by Mick Farren
Although absorbed by the task at hand, our eyes went instinctively to the screen when a break-in newsflash came up on the TV. This was back in the days when breaking in on the show in progress was reserved for really serious stuff, like the outbreak of war, the fall of governments and the death of kings. The image on the eighteen-inch Trinitron was suddenly of a grinning, lip-curled, short-haired Elvis Presley from one of the later and most execrable beach movies, but I knew in an instant. No hesitation. Someone in the newsroom had grabbed the very first colour still that came to hand. That the flashing lightning and rolling thunder might be a little too operatic and implausible never entered my mind.
‘Fucking hell, he’s dead!’
Larry lunged for the volume and we just caught the final recap. ‘. . . singer Elvis Presley dies at forty-three in his home in Memphis, Tennessee.’
My first instinct was to phone Ingrid. Perhaps I should head home. Ingrid was the ultimate true fan and Elvis-believer, and maybe I should be with her. Or maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe she’d want to cope with her Elvis-grief in Nordic privacy. The speculation turned out to be irrelevant. All I heard was an engaged signal. I wondered idly who’d beat me to the dial. Lemmy was too self-absorbed, even though he was having an affair with her at around this time. Perhaps she and I were in that weird limbo of attempting to call each other simultaneously. I hung up and dialled again, but the line remained busy. It then occurred to me that Ingrid might not have the TV on at all, and that the ongoing call was totally unElvis-related. She still laughed, because she had yet to hear.
The next few newsflashes were vague. Paramedics had been called to Graceland, but attempts at resuscitation had failed. A heart attack was suspected, but no information was being released, pending an autopsy. We might have bought the heart-attack story – Elvis had, after all, become a fat, self-indulgent bastard over the preceding couple of years – but Elvis: What Happened? (a book about Elvis’ last years by three of his bodyguards, Red West, Sonny West and Dave Hibbler, all members of the inner circle of the Memphis Mafia) had already come out, revealing, among other obsessive-compulsive transgressions and side-effects of global adoration, Elvis’ truly imperial pill habit.
‘Think he ODed?’
‘Has to be on the cards.’
‘So what do you think he ODed on?’
‘Being Elvis.’
‘Seriously.’
‘Probably a whole combination of stuff. Qualuudes, Demerol, Percodan, you name it.’
My suspicions surrounding Elvis and his drug intake actually went as far back as 1970 and the release of the movie Elvis: That’s the Way It Is. Ingrid, Edward, Boss, John Manly, I and maybe one or two others had made a mass outing to the Westbourne Grove Odeon to see the feature-length documentary on Elvis’ return to the live stage. During a rehearsal sequence when Elvis was goofing with the band and all but fell off his stool, I turned to Boss and whispered, ‘The guy’s as high as a kite.’
Boss looked at me as though I was nuts, but afterwards, in the pub, the subject came up again. ‘You really believe Elvis was fucked-up?’
I was now on the defensive. ‘High as a kite. What the fuck do you think? Why should he be any different to everyone else?’
Boss and Edward continued to look at me as though I was projecting. Ingrid, as ever, kept her own counsel, although I think she’d suspected Elvis’ drug intake all along. It took seven years for my perception to be vindicated, and Boss was big enough to be the first to admit it.
The thunderstorm had started to abate a little when I finally got Ingrid on the phone. ‘Did you hear?’
‘Yes.’
Her tone gave no clue as to how she was feeling, but Ingrid could have remained enigmatically neutral through an outbreak of thermonuclear global war. Showing emotion had been a Class-A felony among the von Essens for many generations.
‘I’ll be home as soon as I can.’
‘I thought you had stuff to do?’
‘Elvis’ death has rather put a damper on things.’
After the rain, no mini-cab was to be swiftly had, but as I was finally leaving, Larry made a remark. ‘You know, Micky, it was really something to be with you when you heard that Elvis died. It’s one of those things that you don’t ever forget.’
The deaths of kings are not static occurrences. They are a time of movement and change, speed and activity. When they shot John Kennedy, we had a conspiracy to build. With Elvis, it proved more paranormal than paranoid. The world was gearing up for twenty years of trailer-park grief, which verged perilously close to a religion. By morning ‘Memories’ would be all over the TV and radio. After a respectable interval I called Felix. I didn’t even have to explain why I was calling.
‘Are we going to?’
‘I don’t see how we can’t.’
‘Lots of pink and black’
‘Plenty of black and some funeral purple.’
We were not only going to put out the top-class and most reverent Elvis Presley Memorial Poster Magazine on the stands, but accomplish it in record time. The crew assembled in the pub first thing (which for us meant about one-thirty in the afternoon) and went to work until the job was finished. I think I was the nominal editor, but Felix was the hands-on publisher, bolstering the troops when they flagged by any means necessary; arguing about the exact tone of the pictures and the hastily written copy. He, too, was paying his respects to Elvis by showing the publishing industry that he could turn out a quality product at near the speed of light. The one shot went on sale four days later, beating everyone except the actual daily papers with their four-page insert supplements. Thirty-two pages of full colour, primarily the young Elvis, gorgeous and beautiful, as everyone really wanted him. In the same time space I also managed the lengthy NME cover story/obituary. Despite being semi-retired from the weekly, I brooked no argument that the assignment wasn’t mine by right.
Yes, we made a buck on the poster mag, but, along with the NME obituary, it was also my tribute, my personal wreath on the freshly turned grave. An indication that my honourable intentions had glimmered through – and of the universal impact of Elvis Presley – was provided by the young, Cliff Richard-hip Indian couple who ran the newsagents on the corner of Chesterton Road and Ladbroke Grove. Most days, before either hailing a cab or getting on the number fifteen or fifty-two bus to wherever the day demanded, I would pick up my twenty Rothman’s, maybe a Daily Mirror or the 2000AD comic I had reserved for me. We’d generally exchange pleasantries, but that was the limit of our relationship. It came completely out of the blue when they thanked me for my piece in NME, and said how they’d found it respectful and very reflective of the way they felt. Up to that moment I hadn’t been aware they had any idea who I was, or that – although they sold NME and were carrying Felix’s poster mag – they even so much as looked at them. Apparently Elvis, in extremis, cut through all barriers of race, class and religion. I remembered, of course, how huge Elvis had been in India, where his worst beach movies fitted almost perfectly with the garish and inexplicable Technicolor excesses of the sub-continent’s all-singing, all-dancing pop cinema, and where he found his last mass audience for those aesthetic atrocities.
I was perfectly serious when I said that Elvis had ODed on being Elvis. One individual could never be the primary player in so many insecure teen dreams, and the object of such planetary hysterias, and survive. The Rastafarians had made some dire predictions for 1977, when the ‘two sevens clashed’. Was the Dead Elvis our white-boy rocker slice of the karma?
Sixteen Coaches Long
In 1977 the two sevens may have clashed, but at least 1978 commenced with one positive event. Wayne Kramer was released from federal prison, after serving twenty-one months of a five-year sentence for cocaine possession with intent to distribute; better than that, he was able to come to England to cut a single and have his own triumphal night at Dingwall’s.
In the time since the MC5 had played Phun City, Wayne and I had evolved a friendship just about as t
ight as it could be, with him in Detroit and me in London. Whenever possible, as I traversed the USA, I’d made it a habit to stop over. Not that Detroit has too much to offer the casual tourist, unless he’s curiously obsessed with the study of heinous smoke-stack industry and inner-city decay. If the object of my mission hadn’t been to visit Wayne and his girlfriend Sam – short for Samantha – Miller, I’d never have gone there at all. The early Seventies, OPEC and the energy crisis had not been economically kind to the Motor City. The Big Three US car makers – Ford, Chrysler and General Motors – had taken the ostrich point of view towards the short-term energy crisis, long-term fossil-fuel depletion, atmospheric pollution and the need, as demonstrated by the Germans and the Japanese, generally to downsize the car and introduce it to higher levels of fuel efficiency.
Sales of gas guzzlers had plummeted, plants posted lay-offs and the United Auto Workers who did keep their jobs were mainly on short time. Detroit became one version of a not-too-pleasant shape of things to come. After dark, the sidewalks emptied. Corner shops kept their doors locked and buzzed in customers, liquor stores had armed guards behind one-way glass. Along with the rest of the city, Wayne had hardly been prospering since the demise of the MC5. Even though he was a hometown celeb, he was down to playing bars on a Friday night for unemployment-cheque drunks, and explaining to the bentnoses from the local musicians’ union how come he was eight months behind with his dues. What the fuck? It’s the life of the vast majority of musicians, if they’re lucky enough to work at all.
Boss and I had been in Los Angeles, using my NME credentials to do the town. The plan had been to fly to LA and continue having fun for as long as it seemed feasible. When we’d exhausted the Hollywood potential – but, we hoped, not our money – we would take the train from there to Detroit, to stay a few days and get drunk with Wayne Kramer and brighten his miserable Motown-bound life. The idea of riding Amtrak could be filed under schoolboy adventure, and when we talked to Wayne on the phone, we discovered that his life was actually far from miserable. In fact, he sounded in fine fettle; he told me he had a brand-new car and obliquely indicated – as one would on a public telephone – that the white powder was blowing in the wind as thick as in Alaska in February. Easily calculating that such a lifestyle could not be maintained on bar-band wages, we deduced he had entered the cocaine trade on some modest semi-pro, retail level, and that gave us all the more incentive to ride the rails.
The journey to Detroit commenced in the early evening with a bottle of tequila. Back in those days, Boss and I had yet to learn the finer points of tequila and we’d opted for the cheaper, clear variety, instead of the more expensive but more merciful gold. As the train moved out through the eastern sprawl of the Los Angeles basin, we worked on the bottle like drunken charros. Amtrak trains move exceedingly slowly by European standards. The tracks are so poorly maintained that they scarcely ever exceed fifty miles an hour. At this snail’s pace, the train hadn’t reached anywhere significant before the two us fell into a stupor and it didn’t matter anyway.
We woke a little after dawn somewhere in the desert with sunlight streaming in the train window, searing a bad cheap-tequila hangover. A hangover on a transcontinental train is not something I recommend. Aside from the light, the sway of the carriage and the clack of the wheels are connected to both the brain and the stomach, and constitute a cruel form of mechanised torture. Fortunately the restaurant car started serving breakfast early, so we were able to stuff our queasy stomachs with pancakes and sausage, and then, after a decent interval, move on to the bar car for Bloody Marys. The bar car became our second home for the duration, where we indulged those transitory buddyships between strangers on a train.
The LA Limited took us only as far as Chicago, where we switched to a less lavish provincial commuter train, with no restaurant or bar car. Now all we had to do was look forward to the good times a-coming when we hooked up with Wayne, an anticipation that made what actually came to pass even more of a shock. By the time we reached Detroit it must have been around eleven in the evening. Not too many folks seemed to use trains in the Motor City. We were the only passengers alighting, and, if that wasn’t sufficiently Twilight Zone, no one was waiting for us. Where was Wayne, the cocaine, the fancy car – all that we’d been promised and led to expect?
Finally a car pulled into the forecourt of the station. Nothing fancy, though, a decrepit Mercury with a smashed-in door held together with gaffer tape and coat hangers. Sam got out. ‘Hi, guys.’
‘Hi, Sam.’
Pretty, but hardly intellectual, Sam was direct and down-to-earth, and not afraid to ask for what she wanted when she wanted it. Right now, she was absolutely direct. ‘Wayne’s been busted.’
‘You’re kidding? How bad is it?’
‘It’s bad, Mick. Wayne only just made bail. He’s sleeping.’
The drive to where Wayne and Sam were living took about as long as Sam needed to deliver the condensed version of what had transpired while we’d been riding the rails. Some months earlier Wayne had been approached at a gig by a couple of wiseguy-looking individuals who wanted him to hook them up with some coke. Figuring he could make a bit for himself, Wayne had gone along. Over the course of the next few months the guys had come back, not once, but on a regular basis, looking each time for larger and larger quantities. Truth was only revealed when the amounts had grown to such a size that, in the event of a bust, they represented serious jailtime. At that point, the buyers – with a full Kojak/Barretta sense of drama – produced guns and badges and identified themselves as Federal Drug Enforcement Agents. For Wayne and his partners in crime, the rock and the hard place had come together like the crack of doom. This nasty dénouement had transpired while Boss and I had been carousing on Amtrak.
We learned of further complications. The cocaine seized by the Feds had been fronted to Wayne’s gullible cartel by a bunch of genuine wiseguys. Not only were Boss and I visiting a shell-shocked crew in full bust-aftermath, but ones who feared the possibility of death execution-style by local mafiosi seeking to make examples. Already Timmy, Wayne’s bass player, had been handcuffed to a wooden piling on one of the less attractive margins of Lake Michigan, while the owners of the coke ascertained that a bust had actually happened and wasn’t just a cover story for an inept rip-off. Timmy was now carrying a gun at all times. Another co-conspirator, known only as the Bug, was contemplating jumping bail and going on the run, while Wayne realised that if he was going to have any future in rock & roll, he would have to stand still for trial and sentencing.
‘Chuck Berry went to jail, right?’
‘Right, Wayne.’
‘But who needs it?’
‘Right, Wayne.’
I suppose some individuals might simply have turned tail and caught the next train out, but a gentleman has to stand by his friends in their time of tribulation, even if a bullet in the back of the head for being in the wrong place at the wrong time is an eventuality – maybe an outside eventuality, but an eventuality all the same. In Wayne’s shoes, I would have been scared shitless, and I expect he was, but outwardly he was handling the situation with an amazing and fatalistic, if-you-can’t-do-the-time-don’t-do-the-crime aplomb. Handling it, in fact, better that I did one particular evening, when we went to see the band play at some cheesy Detroit roadhouse that featured a special on cheap tequila between sets.
Somewhere down the row of shots, one of those guys who isn’t quite a roadie but hangs out with the band anyway put out a line of white powder. Whether I cared what it was or not by that time is debatable, but I snorted like a hog, and then discovered it was some kind of foul animal tranquilliser that precipitated me into a pink-bubblegum, undulating plastic nightmare. Not Pepperland at all, man. People definitely turned uglier and I had no sense of time whatsoever. According to Boss, I remained fairly together while still at the nightclub – albeit by the standards of the excessively bombed – but began to panic badly on the ride home on the high-speed, white neon,
concrete labyrinth that is the Detroit urban highway system by night. I had somehow managed to convince myself that Wayne, who was driving, was as fucked up as I was, and that vehicular destruction was but a twist of the wheel away. Back at Wayne’s house, I went from bad to worse, managing to lock myself in the spare room, break the door knob and then punch out a mirror, I suppose in emulation of Tommy.
Needless to say, in the morning I wasn’t the most popular guest at the party, and it wasn’t until some months later that Boss and I finally admitted to each other that we had both been hearing imagined gangsters in the night. The climate did nothing to alleviate the general misery. It was humid high-summer in the city, and temperatures in the nineties turned the air toxic green with car-plant emissions. Too hot to cook in the house, we attempted a back-yard barbecue one night, only to have a police helicopter hover overhead, like it was Da Nang, lighting up the back yard with its blinding searchlight. We feared a second, follow-up drug raid, but it turned out to be nothing more than a routine airborne patrol.
Subsequently, despite all kind of personal letters and intercessions, like the entire staff of NME writing to the judge regarding Wayne’s value to the community as a musician, the judge gave him five years. After Wayne was sent down, Jake Riviera revealed a whole other side of himself, by suggesting that Stiff should release a charity single of two of Wayne’s songs, both to keep his name alive and to ensure that he had a bit of money when he was released. Fortunately I had some tapes – songs we’d written, plus other stuff recorded by the current band – and I was able to turn these over to Jake. Wayne got out just in time to see punk in full cry and to be hailed as one of its founding fathers. This took him completely by surprise. Seemingly the new cultural revolution hadn’t penetrated as far as the Federal Correction Institution at Lexington, Kentucky, and, as Wayne put it, ‘I still thought a punk was a guy who took it up the arse from other prisoners.’ Bemusedly at first, but rapidly adjusting, he found himself bracketed with Lou Reed and Iggy, and even with your humble servant, now being referred to in the music press as the Godfathers of Punk. Unfortunately the emergent movement appeared to be falling apart so rapidly that we wondered how long there’d be any punk for us to Godfather over.