Detour Ahead: the New York show had been postponed until the end of the tour. It was felt to be more ‘appropriate’ – in other words there were no punters. It was July. Baking hot. The streets were stinking and melting and full of crazies. Who in their right mind would want to go out? Or punish their ears in some sweltering basement club? Easier to stay home, in the shower, except the waterbugs were waiting.
Detroit
It was straight into action without the usual soundcheck foreplay. We hadn’t even seen the hired equipment yet. Bags set up the harmonium – that was the first useful thing we’d seen him do. The dormant instrument had a compact simplicity, like a deckchair – but one that would unfold into a logistical riddle in the hands of the uninitiated. With his backside mooning the already assembled audience of teeth-grinding speed-freaks and rock’n’roll loners, Bags would get the harmonium to stand freely for a few seconds; then, as he straightened up to leave, it would start to sway mournfully and slowly collapse in upon itself, playing dead. Bags’s parka hood would flop over his head as he repeatedly fought the innate guile of his ancient adversary.
We dragged ourselves on stage, still giddy from the turbulence we’d met coming in to land. The organ that had been hired for the tour turned out to be an electric piano, with six keys missing. The game was up. Nico kept turning round and glaring at me during the set – every so often she’d hear the chimey, effete little ‘ching’ coming from the piano. There was nowhere to hide any more. It meant I would have to listen to Spider Mike and learn his guitar parts, try and double up on the chords. When he went ‘chang’ I’d go ‘ching’. Maybe no one would notice me then. The drummer was still pattering around with the fancy brushwork, like a French pastry chef. Echo had numbed himself out with a swig of methadone. He’d picked up an effects pedal before we left, called a Flanger. It made a weird swishing sound, like the sea rushing over pebbles. He’d play a string and it would resonate on and on over Brighton beach. It meant there was enough space for him to nod out between notes. Boom – woosh – woosh – zzzzz.
Spider Mike was cartwheeling away. I’d catch him on the downstroke (chang/ching). It worked. Nico stopped scowling.
We raced through the seven, then left it to her. Since there were only about thirty people in the audience she wouldn’t be treating them to an extensive rendition of the Nico oeuvre. Just enough to make sure we were within the limits of the contract. Not a minute, not a bar, not a stretched melisma more.
After the show a kid strolled up and introduced himself. He was going to be our roadie for the tour. He couldn’t have been more than about eighteen. He wore the regulation ripped Cramps T-shirt, combat trousers and army boots. He looked like he’d wasted ten villages single-handed back in ’Nam. His neck was the circumference of Echo’s entire body. His skin was tanned by months of survival training out in the Mojave desert. His hair was a square-rigged, regulation military cut. His name was Axel. Echo and I watched him while he single-handedly dismembered the entire stage equipment.
‘Army brat … probably responds ter discipline,’ said Echo menacingly. ‘Best not wind’im up with too much Oxford, Jim.’
Axel picked up the flight-cases and heaved them off the stage, wiping the sweat off his forehead with a red bandana. Real Oliver Stone material.
It turned out his father was a Brigadier-General in the U.S. Marines. Axel, it seemed, had rejected his father’s vocation while still retaining the habits of a military upbringing. He approached everything as if it was a dawn raid on Charlie … breakfast at Pinkville. He was to be our travelling companion for the next six weeks.
Echo was measuring out a dose of the green syrupy methadone for Nico. ‘There yer go … the elixir of ’appiness, the nectar of narcosis.’
She slugged it in one. ‘That drummer … what’s his name? He looks at me, like a monkey.’
‘Simian,’ I said.
‘Simon?’ she said. ‘I thought it was Mick, or Dick.’
‘But what about this Axel?’ I hoped she could be persuaded to divest us of his already overbearing presence.
‘He’s very handsome,’ she said, suddenly coquettish.
‘It’s the methadone, Nico,’ Echo explained. ‘Once yer back on scag yer won’t feel so much of the urge within.’
‘He has big aaarms, and a tattoooo … should I say something to him?’ she giggled.
‘Like what?’ asked Echo.
‘Like … you know … that I find him attraaaactiff.’
‘I think yer should tell ’im we need some scag, terribly urgent-like.’
‘I had a period this morning … I haven’t had one of those for years.’
I’d never heard her like this before, discussing biological functions and bodily desires. The black nun was having wicked thoughts and unexpected reminders of that other kind of hunger, need and frustration beyond the end of the needle.
Axel drove us to Chicago to the permanent accompaniment of Metal FM. Muscle was in charge of the brain department – instead of a decent and sensible tour bus he’d turned up in a Chevy four-seater estate, with a trailer hitched on the back. Seven people were about to cross the continent with little else in common except an unfounded faith in the U Haul Trailer company.
Axel had taken it upon himself to be a gung-ho Corporal Peppercorn: ‘Yeeah … we can do it, guys! Tugether!’ and he’d punch the air. He was another idiot in search of adventure, but for him it had to resemble a theatre of war. He’d smirk cockily at other drivers and give them the finger. Charging across lanes, swaying the trailer, so you’d feel the vehicle on the edge of skid all the time, he’d turn the radio up full volume in case any tender shoots of conversation should dare to reveal themselves above the Heavy Metal bombardment. For Axel there was an enemy even greater and more sinister than Communism itself – silence.
Bags the Bulge took the front seat. Four of us squeezed in the back (the temperature was 100 degrees and our bodies were touching). Echo found himself a padded crib amongst the luggage. He could string it out to the next dose of methadone so long as he had a place to stretch his aching muscles. His prescription was for two weeks and for himself; Nico seemed to think it was on the tour contract.
Bags dared to twiddle the radio knob. Axel’s hand blocked him reflexively: ‘Heyyyyy there, buddy – that’s my transmission in transition and your omission.’
‘Five minutes? Please?’ I ventured on everyone’s behalf. He ignored me.
‘What about a more pop station?’ suggested Bags, ever the man of the people.
‘Hallelujah from the sky – rock’n’roll will never die.’ Axel punched the air again.
‘This is ludicrous,’ I said, ‘there are six other people in this vehicle.’
‘Yeeeah, but I’m the driver, Lord Jim – don’t you know, where you bin?’
We drove on, with rhyme, without reason.
Chicago
They like the Blues in Chicago … Nico’s music was so white it was almost translucent. She was indifferent to such unter- mensch basics as rhythm and expression. What we played was like a slap across the face from a Gauleiter’s gauntlet. We did a kind of upstairs bar/poolroom. There was no stage. You could hear the balls clacking through her solo spot:
Janitor of Lunacy
Paralyse my infancy
Petrify the empty cradle
Bring hope to them and me.
Clack a tat tat! ‘Yo … Hey, a couple of beers and some pretzels!’
Two dudes just stood and watched us, leaning on their pool cues, faces impassive, in a kind of sleeping hatred.
Nico still hadn’t found a heroin connection and Echo’s methadone just wasn’t enough. She couldn’t get that lift on to the stage without it. So now she was forced to see the boredom and hostility upon the faces of the miserably few punters. Normally the heroin enveloped her, gave her a totality of purpose that propelled her from the dressing-room on to the stage and projected her out towards the audience. It was a substitute for Will.
She had a name in Chicago that she’d been tracking down every spare minute. Finally, just before we left the hotel, she got the address. Axel took some persuading as we had to be in Minneapolis by early evening. She promised him a hit.
We were parked near a vacant lot on the edge of the South Side in our stupid hire car and trailer, like we’d lost the rest of the circus. Nico had picked up the exact whereabouts of her ‘friend’. She worked a couple of blocks away.
Axel slowly inched the vehicle along as if it was about to come under sniper fire.
‘There she is!’ shouted Nico.
There were two women standing on the corner of a tenement block. One had on a pair of ass-splitting hot pants and red thigh boots, the other an off-white minidress and teetering stilettos. There could be no misconception as to their chosen profession.
‘Saandra,’ Nico leant out of the window.
The girl in the hot pants warily came over. She looked at the car, she looked at the trailer. She wasn’t sure. Then she looked at Axel and Bags – she definitely wasn’t sure.
Nico called her again from the back. The girl recognised her and Nico got out. They chatted for a couple of minutes, then walked off. Axel followed up behind.
The girl in the minidress came over. The doors were open for ventilation. She sat herself down in the driver’s seat. Her skirt hem ‘accidentally’ sneaked up to reveal the absence of underwear.
‘Twenny bucks a shot, guys, whaddya say? Anyway ya like.’
We tried to pretend we hadn’t seen or heard anything, resuming interest in dead conversations and exhausted magazine articles. Though Smiler was giving it some serious consideration, his mouth half-open in that strange Planet of the Apes perma-smile.
The girl fanned herself with her clutch-bag, filling the car with the smell of cheap perfume and stale sex. We all declined:
Out of Moral Prudery – Echo.
Out of Fear of Disease – Me.
Out of Misanthropic Indifference – Spider.
Out of Sudden Loss of Appetite – Bags.
Out of Peer-group Pressure – Smiler.
Cash was tighter than ever after Nico’s score, so we had to be prudent with fuel. Axel had a theory that the car burnt significantly less gas if the air-conditioning was switched off. This meant having the windows wide open, though the breeze was baking hot and laden with dust. Later I learnt that this was in fact false economy, the open windows creating a drag effect.
We arrived too late for the Minneapolis show. Now there was even less in the kitty. We had two days to get to Denver, Colorado, on the edge of the Rockies. About eight hundred miles. The only way we could make it was if Nico didn’t have to score again, which meant Echo would have to give her the remainder of his methadone. Various ploys were thought up by Axel in order to achieve this, the chief being that we could listen to the radio station of our choice for one hour each day. Echo surrendered his insurance. He’d planned to wean himself off the stuff, but not with quite such an abrupt wrench to the nervous system.
Seven misfits literally stuck together in submission to Axel’s military might. ‘I want to drive,’ Nico shouted. ‘Why can’t I?’
No one responded. Axel kept his eyes unflinching on the road: rock’n’roll will never die – you’ll never know until you try!’ he yelled.
I muttered peevishly from the back, ‘rock’n’roll is dead and done – bring back Lonnie Donegan.’
‘Whassamadda wid Lord Jim? English proper, Oxford prim!’
Nico was catatonic on the methadone: ‘That Leonard Cohen … he broke my wrist.’
No one had been talking about Leonard Cohen, or wrists. In fact no one was talking at all. Spider Mike had won the toss for a free hour on the radio station of our choice – he chose Zero FM, Radio O.F.F. Perhaps Nico was making conversation – but nobody wanted to talk except for drummer-boy Smiler and he was terrified. Every time he opened his mouth, Nico would bite his head off. It wouldn’t be anything witty or obtuse, more like ‘Shut your fucking monkey face.’ But now she was trying to be conciliatory, to sweeten the atmosphere with some idle chitchat. It was the same script she’d been using for years – the events she could recall before she became a junkie and time stood still. Like everyone, Nico had certain landmark experiences in her past, but she never bothered to integrate them into the present. She would only ever quote from her own diary – and that had stopped a decade before.
It seemed unbelievable, but she insisted that she’d never used heroin until after her spell at the Factory. Looming up to her, out of the psychedelic fizz, she’d never noticed anything unusual in anyone’s behaviour. She accepted everything. Apart from withdrawal tantrums she hadn’t changed. Everything is the way it is. It just happens. The complex skein of historical process was not, one suspects, uppermost in her thoughts.
‘… he twisted it and twisted it until he broke it.’ She was starting to get upset as the memory got closer. The methadone didn’t block that stuff out.
Echo came in all conciliatory. ‘See what charmin’ companions y’ ave now, Nico, see ’ow much things’ve improved.’
She looked about her and yawned. Methadone makes you sleepy.
It was hard to work out how we came to be pulled for speeding in the middle of Nebraska … nothing but prairie-weed and silence. It meant an on-the-spot cash fine. Everyone emptied their pockets, except for Nico. That would have been a bad idea. There was something incriminating in every crease and crevice of her. Dead needles. Blood-stained cottons. Bent spoons. The kind of stuff you find in public toilets.
Another thing I could never work out was why Bags continued to wear his parka jacket as if he was still in Manchester. Whenever we pulled up for gas and the air was no longer blasting through, a sweet, all-too-human stink would waft up from him. It reminded you of school.
We had to curl up somewhere for the night. We tried motel after motel – they all wanted paying up front. Until we found Gino’s Place. Gino couldn’t care less. He only had one room vacant, every other freeloader loose in America must have been passing through. He scooped the key off the wall and slapped it down on the counter.
‘Take it or leave it … all the same to me, pal.’
We took it. Nico decided she’d rather sleep in the car. That left six of us in one room. We pulled the double bed apart, mattress and base – three on each half. Echo and I declined. Spider Mike and Smiler on one, Bags and his dream companion Axel on the other. Echo and I huddled in a corner, smoking and despairing.
By midsummer the American cockroach is well into early adulthood and in search of a soulmate. And when the lights go out, he loves to dance La Cucaracha. Echo and I weren’t sleeping alone after all. I woke to find my blanket and his covered in hideous brown bodies. Insect legs had definitely crawled across my face and woken me up.
‘Jesus!’ Echo screamed, quietly, as he would. We threw off our blankets and headed for the car. Nico was laid out on the back seat, her arms placed in a funereal cross upon her chest.
‘What is it?’ she said, annoyed at having her place of rest disturbed.
‘A plague upon our ’ouse,’ said Echo.
Nico tutted. He was talking in sign language again. ‘Weell … I’m staying here.’
‘OK,’ we agreed, and sat in the front.
When she was asleep, Echo dipped her bag for the methadone, barely a cupful left. He took a sip, then replaced it. I still had some duty-free Silk Cut. I handed him one, he snapped off the filter and lit up. Nico snored.
Outside the cicadas were singing. The sky was wide open. As far as the eye could see, constellation upon constellation. A silent chorale of stars (the sort of stuff Irish rock groups wax lyrical about).
‘I think Tom favours the Tex-Mex style with the side buckles and silver tips. I’m more yer Italian calfskin with elasticated leather vents. Odd as’ow Cath’lic countries make the best shoes int it?’
‘Are you going to talk aaall night through?’ asked Nico from behind. ‘What with the graaasshoppers … and everything …’
Echo jumped out and slammed the door behind him. ‘Look! We’re in the middle of fookin’ nowhere, yer’ve necked all me methadone, so we can do without Germany callin’ all night long – right?’
‘Shit, you two wouldn’t be here without me.’
‘An’ we’re very grateful,’ Echo hissed through the gaps in his teeth. Nico didn’t notice the insincerity.
‘OK … well, just don’t forget it, that’s all.’
‘We won’t, don’t you fookin’ worry,’ said Echo.
Denver
We had big hopes of Denver. Big black-and-yellow butterflies the size of your hand would fly by as you walked down the street, and it wasn’t the drugs. Quite why Denver had so many giant butterflies and so many different varieties of drugs, I didn’t know, but Echo was chopping out all kinds of curious powders. It seemed to preoccupy his whole attention, choppity-chop-chop, then he’d shovel it with the blade into a neat little square, then choppity-chop-chop again. ‘Shall I carve?’ Then he’d square up again and divide it into equal halves.
‘There yer go, Jim, get summathat down yer.’ He swept out a line for me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said nervously. ‘It looks a very strange colour to me.’
The sensation was something like having red-hot slivers of glass shoved up your nostrils. ‘I can’t conceive of the pleasure one might derive from this,’ I said to Echo, tears in my eyes and a bitter chemical taste at the back of my throat. I’d been given an original blend of heroin and sulphate: a speedball.
‘It might’elp yer stop bein’ such a prick,’ he said.
Echo was keen to shove anything up his nose or into his veins, even when obtained from someone more desperate than himself.
Nico was in the toilet with The Monster From Planet Weird circa’68. They were sharing a shot. It was probably a proud moment for him … The Queen of the Junkies in his home town. Maybe he’d have the needle framed. It was not inconceivable. People, kids especially, used to ask for her old syringes. Every toilet tells a story.
We did all the favourite turns for the faithful old punters. The people who were so crazy they’d been kicked out of Haight Ashbury fifteen years before. Their brains had burst in the Summer of Love. They’d been shunted further and further inland, and out of sight.
The crazies were the best, though. You’d give them as much high-frequency juice as they could handle. Only the nutters liked us. You began to look forward to them being there. As a unit we were a genetic freak, a hideously deformed, doomed to extinction, limping mongrel of styles. A Happy Hour cocktail drummer. A leaping Guitar Hero. A Penitent Pilgrim of the Poppy. A Fastidious Phony. And King Ludwig’s Crazy Sister.
Nico did her famous impersonation of an Alpine foghorn. Smiler just shuffled away with those brushes, dreaming she was Ella Fitzgerald.
‘I want to drive … I want to drive.’ Nico was back on her favourite riff. ‘The Velvets used to let me drive,’ she said.
‘Yeh, but yer used t’ drive over people’s gardens … it’s a bit attention-seekin’,’ said Echo.
‘I think I should drive … It’s not fair, just because I’m … you know … a gerrl.’
‘No it’s not,’ said Bags from somewhere deep inside his sweltering parka. ‘It’s because you’re a junkie.’ The big boy didn’t beat about the bush. Bags kept everything on him, there was no point in trying to bust his suitcase – he didn’t have one. It was all in that bulging parka. You just knew he had it all stashed – the odd $20 here, the occasional $50 there, creamed off the gigs. They were no-payers but there’s always a bit of loose change around. It could add up nicely at the end of twenty dates. Enough to pay for a serious blowout in New York and get photographed with Andy. Bags had decided, one day in the middle of third-year history, that there were the schnorrers at the back drawing naked girls on each other’s exercise books, there were the clean-limbed slaves of learning at the front taking down the dates, and there was him in the middle, putting two and two together and waiting for the dinner bell.
We pulled up for gas.
‘Can everyone just stay in the goddam car?’ said Axel. ‘Just sit tight. Every time we fill up you guys shoot off in all directions.’
He went to pay. Everyone got out. Echo went to look for friends that lived under stones. He came back with a small lizard. Nico was sitting behind the wheel.
‘It’s my turn to drive.’
‘We don’t take turns,’ said Echo. ‘We’ve got a driver, you’re the singer, remember?’
‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t drive a little of the way …’ She was sweating and trembling. The methadone was gone.
‘C’mon Nico,’ said Bags. ‘We’ve got the Rockies ahead – some dangerous curves and bends.’
She wouldn’t let go of the wheel. Echo put the lizard on her shoulder. It ran down her front. She screamed and leapt out of the car. Everyone dived for their regular seats. Business as usual.
We had to put Nico on a flight to L.A. She had friends there who could take care of her habit while we made the big Steinbeck schlepp in our Model T across Nevada, through Death Valley, to the orange groves and the blue Pacific.
Bags briefly removed the parka to reveal a T-shirt that would never be white again. It wasn’t just his feet that stank – the whole of him reeked. The parka had merely absorbed the smell. Now we had a big fat cheese in the front seat, sweating and ripening as we drove through one of the hottest places on earth.
We filled up with enough gas to make our crossing of Death Valley, and six plastic packs of ice – the ice cost as much as the petrol. Echo was sweating it out in his crib. He hadn’t said a word all day. Spider Mike’s face looked meaner than ever – his enormous nose distending into some grotesque baboon-like proboscis. Axel had ripped off all his clothing except for his jockey shorts and combat boots. Bags was already smacking his parched lips at the shimmering mirage of an Olympic-size pool – filled with Italian ice cream. And I could tell Smiler was about to flip – his brains were already scrambled with the heat and the hate from Nico. His smile was now a tight, inflexible grimace that stretched across his face.
Axel thundered on, foot stretched out, the pedal down hard, knuckles white on the wheel. This would be his finest hour.
‘Do or die!’ He screamed a Rebel Yell.
It was Bags’s turn on the radio. But there was nothing to pick up. He tweaked and twitched through the wave-bands; finally he touched on a station. In the distance you could hear it through the crackle of white noise: ‘Physical – I wanna get physical/Let me hear your body talk, body talk.’
Silence … except for the sound of wheels on hot dust. I turned to check on Echo. He looked dangerously pale, in a foetal crouch, sweating through his shirt. The icepack had melted and fallen from his head. I straightened it for him. His brow felt feverish, his eyes were closed, but his lips were mumbling something. I bent over the seat to listen. Very faintly, from the innermost resources of his trembling lost soul, I could hear the distant trace of The Silver Sweet Siren Song of The Eternal Feminine:
‘Ph-physical … I wanna g-get ph-physical …’
Salvation Sister
Echo was recuperating in the shade of his room at the Tropicana. Every so often he’d peek through the drapes in the hope of spotting Tom Waits, declining to stray outside. After the experience of withdrawals in Death Valley he’d had enough intense experiences for a while. He was fairly straight by now and therefore in low spirits. His guilty past was creeping up on him. Recovering from heroin dependence puts you back in touch with sex. Echo was extremely disconcerted by the unannounced erections he’d begun to experience. He was further mortified by the sudden appearance of four girls cavorting naked in the pool, plus cameraman and director. They were adding the final touches to a searing, post-noir exploration into the dark underbelly of Hollywood subculture: Planet Pussy.
We had a few days to kill before the first show. Needless to say we were penniless and of course there was nowhere to go anyway. Just setting foot out of the lobby dumped you in another reality where limbs were redundant. You even needed a car to cross the street, no concessions whatsoever were made to pedestrianism.
Nico was staying with some long-time-no-see pals from the good old days of Vaudeville up in Beverly Hills. People who weren’t obliged to share their pool with porno starlets. Big Boy Bags and his playmate, Axel, had taken the car and gone off to join her for the day. Echo and I just mooched around his room talking about food.
Bags and Axel turned up in the early evening. They looked edgy, feigning politesse, coked-up, struggling to be straight.
‘We guessed you guys might be hungry,’ said Axel. ‘So look what we gotya.’ He held out a paper carrier. Echo took it. Inside were some folded paper napkins, each containing bits of dead food … a chicken carcass with a few shreds of meat left on it, a few dried and disillusioned curls of smoked salmon, a couple of mange-tout peas, squashed petits fours, a disintegrated cake, and a quarter bottle of Californian Sancerre. Echo and I looked down at this decomposing corpse of a dinner party.
‘How can we possibly begin to express our gratitude?’ I said. ‘That you should even find time in your busy schedule to consider our needs … it really is a mark of true professionalism.’
‘Hey, Lord Jim. No sweat/We done got all that we could get.’
Nico showed up in a Rolls Royce. A uniformed chauffeur unceremoniously yanked her out, supporting her as she staggered through the lobby. It turned out someone had introduced her to the Big Dipper ride through Hell that is Angel Dust. That stuff has nothing to do with ‘getting high’ – instead it transforms the user into an android with a vice-like grip and a mission to search and destroy. Every drug burns off precious and finite psychic energy. Depending on the chemical agent, it can be an hour, a day, or even a week – Angel Dust should be kept in cremation urns.
Nico suddenly looked so old. Her skin hung from her bones. Later she recounted some of the experience to us. ‘It was like being in the Electric Chair.’ She’d even broken some of her teeth.
‘Good job yer got a good dinner down yer before’and,’ said Echo, nodding towards the debris.
There was a certain kind of person who thought it would be cool to share a drug with Nico. Or introduce her to a new one. It would make a good celebrity story. And Nico was something of a celebrity in narcotic circles. Queen of the Junkies. She was famous within a limited milieu, i.e. heroin users and those who thought self-destruction a romantic vocation.
Porno-pool life continued unabated. Each day the girls would arrive dressed like aerobics instructors, electric-blue spandex leotards and pink tank tops. Half an hour later they’d be leaping around with spurting hose-pipes, dressed in black PVC G-strings and garter belts. Echo still couldn’t bear to leave his room, the sexual ‘jiggery-pokery’ disturbed him so much.
But he still spent all his time peering out from the corner of his window. He maintained he was actually looking out for Tom Waits. ‘I reckon sex is best left ter the professionals.’
We were to play our first L.A. show at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go. It was supposed to be the last night of the club’s existence. Perhaps the management thought Nico would provide the appropriate funereal solemnity. It was a decent-sized crowd. Except when I asked around, it turned out most of them had come to see the support act, an all-girl Japanese American beat combo in miniskirts and black and white Rickenbackers. After watching them for five minutes it became clear that our musical styles were incompatible. Not only were they sexier than we were, they had some great tunes and an irresistible beat. Surf City was going to love Neolitha the Moon Goddess and her ancient harmonium wheezing out centuries of middle-European angst.
That interminable solo spot of Nico’s was like being trapped nightly in some endless time tunnel. We only did seven songs but Spider Mike decided we should keep three for the end. It felt like a dog returning to its vomit.
We exhumed the Grave Raves: ‘Femme Fatale’, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’. L.A. hadn’t liked the Velvet Underground the first time around, let alone the cabaret version. It just wasn’t their kind of beat. They were another tribe.
I was on their side. When they booed, I booed silently with them. When they heckled, I yearned to make some wisecrack in unison. I wanted to be out there, throwing vodka daiquiris as well. No matter how fast you shovel it, shit always stinks.
Echo cranked up his volume: Boom whoosh whoosh. There it was again – a tide of distortion that drowned out our puny cabaret angst. I prayed it might keep the punters from doing us in. At least it would remind them of the beach.
Inside Echo’s suitcase: a satin shirt in deep red. A small mound of indeterminate black underwear. A Bible. A snowstorm of Milan Cathedral. A photograph of The Venus of the Fireplace. A belt with a broken buckle. A sketch book with private written on the cover. And six pairs of Italian shoes, all stolen.
‘Feel that inner sole … cushioned with a veneer of finest calf-skin.’
I felt it.
‘Yer won’t get that on Oldham market, young Jim.’ He held it up to the gaze like a buccaneer showing off a prize ruby. ‘A good-lookin’ pair of’ow d’yerdo’s – yer can go anywhere. No?’
Blue sky. Blue pool. Blue movie. Echo and I whine in our kennel … underdogs scratching each other’s fleas.
Spider Mike, it seemed, harboured in his bosom a hidden yearning to meet Bob Dylan. It had been his secret motive for joining up in the first place. He kept asking Nico if she could arrange a meeting, but even Bob Dylan didn’t know where Bob Dylan was, let alone Nico, who hadn’t seen him in years.
‘Bawb encouraged me to sing, you know [5 seconds] he was sweet on me, and I on him [10 seconds]. The others didn’t really like him – they were kind of snooooty [2 minutes]. I think they were jalous [30 seconds]. I mean, it took a whole group of them to come up with their little something, no? [10 seconds] Bawb did it all on his own [5 minutes]. He was so nervous and quick. Always in a hurry [10 seconds] everyone wanted something from him [20 seconds]. He wrote a song for me, “I’ll Keep It With Mine”. Do you know it?’
Unfortunately Spider Mike did. He got out his guitar and accompanied her on the chorus, doing the Dylan nose-singing. ‘That’s a pearl Nico … yet another amazing example of your multifaceted musical history.’ He flattered her into including it in the set.
After the first rendition, Echo decided we had to act with ‘extreme prejudice’ against the song. He bought a couple of waterpistols. As Spider Mike joined her on stage for the Bob’n Joan routine, we sprayed them from the wings. It seemed childish, but it was horrible to listen to. It insulted the past, and some of us were still in love with that girl on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, even if ‘Bawb’ wasn’t.
I chaperoned Echo to the reception desk. Ding!
‘’as Mr Waits checked in recently?’ Echo asked the desk manager.
‘Waits?’ He ran through the book. ‘No. We don’t seem to have anyone of that name with us at the moment.’
‘Are yer sure?’ said Echo. ‘Tom Waits, the entertainer.’
‘Sorry … maybe he was a guest of the previous management. The chiefs changed hats a month ago – new staff, including myself.’
Saxophones were playing slow, sad lowlife serenades in Heartbreak Motel. Echo sloped off to ‘knock on Nico’s door’. The shoes would remain unsung.
I knew it was a bad idea to remind the Tropicana management of our continued presence in their establishment. They kicked us out. Echo was relieved in a way to abandon the ghost of his absent hero and was consoled, to a degree, by a complimentary unedited copy of Planet Pussy. Nico was shunted off to another fan’s sofabed. The rest of us spent the night at a friend of Axel’s in East L.A., near Boyle Heights – a barrio shack with hungry dogs straining at the end of tethers, rabid jaws salivating for a taste of those gringo sweetbreads.
In the back they were having a barbecue, the top of an old oildrum converted into a brazier. It was hot, sticky, I took off my leather jacket. Immediately a Mexican guy picked it up and tried it on for size, I didn’t dare argue. Luckily it didn’t fit.
The place was owned by a girl called Rosa. She showed us around indoors. Everything was black – a black shack. Promptly and proudly, she revealed her bedroom, dominated by a black rubber waterbed. On the walls were various hooks and rings from which dangled an intricate assortment of whips and manacles. Rosa was about five foot ten with waist-length black hair and powerful tattooed arms. She looked as if she worked out regularly … on other people.
Later, after the nerve-wracking barbecue, in which the Hispanic guys refused to speak English, confining us to a corner huddle of English wimpishness, we found a patch of bare board to call our own in the living-room. In the half light of early dawn amid snores and farts and Bags’s stinking feet, I heard Rosa’s door open. I sneaked a look and saw her standing over Echo, staring intently at her sleeping prey. She was wearing a black leather corset encased in a breastplate of twisting metal rosebranches with fierce steel thorns. Echo awoke but remained where he was, paralysed. Rosa knelt down, slid her arms under his passive torso, lifted him up lifeless from the cross and carried him to her Chapel of Correction.
The last thing anyone heard of them for twelve hours was the locks on Rosa’s bedroom door click shut … one by one by one.
‘’Ave yer ever’ad an enema?’ Echo asked me. ‘It gives yer’ard-on the size of a baby’s arm.’
We were driving along Big Sur. Strange sea-plants, mist, Kerouac, Ansel Adams, and a baby’s arm.
‘Have you ever read On the Road?’ Nico asked me.
‘No.’
‘Neither have I. I couldn’t finish it … too many woords. She drifted back into the mist.
‘It stays up fer ’ours,’ Echo continued.
Bags wriggled in his seat to accommodate his emergent stiffy. He could whip up some cream right now.
‘Did you hear that, Axel?’ Nico asked. ‘Up for hooours.’
Axel was beginning to get a little less self-confident. Two people in the car had serious designs upon his body, and they were making their intentions abundantly clear.
Nico was in one of her weird, slightly hysterical moods, just on the edge of withdrawal. ‘My father was Turkish … you know what that means, Axel, don’t you? I like it the Turkish way … Axel … did you hear?’
He didn’t respond.
‘’Ear that, Axel?’ said Echo. ‘She prefers the tradesman’s entrance.’
Axel turned up the Twisted Sister.
Echo fell back into reverie. Further down the road he nudged me. Through the window the sign read: Welcome to Santa Rosa.
Later Nico picked up some good clean heroin. She soon got Echo fixed up tight with his habit again. It wasn’t an act of kindness, she just got sick of Public Enema No 1.
We pulled up for provisions in Redwood country. The truck-stop was a log cabin and there was a picnicky, jolly atmosphere to the place. We could hear children’s voices. At the side of the log cabin was a play area.
‘Hi there!’ said a voice. ‘I’m Ronnie, the Redwood Mouse.’
We turned round. There was a giant mouse talking down to us. It must have been ten feet high, the guy inside operating some sort of stilt device.
‘And what brings you to Giant Sequoia country?’
‘We’re musicians, on tour,’ said Smiler, teeth ablaze.
‘Oh, reeaally?’ the voice was slightly camp. ‘Are you a group? Who are you?’ The mouse was getting excited.
‘We’re in the Nico band …’
Ronnie wouldn’t let him finish. ‘Oooh – I don’t belieeeeve you … not Nico of the Velvetth?’ The mouse had a lisp. ‘But where is sheee? I thimply mutht thpeak to her.’
This could be an exchange of historical significance. Nico came out of the store carrying a carton of Chocomilk. Echo pointed her out to Ronnie.
‘That’s ’er, in the pilot glasses.’
‘Hoooeeeee, Nico!’
She came over and stood before the mighty mouse in her boots and leathers, clutching her Chocomilk.
‘Thaaay, Nico, I’m your number one fan. I just luuve Desert Shore and The Marble Index. I wish I had them here with me now, tho you could thign them.’
‘Can you read and write as well?’ asked Nico.
‘Heeey, Thweetie, I’m not a real mouse.’
‘I knooow,’ she laughed.
We left them in complete accord. In rodent Ronnie, Nico had, at last, found someone who was genuinely interested in the future of her career.
Wrong Side of the Salt
By the Great Salt Lake was a vast grey mudflat, covered in fat black flies. God knows what they fed on in the alluvial slime – the lake itself was dead. They flew up into your face with each step. By the lake was a funfair … a kind of water-chute that looked like a tunnel of plastic dustbins, and a bouncy castle. Children were playing in the mud, making mudpies and mudcastles. The flies soon covered their work, a buzzing tide of disgusting little black bodies.
It was so flat, so lonely, so far away from anything beautiful. These were poor people and this was their beach, a thousand miles from the sea.
Salt Lake City had the best thrift stores in America, yet the most monotonously dressed people. It made no sense. ‘This is the place!’ Brigham Young had declared, settling on a flyblown mudflat for his New Jerusalem.
We met a nice waitress in a diner on the outskirts of town. She begged us to let her come with us to New York. Perhaps we’d been putting on too much of the phony English charm. She was desperate, though. We explained what kind of vehicle we were in. Not really intended for individual comfort and privacy. It was a heck of a shame, but this was a rough, tough, man’s kinda job.
‘Tougher’n Duke’s saddle,’ said Axel. She didn’t mind, she’d still come.
We slipped out quietly, mustering the best tip we could for her. On the way back to the car, Spider excused himself. He needed a piss. I watched him walk past our table, scoop up the shrapnel of cents and dimes and disappear into the WC.
‘the kingdom of heaven awaits the pure in heart’ said the scripture board on Highway 80 as we limped penitently back across the continent.
It’s Up to Yooooo
Bags leapt out from under his parka, came out from his fetid shoebox and exposed to the world his most latent desire – to meet Andy Warhol. Bags was bugging Nico for an intro, but the Great Wigola was unavailable, out of town, not answering, reticent as ever. Art object or full-frontal lobotomy? Keep’em guessing. Bags wanted some business tips.
‘Say you want the address of his wig-maker,’ I suggested.
‘Ask’im if’e’ll sign me,’ added Echo.
Nico told us she wanted to be dropped on the Lower East Side. She made it clear that we wouldn’t be welcome tagging along. Echo believed she would probably try to pull in some of her old musopals and dump us. ‘Can’t blame’er … anyone’ere’s better than us, even them spotty kids tryin’ out Strats in the music shops.’
Well, she didn’t get rid of us. Maybe she was too preoccupied with getting high. However, she had, in the two days that preceded the gig at the Danceteria, been working on a demo of ‘New York, New York’, Ol’ Blue Eyes’s eulogy to the Great Meritocracy, with which she would prelude the show.
The Danceteria pulled a good crowd for a sweltering August night. The freaks were in town. Backstage Axel had finally got himself well and truly greased. After six weeks on tour with Nico he’d got the taste and didn’t mind the bad taste. He looked green and queasy.
‘You shouldn’t swallow,’ said Nico pitilessly.
The lights went down. On came the tape. Nico lugubriously intoned: ‘Start spreading the noos/I’m leaving toooday …’
We followed her ‘vagabond shoes’ up the spiral staircase to our appointment with Destiny.
‘It’s up to yoooooo/Nooooo York/Nooooo York.’
It was so hot up there, nerves just melted away in the effort to breathe. No matter where it is, if you’re playing up close to people, there’s always someone who tries to blow your cool. They’re there to outface you – and why not? My tormentor stood just three feet away from me with pierced nipples, long blonde hair, lipstick, and was covered head to toe in gold body-paint. He fixed me with a relentless, empty, mannequin-like stare. Weirder still, he had on a Walkman. He looked like a transvestite cybernaut.
I could feel a smile cracking the expressionless mugshot I’d been perfecting. I tried to suppress it so hard I thought I was going to faint. But it was useless. I could blame it on the weeks of contained hysteria and enforced intimacy with people I’d normally pay to avoid. Whatever the reason, I was pissing my pants. I had to stop playing. I turned and saw the drummer beaming the inane grin of a man happy at his work. I was biting my hand in an effort to find a pain substitute for laughter. Echo saw me. He started laughing. Boom, woosh – woosh. Spider Mike took a look at us and had to turn the other way again to conceal the irrepressible smirk creeping across his sourpuss face. Then Nico caught it, in the middle of ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’:
I’m . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chugga chugga chugga chugga
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ------- / --- / --
Chikka chikka chikka chikka
--- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chugga chugga chugga chugga
. . . . . – / ------- / – / my
Chikka chikka chikka chikka
---- / . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chugga chugga chugga chugga
. . . . . . . . . . . . .26 dollars? . . . . . . . . . . You must be kidding!
Chikka chikka chikka chikka
[Permission to reproduce lyrics refused]
She stopped singing, clipped the mike back on to the stand, and turned to the four of us. She was clapping her hands and stomping her heels, like a flamenco Brünnhilde. And laughing, laughing, laughing.
Outside in the street lay a Viking burial. Axel had literally torn the car apart with his hands and then set fire to the remains, releasing the handbrake as it rolled off into SoHo.
We gazed silently at the smouldering wreckage for a few minutes, said our respects, and split. We couldn’t wait to get away from each other.
Nico disappeared into the arms of the past, Lower East Side cronies who’d share a bit of stuff with her just for the anecdote value.
Echo headed straight for the shooting galleries of the Bronx. ‘Yer walk in … it’s pitch black … yer shout yer order … they lower a bucket … yer drop in the ackers … the bucket comes back a minute later with an’alf g wrap … convenience shoppin’ I s’pose, takes the waitin’ out of wantin’ … Tho’ I’ve never been much of what yer might call a shop-a-’olic.’
Bags bought himself a brand new pair of Big Boy jeans with six-inch turnups and then whirled away on a helicopter tour of the Manhattan skyline. Once he’d sized the place up, he took his meat on down the street … a cruise missile in 42” Levis. Like his idol, his art was his life. But still Andy wouldn’t pick up the phone.
Spider Mike took the first available flight back to Manchester, disillusioned with the American Way. Now no one back home at the Old Cock would stand him a pint as he traded anecdotes about the legendary meeting between Spider Mike and the only man on the planet he’d ever buy a drink – Lonesome Bob.
Smiler? We asked around next day. No one was sure … we heard later he’d gone to New Orleans with a beautiful dancer and was ripping up the rhythm every night, playing drums in a swing outfit, earning ‘best brass’. I had a feeling he might come out ahead – he didn’t take drugs and wore a clean and pressed pair of slacks every day.
‘It’s funny,’ said Echo on the return flight, ‘’ow yer think that someone’s just a phase in your life – when yer might just be a phase in theirs.’