunk. When Gene came on he was trying hard, holding the old pose, but his voice was painfully weak, as though he was worn out from an endless diabolic conflict. Very soon he would return to Los Angeles to die. Back in LA, he found that his wife had not only left him, but had cleaned out his bank accounts. He promptly went on an intensive drunk, finally destroying the already ulcerated lining of his stomach. Soon after stumbling into his mother’s house in the LA suburb of Saugus, Gene apparently fell to his knees and began vomiting blood. He looked up at his mother and told her, ‘Mama, you can phone the ambulance now.’ Within an hour he was dead.

  In the final distillation, legend was Gene Vincent’s legacy. Without becoming unduly metaphysical, he had to be one of those totemic spirits, in the company of Robert Johnson, Johnny Ace, Jim Morrison, Keith Moon and Sid Vicious, who watch over rock ’n’ roll in all its diverse forms, doing their best to ensure that an excess of mental heath and sobriety don’t reduce the music to the predictable; that the sweat, tears and suicidal stupidity continue; that the bop for which they died never sinks to a mundane bloodlessness. My vanity wishes that I could take on a tiny fraction of the sacred duty, but, on the familiar stage at the Country Club, I saw the penalties that could be exacted, the price that might have to be paid.

  Nevermore

  Shortly I’d be hearing the voices in my head, and the fillings in my teeth would be picking up alien radio. The most intelligent way to handle an intense emotional crisis may not be to throw so many micrograms of LSD at it to precipitate a complete psychedelic meltdown. Unfortunately, so much acid happened to be around at the time. Took had decided he was going to finance his showbusiness comeback by dealing in the stuff, but this had proved a severe miscalculation. The overwhelming majority of our immediate community was drinking, wobbling around on Mandrax or, in extremis, nodding out on heroin. No one wanted to drop a tab and wrestle with God and the Devil. Took’s stash of bright-pink acid tabs proved powerful and of fine quality, but largely unsaleable, and we ate them like candy out of a combination of poverty and boredom. This almost precipitated a whole mess of an afternoon when we’d run into a gang of nuns coming out of the convent at the top end of Portobello Road and had actually fallen to the pavement hysterical with laughter. On another occasion, Took happened to suggest that the hallucinations we were experiencing were not merely in our hearts and minds, but actually circling around us like a tangible external aura, fully visible to every passerby. The idea had so rattled me that I was forced to flee into Finches to down a couple of large whiskies.

  It was in this context that I’d decided to drop a tab and attempt to figure out where my future might lie. Instead of delivering the blinding but interpretable revelation for which I hoped, the dose precipitated me into an arid and schizophrenic Marscape: blood-red sand and razor-sharp rocks, where I was simultaneously Captain America and the most humble mould on the Wonderloaf of the Universe. All alone in a growing hallucinatory horror, I masochistically forced myself to listen to Mona. I crouched in the Martian wasteland with headphones clamped to my skull, volume cranked up to the pain threshold, reliving every misguided moment, and with the realisation coming upon me that this was no work of art, but one of brutal psychosis, not entertainment, but a case-study. Now I turned the Dalek cry on myself. Exterminate! Exterminate! Away with the grooved and circular black abomination! I wanted to wrench the vinyl from the turntable, scratch it until it was unplayable, but, even as high as a kite, I couldn’t kill my baby. All I could do was slowly turn down the volume, sunset on Mars, a fade into the darkness of ghosts, and then burst into tears. My whole rock dream had been a cruel charade. I had to tell someone. I had to confess and seek absolution, or neurons would fuse. Germaine had been right – it was a tyrannical dance with death and I was too exhausted to dance any more.

  With every effort of my scarcely remaining will, I pulled myself back from Mars and into the reality of escape. Out of the door and down the stairs, into the street and into a cab. ‘Where to, mate?’ What a monumental question! I was still enough of a Martian to be without words. The driver didn’t put the cab in gear, and looked back at me distrustfully. ‘Are you going to give me a problem?’

  ‘No, no.’ I blurted out the address of Chrissie’s and Angie’s flat, as if by rote.

  The night streets were like a combination of a Wally Wood Mad cartoon and Taxi Driver. Of course, Taxi Driver hadn’t yet been made, but what’s a cultural timewarp when you’re being wrenched by ancient and alien ergotamine visions. The cab pulled up in front of Chrissie’s and Angie’s building. I thrust money at the driver and look
ed around wildly. The streets were rain-slick, reflective and humming with dangerously charged colours. I pressed the bell repeatedly. I probably sounded like a drug or vice raid, but I was desperate to get inside.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s me. Let me in.’

  I was starting to sound like a Cheech and Chong record. Took met me at the top of the stairs. ‘You’re sweating, man.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’

  ‘I’ve made a decision. A very important decision.’

  ‘What decision, man?’

  ‘An important decision.’

  ‘You already said that.’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘You want to release a few crucial details to the masses?’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘After coming all that way, I couldn’t articulate it.

  I, the ineffable centre of the universe, was only able to make this single vowel sound . . .

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘You better come inside, man.’

  I spooked like a skittish horse. ‘No.’

  Took reached out to take me by the arm, for concerned conversation on the stairs would carry to the neighbours. The overhead light made his face a relief map as the electricity wormed through the wires. He became a narrow-beaked reptile. A saurian vulture. No contradiction. Aren’t birds and reptiles supposedly related?

  ‘Steve . . .’ It was Angie’s voice from inside. I fled. Some might have come after me, but Took wasn’t like that. He had a very strong sense of preserving number one. The street was humming electric again. I couldn’t see a cab and began to panic. Then a wondrous and warm, orange ‘For Hire’ sign came into view.