Apathy for the Devil (5 page)

No one came out looking good from the experience. The onlookers resembled doomed sheep on bad drugs, the Angels acted like sadistic animals and the Stones seemed clearly out of their depth yet still numbly detached from the madness they were inspiring. Mick Jagger in particular is captured on film looking decidedly forlorn and fearful during his Altamont performance - a control freak suddenly confronted with dire circumstances way beyond his control. When the famous death scene is finally played out on screen - several Angels plunging knives into an eighteen-year-old black youth named Meredith Hunter during the Stones’ live rendition of ‘Under My Thumb’ - the sense of mounting dread that the film has been building on from its
opening scenes suddenly arrives at a harrowingly inevitable climax. It’s amazing to think that this bloody debacle took place only six months after Woodstock’s gentle-spirited bringing together of the massed hippie tribes up on the East Coast of the USA. The film made of Woodstock was one of 1970’s biggest global cinematic earners-a three-hour-long love-fest mainstream blockbuster - but
Gimme Shelter
was generally for more acquired tastes, diehard Stones fans and art-house connoisseurs. The former’s scenes of benign, beatific communal squalor were as pacifying to behold as the utter bedlam depicted in the latter was painful to even think about and yet the two events weren’t essentially that different from the viewpoints of many who’d attended both. ‘Woodstock was a bunch of stupid slobs in the mud,’ opined Jefferson Airplane’s strident vocalist Grace Slick. ‘And Altamont was a bunch of angry slobs in the mud.’ Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully - who’d been involved in the early stages of Altamont’s genesis - was more specific still. ‘Woodstock and Altamont are seen as polar opposites in a mass-media-generated parable of light and darkness but they were just two ends of the same mucky stick, the net result of the same disease: the bloating of mass bohemia in the late sixties.’

After Altamont, the Stones returned to England and Keith Richards promptly began shooting heroin directly into his veins. Suddenly he wasn’t turning up to recording sessions any more or even answering the phone. The Stones had a lucrative new record deal with Atlantic to inaugurate, tiresome old contractual obligations with both Allen Klein and Decca to settle and a new decade to come to terms with. With no manager to guide them and a guitar player seemingly insensitive to their collective plight, Mick Jagger promptly become the Stones’ de facto leader and business
brain. The Stones’ two closest rivals - the Who and Led Zeppelin - were both in the process of completing new albums for release later that year -
Who’s Next
and Led Zep 4 - so Jagger knew his band had to deliver or die on the vine.
Sticky Fingers
was what he came up with - the classiest, most self-assured collection of Stones songs about wild sex, hard drugs and doomed love ever concocted. Richards didn’t even play on three cuts - ‘Sway’, ‘Sister Morphine’ and ‘Moonlight Mile’ - but managed to make his maddeningly erratic presence felt on the other seven selections.

The record’s young engineer Andy Johns would later recall a telling episode during a session at Jagger’s country home Stargroves in 1970. ‘We were doing “Bitch”, Keith was very late and Jagger and Mick Taylor had been playing the song without him. And it didn’t sound very good. I walked out of the kitchen and he was sitting on the floor with no shoes, eating a bowl of cereal. Suddenly he said “Oi, Andy! Give me that guitar.” He put it on, kicked the song up in tempo and just put the vibe right on it. Instantly, it went from being this laconic mess into a real groove. And I thought - Wow! That’s what he does.’

When the Stones decamped to the South of France in spring 1971, they quickly became absorbed in recording the follow-up album to
Sticky Fingers
. By this point they’d become so frustrated by Richards’s infrequent appearances at virtually any studio they booked that they opted to record the thing in the one place they knew he was always guaranteed to be, the house where he actually lived. It was an opulent mansion called Nellcôte that had formerly been the local headquarters for the invading Gestapo. Nazi crosses carved into the heating system vents were still plainly visible. The dank basement the group used to record in had once
been the interrogation room. This became Keith’s own dark realm in exile.

For his first month or so on the Riviera he was heroin-free but quickly returned to its soothing embrace after injuring his back in a go-kart accident. What happened next has already been well documented. Local drug dealers descended on the property, eventually alerting the local constabulary. The rest of the Stones, producer Jimmy Miller and engineer Andy Johns meanwhile wasted hours of each evening waiting for the smacked-back guitarist to descend from his living quarters and grace them with his presence. But - according to Johns - ‘Everyone was too scared [to directly confront him]. Even Mick would never go up there. It was as if hell existed upstairs.’ Then Keith had all his guitars stolen, unadvisedly pulled a gun on the local harbour master and also managed to alienate certain of his household staff, who promptly went to the police and denounced Richards and girlfriend Pallenberg as major-league heroin distributors and all-purpose degenerates.

The fallout was considerable: arrest warrants were immediately issued for the couple, they had to disappear from the country like thieves in the night in order to avoid incarceration and the rest of the Stones were also placed under investigation in the resulting messy legal brouhaha. One member’s ballooning drug problem had managed to turn the ongoing odyssey of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band into one potentially career-ending scenario after another.

Many supporting players in the whole Nellcôte saga soon fell by the wayside but the Stones still managed to turn adversity into sonic gold dust.
Exile on Main St.
- the record that mostly resulted from those troubled sessions in Keith’s basement - took
the whole sun-baked Riviera-on-hard-drugs languor of their day-to-day lifestyle and artfully moulded it to the hard-nosed horn-drenched American roadhouse rhythm ’n’ blues sensibility that has always best suited their particular musical chemistry. Released in mid-1972, it would prove to be their last truly Zeitgeist-defining collection of new songs.

But we’re getting too far ahead of ourselves here. Let’s back-track a little. On March 10th 1971 the Stones played a concert in Brighton as part of a farewell-to-the-old-country tour of the UK just prior to
Sticky Fingers
’ release and their move to the South of France, and I was there to cheer them on. The performance was prefaced by its share of backstage dramas. Keith Richards - arriving early for a change - found his group’s dressing-room facilities still locked up and came close to pulling out a lethal weapon and braining the promoter in retaliation. Gram Parsons, Richards’s ex-Byrd drug buddy who was travelling with him on all the English dates, became so chemically deranged as the evening progressed that when he attempted to find the stage the Stones were playing on he ended up instead staggering into a nearby cinema. But I’d only learn about those incidents many years later after reading an article by Robert Greenfield, an American journalist then on assignment for
Rolling Stone
who’d actually been in the group’s designated touring party that night. On the evening in question, I was just another paying punter in a sea of faces and limbs come to pay homage to my dark-prince heroes and watch a truly stupendous live spectacle in an overcrowded provincial sweat-box of a venue named the Big Apple. It would be another two and a half years before I’d be granted direct access to their inner sanctum, and in retrospect I’m glad that fate didn’t summon me sooner. The dark vortex could wait awhile before it
claimed my young bones. Like Elvis, I still had a lot of living to do.

Did I tell you I’d finally located a girlfriend? She was a looker too with cascading blonde hair and a supple dancer’s physique, a sweet sixteen-year-old suburban little princess for me to bottle all my overstimulated post-adolescent romantic fantasies up in. Her name was Joanne Good and we’d first linked up in December 1970 when I was press-ganged into being the side-stage prompt for a school play that she was acting in. Joanne’s thespian skills would later bring her mainstream recognition throughout the British Isles: in the late seventies she’d become a regular fixture in the cast of
Crossroads
, the decade’s best-loved UK TV soap opera (these days, she’s a popular morning disc jockey on Radio London). But in 1971 we were both still soldiering down the treacherous path intersecting post-puberty with young adulthood. We both declared undying love for each other - our favourite courting song was the Temptations’ heart-fluttering ‘Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)’, a big hit that spring - but the love we really shared was closer to the toothachingly sugar-rush rapture expressed in a less sumptuous-sounding chart smash
du jour
- Donnie Osmond’s ‘Puppy Love’. We stared into each other’s misty eyes a lot and held hands whenever in public. But physically speaking, we were an odd fit. I was 6 foot 1 whilst she measured 5 foot in her stocking feet. And temperamentally too we bordered on the incompatible. Joanne was vivacious, outgoing and gregarious whilst I was generally intense and prone to introspection.

Her family was Good in both name and nature, apart from her older brother Nigel, who was what they used to call ‘a bit of a tearaway’. He was also Horsham’s most notorious druggy, having
lately been busted for pot-smoking in the town centre, an incident that saw his name subsequently splashed over the front page of the local paper. He and another youth named Rob Daneski, who looked like anyone in Black Sabbath, were the drowsy little commuter town’s two resident heads. I met them through Joanne and we quickly became fast friends forever stalking the neighbourhood together in search of cannabis resin. Nigel and Rob liked to drop acid whenever possible, but I always refused to join them, as I sensed - quite rightly, I now realise - that I was still too emotionally and spiritually immature to react well to its lysergic lift-off.

Though I would later come to be perceived as one of the championship-level London-based substance-abusers of the late twentieth century, I started my journey into the world of chemical refreshment with tentative steps. I first smoked pot at the Bath Festival in summer 1970 when a fellow audience member passed me a droopy, hand-rolled cigarette and bade me suck on its soggy cardboard filter. Inhaling its fumes must have had some effect on me because the next thing I remember was descending from my instant reverie to be confronted by a hippie girl who was staring at me with an extremely alarmed look on her face. I felt like a door had been suddenly ripped open in my brain. Time no longer hung heavy on my stooped shoulders. Pot put me right in the moment, enriching my consciousness with the sensation of feeling simultaneously giddy and alive. From then on it became an integral part of my religion to consume as much of it as I could get my hands on.

But daily consumption only began in earnest once I’d moved to London later in ’71. Drugs in general were hard to come by in the early seventies if you didn’t live in England’s capital or near
one of its major cities that also doubled as a port. Forget heroin, cocaine and ecstasy. Crack had yet to be invented. All you could hope for was to befriend some long-haired ne’er-do-well in your region who sometimes purchased reefer from a connection in the big bad metropolis and pester him to sell you a small chunk. Doping up was still in its infancy as a British national pastime, particularly out in the suburbs, and those few who dared partake invariably became extremely paranoid due to the build-up of cerebral befuddlement and fear of getting busted.

In the early part of 1971, when I wasn’t illegally stimulating my endorphins or belatedly experiencing first-hand the tumultuous joys and sorrows of teenage romance, I was sending my CV around to various universities in the hope that one of them would accept me onto their campus and postpone the day when I’d actually have to go out and find a job for a further three years. I was flat-out rejected by all of them, except for Bedford College, which was then part of London University. They called me down for an interview so I tied my hair back and hid the ponytail under my shirt collar, wore a suit that even an undertaker might call ‘subdued’ and somehow charmed them into taking me on board. I had good reason to feel elated by their decision. Not only would it mean that henceforth I’d be living in London but Bedford College was one of the only places of further education in Britain where the female student population sharply outnumbered the male. Like Jan and Dean’s mythical ‘Surf City’, it functioned on a ratio of two girls for every boy.

In order to bolster my finances that summer in readiness for student life I went looking for any kind of legitimate work. Soon enough I got employed by a Sussex-based chemical plant and spent long days digging drainage ditches for a pittance. Later I
manned the pumps at a local garage. Each job lasted roughly two weeks in duration, after which I got promptly fired for rank incompetence. I learned a lot from these experiences, the key lesson being that I was simply not cut out for the rigours of manual labour and should never consider it as a temporary career option ever again. Leave all that heavy lifting and sod-busting to the brawny lads with the muscles on their muscles. I was better off developing my brain and making a living from that.

Looking back through the misty veil of nostalgia, that summer of ’71 now feels like a sun-drenched and special season of rampant carefree splendour. England’s green and pleasant land never looked greener or seemed more pleasant to be a part of. Maybe it’s just the pot I smoked back then playing tricks with my retroactive memory but I think not. It was indeed a golden age for middle-class floaters like me. Students still received grants. The world’s biggest rock bands still performed to audiences no larger than two thousand at a time at venues that didn’t cost an arm and a leg to enter. Records - my main expenditure - were reasonably priced. It cost nothing to hitch-hike whenever the urge for travel struck. Sex wasn’t fatal. Only skinheads were to be avoided at all cost.