Apathy for the Devil (45 page)

My father passed away in February 2007 at the age of eighty-six. I’d seen him for the last time three months earlier. He told me then that he was in such near-constant physical discomfort he would have preferred to have died three years earlier. He said this without a hint of melodrama, almost matter-of-factly. I looked into his eyes, saw all the pain barely contained behind them and told him I understood. So it wasn’t a big shock to my system when the news came through. That word Americans love to throw around - closure - we’d achieved it in the nineteen years prior to his death. Everything we’d needed to say to each other had been said. I knew he’d always loved me and he knew I would always love him back. There were no regrets unaired or thorny issues still unresolved between us. I kept this foremost in my mind during the weeks leading up to and then following his funeral. I only cried once and didn’t suffer any semblance of a grief-triggered meltdown. I needed to stay strong and support my mother in her time of sorrow.

In March she and I were driven by a friend to a specific stretch of countryside outside Swindon where the shape of a gigantic white horse that had somehow been etched into a hillside back in ancient times was still plainly visible. My father had often indicated that he wanted his ashes scattered on this spot of land. The sun was high in the sky but there was also a fierce wind bustling up the trees and hedgerows and it sent the contents of the urn I was carrying flying all around me as I emptied his remains out. I stood there and breathed him in one last time. He was inside me now and as time marched on I came to learn a simple truth: the best way to mourn the death of a beloved parent is to endeavour to actively adopt the finest aspects of their personality and then let them live on through you as you struggle to follow their example.

In my case, it’ll always be easier said than done. My old man was a paragon of steadfastness, moral rectitude and self-discipline and, as you already gathered, I’ve been notoriously deficient in all three virtues. And I’ll never have his unassailable faith in the existence of God and the kingdom of heaven. But even in my darkest hours I couldn’t quite shake off the inner voice of his influence and value system. Sooner or later we all turn into our parents anyway. It’s best just to go with the flow of human nature.

I’ve yet to re-establish any real face-to-face contact with the Rolling Stones. But our destinies still seem to be strangely intertwined. Whilst writing this book, I was contacted by James Fox, who’s actually writing Keith Richards’s forthcoming autobiography, and sat down with him one afternoon to share my memories of the great man during his vampire years. Apparently Keith has only the dimmest recollection of what transpired in the seventies. It figures.

I don’t have that problem though. I may have left the seventies but the seventies never totally left me. Not in my waking hours so much. But when I sleep, they still reappear to torment me anew.

At least once a week, I have the same dream. It’s the late seventies again and I am a passenger on a train pulling into King’s Cross station. People are laughing at me in the streets outside. They can see I’m strung out and vulnerable. I need to escape. Suddenly I’m backstage at a Rolling Stones concert. It’s the usual scene; the superstars and the slaves. Sometimes I get to have a short conversation with the group’s two principals, other times I get blanked.

Sudden change of scene. I’m in a small club somewhere watching Iggy Pop misbehave. It’s another loveless night with another loveless crowd. One of my
NME
co-workers saunters over and plies me with his sugary condescension. An aggrieved ex-girlfriend is lurking somewhere behind her cold-eyed stare. But I can’t stay. I’ve got to find a place to crash for the night. I go from door to door but no one answers. Finally I open one and walk into a confined space of impenetrable darkness. It feels like being inside a coffin. I start to panic. Then I wake up.

It takes all of ten minutes to reacclimatise myself to ongoing reality. I’ve developed a mantra to pave the way. ‘I’ve got a beautiful son. I’ve got a beautiful wife. I’ve got a beautiful life.’ It seems to help.

By the time I’m out of the bed I know who I am again. Once upon a time I was just another dead fop walking. But I changed ranks along the way and now I am a soldier of love.

These individual songs and entire albums make up the music that meant the most to me during the years I’ve focused on in this book.

‘Dark Star’ - the ‘Live Dead’ version released in the UK in January 1970 - was psychedelic rock’s crowning glory and last hurrah. Exquisite, other-worldly and drenched in LSD’s sense-shifting dream-like otherness, this is nothing less than Coltrane’s
A Love Supreme
reimagined as the stoner rock of the gods.

 

This quirky jazz-fusion exercise from
Third
was playing over the sound system of the 1970 Bath Festival at the very moment I inhaled my first marijuana fumes, so it understandably still looms large in my memory. In fact, the whole double album remains one of my most frequently replayed early-seventies recordings.

 

I can’t be 100 per cent sure but I’m still fairly certain that being
exposed to this beguiling Barrett recasting of a piece of verse from
Ulysses
in early ’70 was what actually prompted me to start reading the James Joyce novel.

 

The Byrds were my all-time favourite sixties group but I never forgave McGuinn for sacking David Crosby in 1967 and generally took a dimmer view of their later output. But ‘Chestnut Mare’ was just too irresistible - their last shot at transcendental greatness.

 

Like the Grateful Dead, Buckley released no fewer than three great albums in 1970 -
Blue Afternoon
,
Lorca
and
Starsailor
. But the last named was the most startlingly creative of them all and I defy anyone to find a recorded vocal performance as octavespanningly gymnastic and demonically possessed as the one Buckley delivers on this extraordinary track. Just listen to the way he screeches out the line ‘I run with the damned, my darling’. It will make your blood run cold.

 

This album instantly sets up a dreamy pothead ambience that re-evokes the mood of its time so completely that hearing it again is like experiencing instant déjà vu.

 

1970 was Neil Young’s breakthrough year and it really took off for him that autumn with the release of the
After the Gold Rush
album. I was a bit ambivalent about some of the record’s contents, finding parts of it too fey and whimsical. But ‘When You Dance’ found Young strapping on an electric guitar and conspiring
with Crazy Horse and Jack Nitzsche to create a truly glorious racket that was seldom off my record player that season.

 

The sound of the seventies barbarians baying at the door. Back then, you either felt the power of the Stooges’ disruptive music reverberate through the very core of your being - or you didn’t.

 

‘Directly from My Heart to You’ - the Mothers of Invention
Frank Zappa’s musical output post-Mothers mostly gave me the creeps but on his final MOI compilation
Weasels Ripped My Flesh
- released a year after the group’s 1969 demise - he released this unforgettably greasy rearrangement of the old Little Richard classic just to convincingly prove that this old outfit - greatly abetted here by violinist Don ‘Sugarcane’ Harris - could rock out with the best of ’em.

 

This, Lennon’s last truly inspired set of songs and performances, came down like a jackhammer on the youth culture of the hour when it was released in the winter of 1970. When he wasn’t frantically exorcising the demons of his childhood, Lennon used the record to ritually slaughter the whole late-sixties peace-and-love pipe dream still hypnotising the rock landscape. In the final selection ‘God’ he spelt it out in no uncertain terms: ‘The dream is over’; ‘I just believe in me / Yoko and me / and that’s reality.’ From that point on, the whole ‘me’ decade mindset was officially in session.

Sticky Fingers
- my all-time favourite Stones album and the record I played most frequently throughout the year under discussion - is amply eulogised in the 1971 chapter but this lesser-known rampage through Chuck Berry’s back catalogue - released as a bonus B-side to the ‘Brown Sugar’ 45 rpm - was what I’d put on first thing every morning in order to wake up and face the day.

 

The deeply spooky and wickedly eclectic Jack Nitzsche-helmed project gets my vote as the greatest film soundtrack recording ever made.

 

Alice Cooper’s early-seventies mega-success was short-lived but significant if only for this track - the quintet’s first global hit - which not only gave glam rock some much-needed hard-rock sneer and rebel clout but also - stylistically and attitude-wise - boldly helped pave the way for the punk explosion that finally came five years after its release.

 

This wasn’t a hit in 1971 but I’d still hear it everywhere I went that year. Lou Reed sang the words with uncharacteristic gusto but it’s his irresistibly circular guitar riff holding the whole thing together that really seals the deal.

 

You can’t spotlight the most memorable musical moments of 1971 without including something by its ‘man of the year’ Rod
Stewart, and this hauntingly plaintive folk ballad from
Every Picture Tells a Story
still glistens with everything that was once great about the man.

 

Brian Wilson wrote and recorded this back in 1966 but it took the Beach Boys five more years before they saw the wisdom in actually releasing it. Miraculously this spine-tingling ode to the rise and fall of the sixties’ golden wave of spiritual uplift sounded just as divine and unearthly in the seventies as it would have done in the time frame it was written for.

 

This melancholy, drifting meditation on big-city isolation became the all-purpose soundtrack to my period as a student at London University which began in the October of 1971.

 

Like another of ’71’s key singles, John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, ‘What’s Going On’ is an unapologetic musical sermon from the mount to the pop masses, but unlike Lennon’s sanctimonious diatribe, it actually works for me. The message is heartfelt, righteous and to the point, the groove, chords and arrangement are all sublime but its most outstanding feature is the prayer-like way Gaye sings to himself in the call-and-response sections, inventing a whole new form of vocal self-expression in the process.

 

Simply their all-time best masterclass recording.

 

Ziggy Stardust was still a few months away from being introduced
into the public domain when Bowie released his
Hunky Dory
album late in ’71, but anyone who heard the record that winter instantly sensed that he would become one of the decade’s leading creative luminaries. This track in particular stopped everyone in their tracks, an unforgettable foray into the realm of fractured surreal songcraft that beguiled and mystified like a darker shade of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.

The album this comes from -
Gonna Take a Miracle
- was the first record I ever reviewed for the UK press but that’s not the reason why I’ve chosen it. ‘The Bells’ is a beautiful Marvin Gaye-penned torch song that was first recorded by the Originals for Tamla Motown in ’71 and which even reached no. 1 in the US singles chart that year. It’s one of Motown’s most incandescent late-period productions but Nyro and LaBelle trump the original with a more intimate reading that blends sublime gospel harmonies with a lead vocal that is the very essence of barely contained romantic hysteria. By the time La Nyro gets to the pay-off line ‘If you ever leave me, I believe I’ll go insane’, you’re already convinced she means exactly what she’s singing.

 

‘Thunder Express’ - the MC
5
(
The Big Bang!
)

When the Motor City 5 exiled themselves to England in early ’72, this was the song they had up their collective sleeves as a possible hit single. Basically a rewrite and update of the classic four-to-the-bar Chuck Berry automobile fetish, ‘Thunder Express’ never made it into a recording studio but still managed to become the
highlight of all their concerts that year. This live version - recorded for a TV show in Paris - totally captures what it was like to be one of those privileged few who actually made up their audience.

 

The stoner-rock masterpiece of 1972.

 

Don’t laugh. This vibrant ambitious blending of hard-rock light-and-shade with classical music’s sweep and sensibility is UK prog’s greatest-ever achievement bar none. So good in fact that it almost single-handedly vindicates one of the dodgiest musical hybrids of the past fifty years.