I got a message on acid that you should destroy your ego, and I did, you know. I was reading that stupid book of Leary’s [The Psychedelic Experience] . . . and I destroyed myself . . . I destroyed my ego and I didn’t believe I could do anything.
– John Lennon to Jann Wenner, 1970
Q: ‘Why do rock stars tend to have premonitions of doom?’ David Bowie: ‘’Cause they’re pretty nutty to be doing it in the first place. We’ve got pretty tangled minds. Very messed up people.’
– David Bowie on The Dick Cavett Show, 5 December 1974
I’ve always thought of going back to a place where you can drink tea and sit on the carpet. I’ve been fortunate enough to do that.
– Syd Barrett to Michael Watts, 1971
Q: Did you have an unhappy childhood?
Ray Davies: That’s a novel.
Q: Could we have the first chapter?
Ray Davies: You know, I’m still only five years old. I’m trying to convince this person at the weekends that I’m still five and that’s all I want to be. I don’t want to be any more because as things are I’m able to communicate on a very basic level. I know what food I like to eat. I’ve got two pairs of shoes – one for on and one for off stage and when they wear out I buy another pair. I’m reasonably all right. I’ve got enough tea bags and maybe I can start writing again, which would be a good thing.
– interview in NME, 20 October 1973
At the end of 1973, those in English rock’s upper echelons who had survived the 1960s’ psychedelic onslaught with their marbles intact – and these could loosely be said to include Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, David Bowie and Roger Waters – had lucrative careers to cushion the realization, voiced by the primal-scream Lennon on The Plastic Ono Band, that the dream was over. But if the concept album was on life-support, there was still at least one hardy soul from the beat boom-years who wished to pump oxygen into its ravaged body.
Unfortunately for Ray Davies, as for so many from his generation of English songwriters, ‘nothing was ever the same after 1973’ – the conclusion he came to at the end of his 1994 autobiography. Yet there was never any question he would keep writing and producing, come what may. For, as he also confessed partway through X-Ray, ‘Anyone who says that creativity comes from divine inspiration is certainly wrong, particularly in my case. I wasn’t writing songs for my wife, my unborn child, God or country, I was writing to stay sane.’
By the mid-Seventies, though, it had become a case of never mind the quality, fulfil the contract. The years 1973 through 1976, during which The Kinks ran down the options on that RCA deal, fleetingly promised new vistas for the band, but they all ran aground on Davies’ obsession with making the songs fit the concept, not the other way round, as had been the case – and the benchmark of his achievement – in the years 1968 through 1971. Meanwhile the themes had become oh so familiar – the fear of failure, the spectre of the past, the worry that the rest of humanity would realize he was just as fucked-up as them:
Ray Davies: You can get the most sophisticated man in the world, and if he’s hung up about his feet, nothing will change it. He’ll go to university, he’ll become a nuclear scientist, he’ll fly to the moon, land on the moon – and the moonman will say, ‘Hey you’ve got big feet!’ And he’ll be back at school, because that’s what they said to him at school. [1977]
Of all those ideas for an ongoing series of concept albums, it was Preservation Act, spread over three albums and released in two parts across 1973 and 1974, which consumed Davies in the immediate aftermath of White City. But eighteen months later, when he finished the increasingly ill-conceived concept-piece, it was clear that his heart was no longer in it. When he thought about it, he decided that he had ‘spent . . . five years – storing up ideas for Preservation [Act], and The Village Green Preservation Society was like a rough sketch’. What he failed to realize was that, despite having worked himself into (and out of) another breakdown, in this particular instance the rough sketch was a rich tapestry and the full-blown version a rank xerox. Although he would return to the songs on VGPS repeatedly, those from Preservation Act would rarely be preserved in the memories and/or collections of rock fans.
But still he would not be dissuaded. Before 1975 was out, he had another song-cycle to peddle – and this one cracked the US Top Fifty. The theme of Soap Opera was again a familiar one: ‘It is about mental illness.’ When he found it hard to come up with anything new to say he excused his mindset in somewhat familiar terms: ‘It’s very difficult if you’ve been brought up to be factory fodder to then find that people are interested in what you have to say. Always [this], what am I? Who am I?’ When that album also failed to find favour at home, he decided to return to his school days for the vaguely embarrassing Schoolboys in Disgrace (1976). Something deep inside continued sending him back to those days when life was simple – and sweet:
Ray Davies: I’ll tell you when it was good. When I was walking down the road with Michelle Gross, whose dad owned the sweetshop. She was about a foot taller than I was and she had her arm around me and I said, ‘God, if I can stay with this girl forever I can have all the sweets I ever want.’ That was when it was good. [1989]
Hence, Pete Townshend’s mid-Seventies swipe at his songwriting mentor: ‘He writes like an old man who is forever looking back on his life.’ And still more Kinks records kept trundling off the presses. Even a switch of label, to Clive Davis’s Arista, did not seem to slow Ray Davies down. But try as he might, he could not shake the sense that he was not like everybody else, that he would never belong. He was set apart, kept apart from those he was trying to reach. And even as he hurtled towards his next breakdown, he knew that no matter how many therapists they sent him along to – and the first words of the doctor who treated him after White City were, ‘Tomorrow you will have some analysis’ – only the songs could ever unlock the boy inside:
Ray Davies: I’m trying to picture somebody’s head – all the open thoughts and the thoughts they’ve got locked in. Everybody has that little safe, which nobody is going to look into . . . I want to be like everybody else. I want my mind to click into place and say ‘Yeah, that’s right, there’s nothing unusual about doing what everybody else is.’ . . . [I mean,] I can get on with people. I can make anybody laugh, but I just can’t think like them. [1974]
*
At least Davies had cut down on the self-medicating slugs of booze, unlike his songwriting shadow, Pete Townshend, who was also having trouble reconciling his overwhelming desire to communicate with the realization that most of those with whom he communicated didn’t relate to his songs on anything more than a superficial level. Talking to Melody Maker the year after Quadrophenia, he even seemed to be suggesting he had done wrong in attempting to say something more meaningful than ‘I hope I die before I get old’:
Pete Townshend: The unique thing about me as a writer is that I’ve done that sorta rock opera thing, and I did it solely and purely to try to expand the outward possibilities of rock . . . It happened to be very successful communicatively into the bargain. But it didn’t do anything for rock & roll; and it didn’t do anything for me as a rock writer. I still think that rock works most effectively on a song-by-song basis. [1974]
This sense that it had all been in vain increasingly wore away at Townshend’s veering self-belief. In 1974 he saw the realization of his long-cherished dream to have Tommy made into a film. Not only that, but the meandering Ken Russell-directed film was a huge commercial success, bringing yet more converts to the very concept album that had sparked this entire psychoanalysis-by-song-cycle genre in rock. And yet, when he arrived at the London Leicester Square film premiere on 26 March 1975, he was appalled. As he told NME shortly afterwards, his first thought was, ‘Who the hell were all those people at the Tommy premiere? Whoever they were: I’m certainly not in their gang.’
The perceived failure of Quadrophenia, the relentless grind of the road, and the onset of his first serious writer’s block in six years now conspired to place Townshend on his own solitary rock, and on this promontory he was slowly drowning in an ocean of booze. In the long interview he gave for the book of the movie of the album he admitted: ‘I got dragged very low by the amount that I was drinking, and by the fact that . . . [touring] was a very low level of existence . . . There was really no magic in the [shows] for me.’ Ironically, the 1974 shows were held in generally high regard by The Who’s hardcore fans, perhaps because it was the first time The Who really delivered the ‘greatest hits’ show they had always wanted; prompting Townshend to remark, ‘The Who have become a golden-oldies band and that’s the bloody problem.’34
Unfortunately, try as he might to convince himself that ‘rock works most effectively on a song-by-song basis’, he had not recorded a single song with The Who that was not part of a larger conceit in such a long time that he’d forgotten how to do it. As he openly admitted in 1978, when the clouds had partly lifted, ‘I didn’t have any songs or any subject matter apart from the same old stuff that had brought forth all the dreary Who by Numbers material – alcoholic degradation.’ Indeed, almost the first song he demoed for that underrated 1975 album pretty much drunk that particular subject dry. It had the working title ‘No Way Out’, but ultimately appeared on album as ‘However Much I Booze’. Either way, he was drinking himself into an early grave, while the band’s other spokesman was telling anyone who would listen that their songwriter was bang out of order. And Townshend knew it:
Pete Townshend: When Roger said I was drunk . . . he was right. Drunk? Was I drunk?!! . . . I was falling to bits. At the same time I was going slightly barmy. I was hallucinating. I was forgetting big chunks of time . . . At that particular period I felt the band was finished and I was finished and the music was dying. [1975]
Such is the solipsistic nature of addiction that Townshend even convinced himself he had formed a pact with drummer Keith Moon to stop drinking. Moon – who had returned from a lost weekend in L.A. that lasted almost a year, definitively cost him his already-failing marriage and almost bankrupted him – was on a drug designed to make it impossible for him to drink: Antabuse – the clue’s in the name. Townshend decided to join him at the Teetotallers Inn. Unfortunately, as he wrote in a long confessional piece the NME would run in 1977 under the heading, ‘Pete Townshend’s Back Pages’:
When . . . recording Who by Numbers, Keith’s courageous attempts to head off his alcoholism moved me to stop drinking too. I stopped overnight. The results were quite interesting. My hair started to fall out. Another remarkable side effect was that I carried on drinking without my knowledge . . . Apparently, at the end of one session which I had gotten through by pulling incessantly at a total of about twenty cans of Coke, I wished everyone good night, walked up to the makeshift bar set up on an amplifier flight case at the back of the studio and drank down a bottle of vodka. I just don’t remember doing that . . . The shock that hit me as the pieces fell into place was even more frightening than the black holes in my head.
Such were these feelings of ‘alcoholic degradation’ that when producer Glyn Johns attempted to introduce some light and shade into an album of excoriating self-loathing by including the Formby-esque ‘Blue, Red and Grey’, Townshend responded by exclaiming, ‘What?! That fucking thing. Here’s me wanting to commit suicide, and you’re going to put that thing on the record.’ The fact that for the first time in a while he had written a song that celebrated the simple things in life did not change things a jot.
The May 1975 Who by Numbers sessions were close to rock-bottom for Townshend, who would begin to climb out of his empty glass by the time his old mucker and ex-Face Ronnie Lane suggested they make an album together at the end of 1976. It had been eight years since Pete had first expressed an interest in joining Lane’s then-band, Small Faces, and finally they were making a joint LP, Rough Mix. By 1976, it was Lane who had fallen on hard times, and Townshend who had the gold albums on the wall. The years since Lane left The Faces in 1973 had turned what slim chance he had of ongoing chart action into no chance at all.
*
Certain other English figures from the same milieu who once dreamed of climbing the rocky mountaintop were no longer so keen to continue driving on to the pop summit. Whether they had ever enjoyed the intoxicating view from this peak – as Peter Green and Syd Barrett had – or stayed in the commercial foothills (Nick Drake, Vincent Crane), by the end of 1973 each of these troubled souls had seemingly abandoned their art and scuttled on home. For all of them, it was the last refuge from their inner scoundrel.
Vincent Crane had managed to keep an increasingly dissolute version of Atomic Rooster together until the end of 1973, when Nice ’n’ Greasy became their final ragbag offering. Flat broke and still crazy (at one point, he bricked up his front door to stop the bailiffs from serving him with any writs), he spent the rest of the 1970s working in theatre production, writing for radio dramas and teaching music at a school in Battersea – anything that would not serve as a reminder of his days as chief bantam in a band of half-cocked crazies.
For Peter Green, the decision to walk away from the curse of fame had proven relatively simple. In a sense, he had never really gone out in the big wide world. Throughout the whole Fleetwood Mac circus he had continued to live at home with his parents, and as his friend, guitar-shop owner Paul Morrison, told his biographer: ‘I think the reason is that he felt very vulnerable out in the big wide world. He was never able to cope with being a star.’ But even at home, he couldn’t quite live down his past; and on occasions he would take off without warning, leaving his bemused parents (and girlfriend) to fend for themselves, as he did one morning in 1973, when he woke his girlfriend to tell her ‘he had to go to Israel and be with his people’.
But when he sent her a postcard from the land of Zion a few weeks later, it was to announce that he was thinking of joining the PLO. One confidant throughout these years, Mich Reynolds, recalls: ‘It wasn’t a nervous breakdown; it was a slow decline . . . A lot of the time I [just] thought he was taking the piss out of people. It was difficult to know when he was doing it for effect and when he couldn’t actually help it.’ By 1974 Green’s parents had concluded ‘he couldn’t actually help it’, and he was finally committed to the kind of mental hospital to which Crane had periodically retreated. This one, recommended by a doctor for whom his mother used to work, was at West Park in Epsom. According to Green, his spell in this place, far from making him better, prolonged his time in the wilderness:
Peter Green: They tricked me into agreeing to go to a nice place where Jewish boys and girls would be and then they took me to the hospital in Epsom, the madhouse . . . Next thing I knew I was stuck there and eventually they gave me ECT [electro-convulsive therapy] . . . injections and tranquilisers.
His desire to bypass the problems thrown up by that brief, hugely creative period of self-discovery had led him to a life spent in a semi-permanent drone-like state. Far from curing him of any earlier psychosis, the experience merely convinced him he had been on the right path all along: ‘I [still] wanted the wisdom of LSD, but I couldn’t quite get back again . . . It took me somewhere where I wasn’t Peter Green and I had no cares at all; it was great.’ Shortly after he was finally sprung from this dreadful place by his then-girlfriend he wrote her a note, which he handed her one day while she was working at the booking agency where they first met. It read:
The depression you try to escape from
Is your lonely soul’s broken heart
Realizing its mistake, and crying
You are torn between the tragic truth of a lost soul
And the falseness you have been led to believe is your way of life
I choose the first to be my self
If you look hard and deep you will see it in all Man
If you don’t see it – you will see madness.
The pair made plans to marry in September 1975, but two days before the supposedly happy day the lady realized that Green was still not a well man and decided to return home herself. When she asked if he would mind taking her there, he replied, ‘Not at all.’ Even he had come to realize he must travel the road to recovery alone. That road had a few more potholes along the way – including a short spell in prison in 1977 for pulling a pump-action shotgun on his long-time manager, Clifford Davis – before he picked up the guitar again late in 1977, and began re-learning those Robert Johnson riffs that once served as a shamanistic incantation.
*
Green was not the only hugely gifted guitarist who at some point in 1972 took a sabbatical from the unholy instrument to concentrate on expelling those inner demons, while the professionals of health care tried every faddish trick in the mental manual. Nick Drake also apparently spent a couple of months in full-time treatment for his chronic depression some time that year, but the medication merely dulled the senses and stilled his muse. By the time he returned to his parents’ home in Henley-in-Arden, he was in full retreat. As his mother Molly later remembered, ‘I think he felt it was a kind of refuge. He had to come back here. He tried many times to go away . . . I think he had rejected the world. Nothing much made him happy.’
The one thing that had once brought Drake relief – and release – had been taken away from him, and he didn’t know why. When he finally picked up the guitar again, he just felt he was going through the motions. Previously, as sidekick Robert Kirby fondly recalls, ‘he would spend days developing a particular phrase or chord sequence. He was always writing. He would also play the blues – but as a study exercise, getting ever more complex.’ Now, though, he would sit at his parents’ home ‘strumming the same chords over and over again on his Gibson acoustic guitar’, as if trying to grasp how such a rare gift could have passed so out of reach. Perhaps the devil had stopped him at the crossroads, one night when out driving his parents’ car, and reclaimed his largesse.
At least Drake could still hear the spirit of Robert Johnson coming through his phonograph, even as he confessed to longtime friend Ben Lacock that he believed he could sense the same ‘hellhound on my trail’. That hellhound finally got a name when Drake wrote his first documented song since Pink Moon got to him. ‘Black Eyed Dog’, written towards the end of 1973, was unlike anything in the Drake canon to date and the first of five tracks he would record at sessions in 1974, having again asked John Wood to act as his mediator.35
The first session in February was quite unlike anything Wood had experienced to date: first, Drake no longer felt he could do justice to the songs unless he recorded the guitar part first, and then overdubbed a vocal; second, the process of paring down the lyrics – first apparent on Pink Moon – had reached such a point that they made the twelve-bar blues of Robert Johnson seem like epic ballads. ‘Black Eyed Dog’, five unsparing lines long, centred on a single premonitive couplet, ‘I’m growing old and I wanna go home / I’m growing old and I don’t wanna know.’ It was Drake’s ‘Me and the Devil Blues’. This black-eyed dog already knew his name when he came a-knockin’ to tell him it was time to go. Producer Wood did not know what to make of the pared-down lyrics or the scratchy staccato accompaniment, and wondered aloud if Drake might be ‘having a problem with words’. Drake’s response was a scary insight into the interior life of someone prematurely weary of the world: ‘I can’t think of words. I feel no emotion about anything . . . I’m numb – dead inside.’
It seems Drake also began work on one or two other songs at this session – probably ‘Voice from the Mountain’ and ‘Tow the Line’, each of which seemed to inhabit the world of Hampstead and Cambridge. There was a reason why. He had been performing them in prototype as far back as 1969. They reflected a more garrulous world of possibilities, the former track in particular ticking all the usual boxes when it came to Drake’s pastoral lexicon of imagery: ‘voice from the mountain’, ‘voice from the sea’, ‘a tune from the hillside’, ‘a chime in the night’ – only to end on an ominous note, ‘Tell me, my friend . . . where can it end?’
Meanwhile, in the case of the tonally upbeat but verbally ambiguous ‘Tow the Line’, there would be another ham-fisted attempt on the part of the Drake estate to rewrite history when the track was finally released on Made to Love Magic in 2004. In the sleevenotes ‘Cally’ set about asserting that: ‘Nick left us with a song full of assurance and a contemplative calm that adds another dimension to the notion that he was at the end of any tether at that time.’ No mention of its compositional status as a relic of the past, or its scratch vocal. ‘Cally’ also claimed that the track was unmarked on the reel, and only ‘made itself known [when] the tape was allowed to run on . . . never having been mixed or, indeed, heard since 1974’. But ‘Tow the Line’ was not so much a lost track, as a lost vocal. The song had been circulating on bootleg for years as a backing track, so the story about the tape running on to reveal this ‘unknown’ track was just another myth for the funereal pyre.
In keeping with the other 1974 tracks, ‘Tow the Line’ was cut instrumentally and then overdubbed with a vocal, which means it must have been marked on the multitrack. The final nail in the coffin of Cally’s arch-revisionism was applied when Joe Boyd, the producer of the July 1974 sessions, told one Drake biographer he had no recollection of working on the track. It may well have received a guide vocal in February, but Drake had probably already rejected it as a candidate for the fourth album by the time he resumed his association with Boyd in July.
The resumption of their collaboration had been in the works for a few months, Boyd having already been warned by Wood, ‘Nick had said that he had some tunes but no words.’ When Boyd himself pressed Drake to explain what he had meant, at a meeting that spring on a trip to London, the songwriter informed Boyd: ‘I haven’t got any tunes anymore.’ Boyd told him to go away and find some.
By the July sessions, Drake had indeed penned two seemingly new songs, ‘Rider on the Wheel’ and ‘Hanging on a Star’, the latter of which ran to six whole lines, each and every one directed at Boyd for leaving him in the lurch at the end of 1970 after promising him the pop world. The song seems to have been directly inspired by what David Sandison called ‘a good talking-to’ and the protagonist himself called ‘a pep talk’, given by Joe to Nick at that spring meeting. According to Sandison, ‘What he did was to tell Nick that he was wasting and abusing a real and valuable talent and that he ought to stop pissing about and knuckle down to work.’
If Boyd had initially hoped the ‘pep-talk’ might work, hearing the self-pitying ‘Hanging on a Star’ made him realize just how fragile his favourite songwriter had become, and that ‘the failure of his music to be successful in his lifetime was . . . the [real] source of his unhappiness’. In those final months that acute sense of failure would begin to consume Drake. The sessions in July merely brought home to him that a whole album of new material was beyond him. (The four songs they finished to Drake’s satisfaction took longer to record than the entire Pink Moon.) And without the prospect of any more music, why even go on? One evening that summer, he turned to his mother and said, ‘I have failed in everything I have tried to do.’ Molly vainly attempted to elaborate on ‘all the things that he had so patently done. It didn’t make a difference. He felt that he’d failed to get through to the people that he wanted to talk to.’
Ironically, just as Drake was about to give up the ghost, there came the first sign that the world was catching up: in the pages of perhaps the most influential rockzine of the Seventies, Zigzag. In its June issue, Connor McKnight wrote a heartfelt first piece on the elusive work of the man, under the prophetic title, ‘In Search of Nick Drake’. Drake himself even showed it to his parents, and according to one American who interviewed them after their son’s death, ‘In the weeks after [it appeared, he] began to work on songs again’ – presumably a reference to ‘Rider on the Wheel’ and ‘Hanging on a Star’.
Those looking for some presentiment in these last lyrics of what was to come could probably seize on the last verse of ‘Rider on the Wheel’: ‘I don’t feel the same / But I ain’t gonna blame / The rider on the wheel’. But then, they could just as easily lock on to a song like ‘Outside’, written in 1967–68, the concluding couplet of which read, ‘If the world is all wrong / I won’t be staying long.’
None of this may matter a great deal if Drake’s death, in the early hours of 25 November 1974, was the result of an accidental overdose, and not the suicide that the official coroner concluded it was. But there are too many people close to Drake who had seen it coming for this to be a credible conclusion. A few weeks earlier, Drake had asked his mother(!) to invite the Martyns to their home. Although Beverley was too pregnant to make the journey, John came and they made their peace.
But, as Beverley wrote in her recent autobiography, Sweet Honesty, her husband’s account of their reconciliation filled her with an ominous feeling: ‘He had wanted to make up his friendship with us and apologized for that last evening. With hindsight, it was as if he was tying up the loose ends in his life. I was glad we were all friends again but I felt that he was going to do something bad. I told John I thought we were going to lose him, but it still came as a shock when the phone rang.’ John Martyn later told his own biographer: ‘It seemed so obvious at the time that it would come. It was inevitable. He was surrounded by a loving family, they adored him. [But] he was just too distant.’
Suicide had been on Drake’s mind throughout those last few months (returning from a brief trip to France, he handed his mother a copy of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, a philosophical discourse on whether suicide is morally justifiable), and maybe for some time before that. His friend Paul Wheeler remembers one occasion when he had been playing Stephen Stills’ ‘Four & Twenty’, from Déjà Vu, and a visiting Drake became extremely agitated. At the time of the incident, Drake was approximately the same age as the narrator in Stills’ song, who is contemplating taking his own life:
Drakes long-term girlfriend, Sophie Ryde, had also finally broken off their on–off relationship, prompting Drake to write her one last letter the night before his death. What he didn’t pen that night was a suicide note, which at the time convinced NME’s Nick Kent – who would write the most influential profile of the singer-songwriter just three months after his self-induced death – that it was probably an accidental overdose of the all-too-lethal anti-depressant Tryptizol, not the last act of a desperately depressed individual. Kent later recanted his view: ‘At the time I made great play of the fact that no suicide note, no grand flourish, had accompanied the act – yet this in all honesty is probably exactly the way Drake would have ended it all.’
In fact, the twenty-six-year-old did leave behind everything he wanted to say. An exercise book of his lyrics was at his bedside when his mother found him the following morning, slumped across his bed. Nor did Molly find the absence of a suicide note so curious. As she later said: ‘He never wrote anything down, never kept a diary, hardly even wrote his name in his own books . . . It was as if he didn’t want anything of himself to remain except his songs.’[my italics] The exercise book of his songs, bought when he was at Cambridge University and the songs still flowed effortlessly from his sloping pen, would remain Molly’s solitary reminder – his recordings excepted – of her son’s remarkable gifts.
Meanwhile, the songs from those final sessions would take their own sweet time appearing. Richard Williams, head of A&R at Island in the mid-Seventies, even put about a story that they had been destroyed. But finally in 1979, with Island preparing the release of a three-album boxed-set of Drake’s recorded work, Fruit Tree, it was decided to place the four finished 1974 tracks at the end of Pink Moon (finally making it a forty-minute album). Seven years later these same tracks got their own album, Time of No Reply, a collection of assorted studio outtakes and home demos that climaxed with the same quartet of songs. And that seemed to be that, until 2004, when history was again up for grabs, thanks to Drake’s estate. This time, the now-five tracks were scattered around a new thirteen-track set, and ‘Tow the Line’ became his final word. (Wood himself participated in the myth-making, describing it in his notes as ‘the last song Nick ever recorded’.) Not so.
*
In the summer of 1974 Drake was not the only burn-out victim who had returned to his inner child’s home base with an exercise book of old lyrics to hand. Nor was he alone in discovering that his old record label was prepared to fund further recordings on the back of a revival of interest from an influential rock writer, pushing for proof that the flame still burned. In April 1974 Nick Kent, still ten months away from turning his attention to the permanently-stilled Drake, published perhaps his most famous piece: a five-page NME cover-story on the enigma that was Syd Barrett, the front-cover caption of which read: ‘Whatever happened to the cosmic dream?’
With Dark Side of the Moon still in the charts a full year after its release, and with no news of Syd Barrett in more than two years, Kent felt that now would be a good time to remind NME readers of Syd’s central role in the band’s early career (on the back of Piper’s re-release as the first part of A Nice Pair). He even hoped to remind Barrett himself that he still had an audience, claiming ‘demand for more Syd Barrett material is remarkably high at the moment and EMI are all ready to swoop the lad into the studio, producer in tow, at any given moment’. (The previous month, Capitol US had issued a double album of the two solo Syd LPs to a positive reception.)
The real problem, according to Peter Jenner, was finding out whether in fact ‘Syd Barrett is [now] unable to write songs . . . or [if] he writes songs and won’t show them to anyone’. There was only one way to know for certain: book a studio. So it was that on 12 August 1974, Jenner and Barrett resumed where they left off some six years earlier – recording whatever Barrett had in his locker, even if it was just meandering bluesy improvs. The hope was that the results could sit alongside a couple of lost tracks from the Floyd era and a smattering of tracks that could, and maybe should, have made the two solo LPs. Engineer John Leckie says the thinking behind these sessions was simple: ‘There were things that [eventually] came out on Opel like ‘Dolly Rocker’ . . . [as well as] ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’, ‘Vegetable Man’ [but] there wasn’t enough to make an LP up, and [so we] were at least hoping to get at least a couple of new tracks from Syd, so that we could mix it all together.’36
Jenner recalls that ‘there was some indication that he wanted to do it’. But who did Jenner think would turn up: Roger K. Barrett or his creative alter ego Syd? Did he even still think of himself as ‘Syd’? According to the contracts he had recently signed with EMI – for the two reissues released in the past nine months – he did. He had signed both, ‘Syd Barrett’, which would be all well and good had he not previously always signed his official contracts with his real name, ‘R. K. Barrett’. Only after his muse was permanently stilled did he start signing himself ‘Syd’, suggesting this was still one crazy diamond.
Jenner’s attitude was suitably philosophical: ‘Give Syd all the tools and then see what he comes up with.’ Thinking ahead, Jenner had even booked a whole week of studio time, in case the first day or two proved a bust. But the Barrett who dutifully turned up for the first four days was a shell of the former shell. When Jenner’s gentle cajoling failed to produce anything, agent Bryan Morrison gave Syd one of his pep-talks, ‘Come on, Syd, come on, Syd, get it together.’ Barrett just kept noodling away at guitar-parts for songs he knew he would never finish and after four days of this torture walked out of the studio, never to return. One imagines the experience was at least as painful for him as it was for a disabused Jenner. Not one note was usable (though this hasn’t stopped bootleggers from releasing several meandering snippets searching forlornly for a musical berth), and the idea of an album of outtakes was quietly put to bed. It would be 1988 before the project saw the light of day, as Opel, and even then the Floyd exercised their veto when it came to the two unreleased 1967 masterpieces that would have made the album a chart prospect.
And that was that. Barrett stopped kidding himself he was still Syd, gave up his latest flat in London and returned to Cambridge. By now, this had become a pattern of sorts. As Hester Page told Rob Chapman: ‘Like a homing pigeon, if he started to feel a bit out of it he went back to where it was familiar and he was safe . . . In the end it was safer to go back to Cambridge and not be pestered by this world he felt he couldn’t fit into anymore.’ In his mind, he never really had left home. As Mick Rock observed at the time of his friend’s 2006 death: ‘Syd never really left Cambridge, never really left England particularly. He returned to the house he grew up in, living like this mad uncle upstairs, occasionally floating down.’
And yet, just like Drake and Green, it seems Barrett didn’t really like it at home; he just couldn’t bear it anywhere else for very long. He had told Steve Turner as much, back in March 1971, as he was preparing to fade from view: ‘Cambridge is very much a place to get adjusted to. I’ve found it difficult . . . [but] it’s the home place where I used to live . . . It’s a nice place to live really – under the ground.’ Much like the Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.
At least he retained that unique sense of humour. And he would need it now, as the ill-assorted set of individuals that had once constituted ‘his band’ became one of the two or three biggest concert attractions in the world. In the four months that separated Nick Kent’s eulogistic piece on Syd from those final, frustrating sessions with Jenner, Floyd fans heard the first whispers that the band was finally getting down to work on a successor to the record-breaking Dark Side of the Moon. In June, they played a short set of shows in France, where they unveiled two new compositions, both lengthy, the ten-minute ‘Raving and Drooling’ and the epic, nine-part ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ – and there was no doubting which mad gem they meant. Waters talked about the initial inspiration for the latter song in a 1975 interview with Rock et Folk, while continuing his boycott of the British music press:
Roger Waters: We didn’t start out with the idea of making a record based on the theme of absence . . . We began to put the music for ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ together, and from that we got a very strong feeling of melancholy . . . When I wrote the words, I don’t know why, but I began to write about Syd’s [creative] demise. And then a few other sections got written . . . I wanted to force myself into what I felt at the time and to write something about it all . . . projecting my feelings about what was going on inside me. [1975]
But there was a lot more to Waters’ decision to write about Barrett that spring than mere happenstance, or rank sentiment. He was clearly responding to Nick Kent’s article, which implied that the band stopped being interesting the day he gave Syd his marching orders. Not that an affronted Waters was about to acknowledge Kent. No, no, no, he was responding to all the recent articles about Barrett in those impertinent English music papers – sum total as of May 1974, one:
Roger Waters: For my part I’ve never read an intelligent piece on Syd Barrett in any magazine. Never. No one knows what they’re talking about. Only us, the people who knew him, who still know him a bit, only we know the facts, how he lived, what happened to him, why he was doing certain things . . . They make me laugh, these journalists with their rubbish. In actual fact, I wrote that song . . . above all to see the reactions of people who reckon they know and understand Syd Barrett . . . Because he’s left, withdrawn so far away that, as far as we’re concerned, he’s no longer there. [1975]
Waters’ own song to Syd – indeed, all three of the new songs he had now written for Dark Side’s successor – soon became a battleground for the spat to end all spats between Waters, as self-appointed spokesman for the pretentious wing of English prog-rock, and the king rat of rock critics, Mr Kent (‘You Gotta Be Crazy’, the title of the other track debuted at autumn UK concerts was, according to Waters, ‘a reply to the English press’). When Kent was dispatched by NME editor Nick Logan to review the first of three sold-out Floyd shows at Wembley’s dilapidated Empire Pool Arena on 15 November 1974, he was given the opportunity to expand further on his former treatise and did not stint:
Incisiveness has never been something the post-Syd Floyd have prided themselves on, and so one has to wade through laboured sections of indolent musical driftwood before, lo, the plot is resumed and one is sent careering back to our Roger’s bloated denunciation . . . [which] ends with a mildly potent ‘j’accuse’ blast of postured psychological cause-and-effect ranting.
Waters was furious. Yet he wasn’t about to respond directly to Kent’s critique of the band’s current failings. As he would tell Rock et Folk, ‘I don’t think it’s really essential to institute a dialogue with the rock critics . . . there are more interesting minorities . . . Rock critics . . . are not an explanatory medium between us and the public.’ It was simply a coincidence that they formed such an insistent backdrop to his recent output (including a song he never finished but mentioned in passing, ‘Flight from Reality’). The following year he would ratchet up the personal paranoia to heights even Barrett never scaled, telling Capital Radio that ‘because we’re very successful, we’re very vulnerable to attack and Syd is the weapon that is used to attack us’.
As of December 1974 – with Floyd’s follow-up to Dark Side . . . still seven months away – it was left to Gilmour, who had previously tracked down Kent in order to ensure some personal input in his Barrett article, to now denigrate the man’s critical faculties. Gilmour duly informed NME’s Pete Erskine that his fellow scribe ‘goes on about Syd too much and yet, as far as I can see, there’s no relevance in talking about Syd in reviewing one of our [current] concerts’. In fact, the words ‘Syd Barrett’ were mentioned exactly once in Kent’s 3,000-word review of the Wembley show; and anyway, to suggest that the subject had ‘no relevance’ when the centrepiece of the new set was a twenty-five-minute ‘tribute’ in song to their former leader, and the second half of the show was a live re-creation of an entire album haunted by Syd’s spectre, was disingenuous at best.
Actually, Kent had done the band a big favour. The result of his attack – and it was certainly that – was ultimately a positive one. As Kent later revealed: ‘I saw Rick Wright after that piece came out and he actually thanked me for it. He said he didn’t like what I’d written, but at the same time it stimulated some kind of intra-group discussion, because as a group they had [started to] become so detached from each other.’ Some unity was now needed because, as of January 1975, when Erskine’s counter-piece appeared in NME, the Floyd had not even started recording the most eagerly awaited rock album of 1975, Wish You Were Here.
And still, any fears about bootlegging – and this time the Floyd really were the target of those shady preservers of musical history, with Tour ’74 capturing all three new songs live from Stoke in startlingly good audience stereo, housed in a laminated sleeve with lyrics – remained secondary to the band’s belief that the songs were immeasurably strengthened by being forged in the furnace of live performance. In the case of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, they were right. But the longer they worked on the new songs, the more convinced they became that they should change the dynamic. By early June 1975, when they were finally putting the finishing touches to Dark Side’s superior successor, they had put aside Waters’ latest songs of madness – ‘You Gotta Be Crazy’ and ‘Raving and Drooling’ – to make the twenty-minute ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ not only the album’s centrepiece, but its bookends. All it needed now was a few judicious overdubs.
And so it was that the band convened at Abbey Road on 5 June 1975, to celebrate Dave Gilmour’s wedding to his long-term girlfriend, and to apply those last dabs of the audio brush to a song they had now been working on for a solid year. Because the wedding reception was being held in the Abbey Road canteen, there were a lot of people from the band’s wacky past milling around that day, most of them at Gilmour’s behest. They included Jerry Shirley, who had made such a contribution to those Gilmour-Barrett sessions. And there was a large, bald man with no eyebrows, who was sitting next to Shirley in the canteen, wearing a slightly dazed look, and a huge grin. It was Syd.
Waters seems to have been more fazed by Barrett’s appearance that day than the others, or perhaps than he really should have been. He later commented, ‘For him to pick the very day we start putting vocals on a song about him – very strange.’ And yet it was hardly the only occasion Barrett had kept tabs on ‘his band’ since his 1968 departure, or the first time he had decided to visit them in the studio. As for his timing, the press had been talking about this track for the past nine months. Who, in such a situation, wouldn’t be the least bit curious to hear what the fuss was about?
Of course, he did look a bit odd with those shaved eyebrows and ill-fitting white suit.37 But then, he had always enjoyed yanking the chain of these former architecture students. And, as Duggie Fields once observed, ‘You weren’t always sure with Syd whether he was winding you up . . . He liked challenging people.’ So was this impromptu appearance a case of the madcap having one last laugh? According to his sister Rosemary, it was. In a rare interview, published in Luca Ferrari’s A Fish Out of Water, she suggested: ‘Syd was actually joking, and . . . everything from the white outfit to the shaved head and eyebrows was meant in jest.’
If so, he must have left that evening chortling to himself about how Waters was still the same po-faced, uptight control freak he had been back in the day. There are enough clues in Barrett’s few reported words that he was having a rare old time. At one point – according to the other Roger’s version of events – Barrett actually stood up and said, ‘Right, when do I put my guitar on?’ Waters broke it to him gently, ‘Sorry Syd, the guitar’s all done.’ Now what sort of myopic muso can’t see the validation even a scratchy guitar riff from the man himself would have brought such a track? After all, the side-long song had no shortage of Barrettian touches, of which that little four-note guitar riff that introduces part one was the most blatant, self-consciously evoking Syd Barrett’s lead-in guitar phrase on ‘Astronomy Domine’. It seems Waters couldn’t even bring himself to humour Syd by pressing record, then wiping the result from the final master – if it was anything like those recordings made the previous August.
Further proof that the wise fool still knew how to laugh at himself, and the world of rock, came when Waters played Syd the finished track and wondered aloud, ‘Well, Syd, what do you think of that?’ His response was a peach: ‘Sounds a bit old.’ Been there, done that; try to follow me if you can. By June 1975 Barrett may have lost that understanding for good, but he still had the jump on the leery Waters. He, at least, knew what French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud meant when he had written, a century earlier, high on absinthe: ‘A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless and systematic disorganization of the senses . . . and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them!’
By now Waters had genuinely come to believe he could ‘aspire to Syd’s crazed insights and perceptions’, a claim he was to finally make in print in 1987 as part of a one-man campaign to denigrate the very notion of the Floyd carrying on without him. At least Barrett probably left Abbey Road knowing they were no longer ‘his band’. They were the answer to every rock promoter’s prayer.
In 1975 Rock itself was unrecognizable from what it had been in 1968. And although it had travelled a long way it had also lost a fair few of the brightest and the best, and not just those who had taken too much for granted. Of those who had always been enticed by the bright lights, big cities across the pond, some willingly allowed themselves to be whisked away into California’s air-conditioned nirvana where they could indeed be comfortably numb.
*
In the period 1974–78, Keith Moon, David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Peter Green and John Lennon would all temporarily relocate to la-la-land. For Moon the Loon, the life of the rock star was just too enticing a substitute for real life, and he had soon returned to his manic ways. A protracted spell in Los Angeles in 1974 convinced him – and not only him – that this was the life. But as the band’s manager recalled to Moon’s biographer, if there was one place Keith Moon shouldn’t be allowed, it was the headquarters of hedonism that was L.A., c. 1974–75:
Chris Stamp: L.A. was a fucking nightmare. [Keith] was living in one of these expensive, cold Beverly Hills houses. Ringo and Harry Nilsson came around a lot and . . . they were fucked up. And they were good people. Surrounding them were the roadies and the drivers and the dealers . . . [and] they were even more fucked up. So it was madness. The wrong place for him to be – because L.A. is just L.A.
Moon was hardly alone in finding this Babylon of the West to his jaundiced taste. In the city where it was never winter, they had their own special snow and it got up people’s noses. Moon was delighted to find a rock-solid ex-pat community of would-be hedonists with not a party-poopin’ wife in sight. He had already experienced the tail-end of L.A. rock’s most infamous lost weekend, the 1973 booze-fuelled bender that culminated in the infamous John Lennon-produced Harry Nilsson album, Pussycats – ostensibly contributing drums to two of the more ramshackle tracks (‘Loop de Loop’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’).
Inspired, if that is the right word, by an album that pretty much killed Nilsson’s career stone-dead and sent Lennon hurtling back to the missus, Moon returned to L.A. the following summer, after a few large-scale Who shows replenished the coffers, to begin his own solo album, Two Sides of the Moon. These sessions would make the Pussycats sessions sound like Please Please Me. Becoming the stuff of legend, they proved once and for all that cocaine, willing chicks and creativity do not mix. The resultant platter would make MCA choke on the bill for an event with hardly any paying diners.
Into this modern Sodom arrived in early September 1974 a certain David Bowie, halfway through a six-month on–off US tour designed to promote his latest fab waxing, Diamond Dogs, and to put to bed once and for all the alienating androgyny of Aladdin and Ziggy Along for the ride was a BBC documentary crew, and an English director, in Alan Yentob, who wanted to know, what gives? Bowie, caught between rock and a more soulless place, decided in a rare moment of articulacy to come clean to Yentob about all those earlier creations of his:
David Bowie: One half of me is putting a concept forward, and the other half is trying to sort out my own emotions, and a lot of my ‘space’ creations are, in fact, facets of me . . . [though] I wouldn’t even admit that to myself at the time . . . Ziggy would relate to something . . . [in] me. Major Tom, Aladdin Sane, they’re all facets of me, and I got lost at one point. I couldn’t decide whether I was writing characters, or whether the characters were writing me. [1974]
In his coke-fogged mind, Bowie thought he was being mighty clever, owning up to a glorious past he was disowning nightly onstage. Already, he had managed to convince himself he had wriggled free of those all-consuming creations. Backstage at his ‘triumphant’ return to Radio City Music Hall, a month later, he told Alice Cooper: ‘It’s easy to get trapped by your stage presentation; the secret is to find a way to move on.’ Yet it was Cooper who had moved on. He had just disbanded the bestselling band of the same name, and begun work on his very own welcoming Nightmare. Whereas Bowie had simply abandoned everything he had ever believed in, even as he sought to present his volte-face as another artistic act of (re)creation:
David Bowie: About two years ago, I realized I had become a total product of my concept character Ziggy Stardust. So I set out on a very successful crusade to re-establish my own identity. I stripped myself down and took myself down and took myself apart, layer by layer. [1976]
Once again, Bowie was informing anyone who would listen that he would be ‘concentrating on various activities that have very little to do with rock and pop’. And this time he wasn’t joking. What he didn’t admit was that the change had been forced on him by the economics of touring the States with his lamest collection since he was a denizen at Deram. Two punchy preview 45s culled from Ziggy’s reject locker – ‘Rebel Rebel’ and ‘Diamond Dogs’ itself – did not an album make. And he was being called to account. Lester Bang’s August 1974 Creem review of Diamond Dogs – surely assiduously assimilated by an avid rock-press reader like Bowie – did not sugar-coat the facts:
Diamond Dogs reaffirms what an incredible producer Bowie is even if most of the songs are downright mediocre . . . He was always weary, and pretentiously likes to think of himself as the prescient chronicler of a planet falling to pieces . . . [but] this is the sloppiest Bowie album yet . . . He really doesn’t seem to care as much as he used to.
The man was losing even the elements of the American rock constituency he had previously thought he could rely on. As such it was doubly important to his commercial well-being Stateside that he told everyone he had been kidding all along and that, although it had been a helluva ride, it was over:
David Bowie: At the time that I did Ziggy Stardust, all I had was a small cult audience in England from Hunky Dory. I think it was out of curiosity that I began wondering what it would be like to be a rock & roll star. So basically, I wrote a script and played it out as Ziggy Stardust onstage and on record. I mean it when I say I didn’t like all those albums – Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups, Diamond Dogs, David Live. It wasn’t a matter of liking them, it was, ‘Did they work or not?’ Yes, they worked. They kept the trip going. [But] now I’m all through with rock & roll. Finished. I’ve rocked my roll. It was great fun while it lasted, but I won’t do it again. [1975]
What he wasn’t inclined to admit was that his latest gambit, the Diamond Dogs tour – running initially from June through July 1974 – had lost a fair few old fans, while barely winning over an equivalent number of new fans. On the tape of the third show, Toronto (16 June), fans can be heard shouting, ‘Where is Ziggy? We want Ziggy!’ Yet even before the arrangements had found their feet he was recording shows in Philadelphia for a live album, at the insistence of Defries. What Defries didn’t spell out was the sheer necessity of the ruse, in order to recoup some of the huge losses brought on by the grandiose stage show and the ten-piece live band, out of all proportion to Bowie’s pulling power. Bowie, a reluctant participant in the process, later suggested that David Live should have been called David Bowie is Alive and Well and Living Only in Theory. But it had finally been spelt out to him – by his long-suffering record label – that record advances had been subsidizing all three US tours, and the buck stopped here, and now.
On 2 September, when Bowie resumed touring at L.A.’s open-air Universal Amphitheater, gone were the hydraulic lifts and post-industrial scaffolding that passed for the Diamond Dogs set. They were replaced by a five-piece group of backing singers and Bowie’s idea of sweet soul music. His explanation, proffered to Tony Zanetta after the first L.A. show, was that he wanted ‘the focus of the tour to be on the music and not on theatre’.
Key members of the band, already soured by a financial dispute over payment for the David Live recordings, began to make their feelings known in private. Michael Kamen, effectively the musical director, was unhappy to find that ‘the stage was [suddenly] full of large black people going “Halleluiah” and shaking tambourines, and poor David was very thin and very white and completely out of his element’. Guitarist Earl Slick was equally unimpressed: ‘David had gone completely in a direction I didn’t like, not to mention it wasn’t the way I play.’
Nor did the audience hecklers let up. At Radio City in November, one reportedly shouted, ‘We want our money back. We want Ziggy Stardust.’ They, at least, remembered what Bowie had told the US press the day he introduced Ziggy to them at the Dorchester Hotel in July 1972: ‘I’m never gonna try and play black music ’cause I’m white. Singularly white!’ And English. For the diehards, the version of ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’ that he recut at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound in a new, supposedly soulful guise – which reinvented the song so successfully that it really was only about dancing – was a form of sacrilege.
By now the set-list was being nightly overhauled, with Bowie introducing new songs such as ‘Footstompin’’, ‘Can You Hear Me?’ and ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’38, soundalike soul songs that fell largely on deaf ears. Perhaps things would have been clearer if he had introduced into the set another song he’d just cut at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound studio, ‘Who Can I Be Now?’. Yet he still wanted it both ways – all ironic distance as far as his rock fans were concerned, but Mr Sincerity when finally booked to appear on Soul Train, America’s one concession to black music on mainstream TV When he threatened to call his new ‘white soul’ album Shilling the Rubes, though, bosses at his US label put their foot down and said, no way, Ishmael.
Well, this Ishmael had a whopper to tell. Barely had Bowie unveiled his new sound to the she-creatures of Hollywood than he was telling their daily bible, the L.A. Times, ‘I was [always] trying to put forward concepts, ideas and theories, but this [new] album doesn’t have anything to do with that. It’s just emotional drive . . . There’s not a concept in sight.’ Nor were there any decent riffs in sight. Or at least not any which came from the once-febrile mind of Davey Jones. ‘Footstompin’’ was not a bad riff, but it was one that guitarist Carlos Alomar had come up with, only for Bowie to decide he could cut up a guitar part just as easily as he could a line of lyrics – or coke:
Carlos Alomar: David had recorded my chord changes and riff, and he hated it. He took out the lyrics and ended up with the music, and cut it up on the master so that it would have classic r&b form. He . . . experiment[ed] with the original tape, running it backwards, cutting it up . . . [The resultant] ‘Fame’ was totally [a] cut up. When he had the form of the song he wanted, he left.
Having generated the song-form he wanted, Bowie set about writing a new set of lyrics that put the boot in. As he later recalled, what he came out with was ‘quite a nasty, angry little song’. He had recently experienced some ‘very upsetting management problems, and a lot of that was built into the song’. Having finally got around to reading the contract he had signed with Defries back in August 1971, he had no dilemma deciding what he wanted to get off his chest:
Fame, lets him loose, hard to swallow
Fame, puts you there where things are hollow . . .
Fame, it’s not your brain, it’s just the flame
That burns your change to keep you insane . . .
Fame, what you need you have to borrow.
He had already been warned about Defries by, of all people, John Lennon, former client of Allen Klein and drinking buddy of Morris Levy. Lennon’s presence at the ‘Fame’ session, and his suggestion that Bowie add ‘all . . . the high-pitched singing’, would be enough to garner him a co-credit on the track. In the meantime, irony of ironies, the song Bowie wrote as a retort to the one man who believed in him way back when, and had hocked his own (and RCA’s) future to give him that one shot, soared to number one on the American charts in the summer of 1975, turning around his fortunes in the land of the free lunch. It also turned him into a know-it-all, who had all the answers when down-on-his-luck friend Marc Bolan wondered why he couldn’t crack the charts Stateside with the same formula that worked back home:
Tony Visconti: During the Young Americans days, David told me that he had recently talked to Marc . . . David was already quite successful in America then, which is something Marc wasn’t. Marc’s way was to slag other people off to make himself look bigger, and he tried to have a go at David that night, telling him that he was doing things wrong; and David just put him very straight about where he was at, that he wasn’t going to break America with his present attitude, that he should bend a little and listen more to American taste.
What Bowie did not tell Bolan directly was that he had achieved his own success by changing his whole vocal style into something as transatlantic – and homogenized – as Half and Half. He had tried and failed to sell the States on a form of English rock as glam as ‘Get It On’, and as camp as ‘Blockbuster’, so it was time to come clean: he didn’t have the patience (or the money) necessary to wait for Middle America’s mall-children to catch up. Meanwhile, a disconsolate Bolan, who back in 1971 had fleetingly had America in the palm of his hand, stuck to his template, even as Bowie was happily boasting that his success, long fought for and hard won as it was, really was a case of ‘shilling the rubes’:
David Bowie: ‘Fame’ was an incredible bluff that worked. Very flattering. I’ll do anything until I fail. And when I succeed, I quit, too. I’m really knocked out that people actually dance to my records, though. But let’s be honest; my rhythm and blues are thoroughly plastic. Young Americans, the album ‘Fame’ is from, is, I would say, the definitive plastic soul record. It’s the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock, written and sung by a white limey. [1976]
Not everyone fell for Young Americans’ charms. Dylan, who knew a rube when he saw one, reportedly told Bowie he thought the album was terrible. And when Bowie insisted on playing the whole thing to Paul McCartney and wife Linda – twice! – the ex-Beatle snapped, ‘Can we hear another album?’ However, Bowie no longer craved the validation of peers – or mentors. Fame had indeed taken him over. Actually, it had swallowed him whole. As Mick Rock notes: ‘Externally he handled it well . . . [but] internally he was having problems.’ Symptomatic of his slide into the swimming pool of his very own rock & roll fantasy was his decision at the end of the Soul Tour to relocate to Los Angeles His wife Angie was soon fearing for his very soul:
Angie Bowie: [By 1974] David’s whole life [had] changed . . . He started living largely in the dark, in the company of other coke freaks. He visited home only when he needed to, or could be assured that his nearest and dearest, or other non-cocaine people, wouldn’t bother him. I saw less and less of him, and I just hated that. I couldn’t stand watching the David I knew vanishing from his own life . . . [So I found] a beautiful Art Deco house [in L.A.] on six acres, an exquisite property and terrific value at just $300,000. But he took one look at a detail I hadn’t noticed, a hexagram painted on the floor of a circular room by the previous owner . . . and got hysterical. [1993]
If cocaine had taken over as the drug of choice by the time he played the Universal in September 1974, Bowie quickly discovered that when it came to the Peruvian marching powder, southern California was the land of plenty. One day during the Universal residency, Fran Pillersdorf, production co-ordinator on the tour, was obliged to go past his bedroom door on the way to the bathroom: it was, she recalled, ‘dark in the middle of a bright California day. There were bottles and cocaine from the night before, and there was David lying in the dark room with the door ajar. He was bone tired and freaked out.’
He stayed in pretty much the same state of mind and body throughout the whole Californian mini-tour that month, and it was here that the cameras of Yentob’s Arena crew caught the ex-Spider, still weaving his web of self-deceit. But if the live clips from the L.A. shows were meant to convince his fans back home he still had something to say, while the fey cockney accent he adopted offstage would hopefully convince them he remained ‘one of us’, then the strategy was flawed from the very start. Broadcast at prime-time on a February evening in 1975, with the UK release of Young Americans just around the corner, the programme was very much an exercise in cinéma vérité – save that Bowie was not the orchestrator this time, he was Yentob’s victim. Charles Shaar Murray, who had acted as Bowie’s trustworthy conduit to the impressionable readers of NME for the past two years or more, was unsparing in his assessment of the former Emperor of Pop, who now had to stand naked:
Bowie’s all nerves, like some strange insect trapped in a jar. His conversation runs around in circles like a rat on a treadmill, he radiates cocaine paranoia and his eyes squirm in their sockets. He says that he’s glad to be rid of Ziggy and to start being himself, but that seems to be proving his undoing. Ziggy was a stronger and more fascinating creature than David Bowie; Ziggy sucked him dry. What Yentob got in his viewfinder were the dregs.
Americans had already been given their own insight into what happens when a star is sucked dry by his own ego, having witnessed Bowie’s first national prime-time interview on The Dick Cavett Show, broadcast on 5 December 1974. The live performance of three songs, including the unmodified ‘Footstompin’’ and an earnest ‘Young Americans’, still seemed to suggest he might have something to say. But the ensuing interview was painful to watch, as Cavett tried every trick in the book to get more than a mumbled platitude out of the man. What the hell had happened to rock’s most articulate self-promoter? The most revealing remark in the whole sorry saga came when Cavett ventured into David’s background, asking about his parents, specifically his mother. Bowie briefly stopped playing with his cane like some autistic child to half-jokingly suggest: ‘She pretends I’m not hers. She doesn’t talk much [to me]. We were never that close.’ In fact, it was him who was doing the disowning, from six thousand miles away, even as he continued playing the ‘mad family’ card to the American media:
David Bowie: My brother Terry’s in an asylum right now. I’d like to believe that the insanity is because our family is all genius, but I’m afraid that’s not true . . . I’m quite fond of the insanity, actually. It’s a nice thing to throw out at parties, don’t you think? Everybody finds empathy in a nutty family. Everybody says, ‘Oh, yes, my family is quite mad.’ Mine really is. No fucking about, boy . . . [But] I haven’t spoken to any of them in years. My Father is dead. I think I talked to my mother a couple of years ago. I don’t understand any of them. [1976]
To escape the family curse, he had turned his back on everyone he once held dear, and flown halfway around the world – only to find that all his psychological baggage had again arrived first. When self-denial didn’t work, he shut off his emotions – and the work suffered. Estranged wife Angie learnt the hard way that his ‘real psychological problem in the years I knew him was his emotional frigidity, the cure in his case being worse than the family disease. The real crazy stuff, the mania, delusions, and paranoia he exhibited during the second half of the decade . . . coincided precisely with his ingestion of enormous amounts of cocaine, alcohol and whatever other drugs he had on hand; his “madness” simply didn’t happen unless he was stoned out of his mind.’
His next creation would be a freeze-dried coke fiend with a streak of megalomania hardwired in. The Thin White Duke was another artistically successful alter ego, but it was a case in point of placing someone ‘there, where things are hollow’. By now, he really thought he had found some unique way to control those inner demons. Interviewed for Playboy by Cameron Crowe as he prepared to take the Thin White Duke around the world – with the shortest of pit-stops in London – he was asked if he thought he was schizophrenic: ‘One side of me probably is, but the other side is right down the middle, solid as a rock . . . My thought forms are fragmented a lot, that much is obvious . . . [But] being famous helps put off the problems of discovering myself. I mean that.’
It took until the fag-end of 1976, and a protracted trip to East Berlin intended to cleanse him and his symbiotic sidekick, Iggy, of the new world and old habits, for the boy from Brixton to realize that there was a reason he was always crashing in the same car. When he did realize he had been living in the land of hollow men, he snuck on back to the city of New York, to which his new friend, Lennon, had already retreated. For the pair of them, this island of insanity off the East Coast of America was quite close enough to the childhood homes they alluded to repeatedly in their early-Seventies songs, but spent the second half of the decade disavowing. Lennon even explained his reasoning on the dangers of returning home: ‘That’s one time when you can’t hide from yourself. The records, the fame – none of it shields you. You remember exactly who you are deep inside.’
Bowie’s old friend, Bolan, had also eventually tired of his own season in the L.A. sun. By the beginning of 1975 he was ready to board the trans-Euro express. Stopping off in France for a detox and a musical rethink, he re-emerged in 1976 a slimmer, leaner Marc. Like Keith Moon, he had found his time in L.A. to have been desperately unproductive, merely fuelling a sense of dislocation bordering on homesickness. For both these party animals, London would prove to be their final resting place – literally. Both would be dead by the end of 1978, the former killed by the worst-placed tree in west London, the latter by an overdose of the same anti-depressant that killed Drake.
If Bowie finally split the L.A. scene because he had started to see pentagrams on floors and demons at the windows, it took one of Ziggy’s surrogate fathers, ex-asylum inmate Peter Green, to class the people around him in the city of angels as in league with Lucifer. It was 1978 before Green made it back to L.A., but when he did, it was to indulge in an ill-fated marriage to one of L.A. witchy women, which ended in a matter of months because, as Mick Fleetwood says: ‘He felt that she had made a covenant with the Devil.’ A bemused Green had already found that his former band had reinvented itself as the quintessential radio-friendly AOR band, coming up with their own FM-freeway phenomenon, Rumours, the previous year. For their new audience, though, the period with Green was essentially an irrelevance and ‘Black Magic Woman’ was a Santana song.
Indeed, by this time much of English rock was an irrelevance Stateside. And the change had come about in 1974–75, while all these English rockers were cavorting in the pools of Hollywood and Burbank. For at the very same time, up in Laurel Canyon, the likes of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young were laying down their own response to these difficult times – and in 1974, that meant Court and Spark and On the Beach, two pure-bred pedigree examples of California’s own new wave of singer-songwriters, a little burnt out but beautifully self-absorbed. Meanwhile, in Malibu, the granddaddy of them all, Bobby D., was sleeping on the floor of his empty new mansion with Bay Area girlfriend Ellen Bernstein, and writing the album that best expressed the time when ‘revolution was in the air’, Blood on the Tracks. Fittingly, it was he who closed the book on the Sixties’ socio-musical legacy. And on the timeless ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, he could have just as easily been describing the madcap Barrett as rather consciously evoking his own Rimbaudian muse:
There was music in the cafés at night,
And revolution in the air.
Till he started into dealing with slaves,
And something inside of him died.
Well, in Syd’s case, something or someone inside had died. As of 1975, I really was another. After his little 5 June stunt at Abbey Road, Roger would not let Syd come out to play. The following year, when Capital Radio DJ Nicky Horne called on Barrett at his home to ask if he would co-operate in a radio retrospective on the Floyd, ‘this huge fat man answered wearing only pyjama trousers. He looked down at me, and said, “Syd can’t talk.” When I told Dave Gilmour [what happened], he said the man had been Syd, and he’d been telling the truth. He really couldn’t talk any more.’
Meanwhile, the Pink Floyd of Gilmour and Waters remained one of the few English rock acts to retain and expand a US audience through the second half of the Seventies. The Who maintained their live audience by pandering to them, while The Kinks just stopped trying. And Bowie took regular two-year breaks from the stage to stoke up demand. The English wave of musical madness that had so spectacularly crashed on foreign shores was just about done, with Punk just around the corner, ready to impose the last rites on the kind of musical indulgences that the Sixties mindset had given licence to.
But although it still had plenty to say about this English malady itself – and in the form of Ian Curtis, its own Drakean poster-boy for the new depression – English rock had lost its grip on that international mass audience. It had also developed an ideological aversion to albums on which the sum was more than the parts. Art was again supposed to be consumed in three-minute sound bites cut for seven-inch vinyl.
The term ‘conceptual unity’ was banned by the Ministry of Punk Propaganda at King’s Tower. The idea of creating order from inner disorder, and calling it a piece of art, was a no-no – even after Siouxsie & The Banshees managed to slip their own concept album about suburban madness between the covers of their own long-playing debut, The Scream (1978). The Fall’s first EP, Bingo Master’s Break Out, was another 1978 mini-masterpiece wholly inspired by Mark E. Smith and girlfriend Una Baines’s experiences working at the local asylum. Who knew?
But for the likes of Poly Styrene, who formed X-Ray Spex at the mid-point between two nervous breakdowns, a Bowie-esque flight from childhood remained the order of the day – even as her song ‘Identity’ ripped the lid off this barely maintained pretence. If many Sixties rock artists had burned, burned, burned until they just burned themselves out, it would be as nothing to Punk’s headlong rush into self-ignition. X-Ray Spex would be just one of a number of punk bands that had the lifespan of a plate-juggler’s act. But then, even the punk drug of choice foreshortened the arc of creativity: ‘A lot of speed / is all I need’, to quote a particularly Rotten phrase.
And still the English continued sacrificing the brightest and the best at the altar of its very own rapacious art-form, rock music. And if the drugs didn’t help, perhaps it was never that
simple. As Syd Barrett’s replacement in the Floyd once said: ‘Acid and stuff . . . acted as catalysts . . . [but] it’s more that he couldn’t handle success on that level . .
. And [something] to do with his past life, his father dying and all that stuff.’ In fact, as Barrett knew only too well from his own reading, his complaint was hardly his alone. It was, in
fact, symptomatic of a very English malady.
‘We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terribly brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it.’
– Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (1977)