25: Anything for Art!

My band’s latest manager arranged for us to perform in Reno, at a club next door to a laundromat on the town’s outskirts. Three and a half years before, I’d been much impressed when, performing at a White Front department store-sponsored concert at the Hollywood Bowl, Pete Townshend had hurled a mic stand like a spear at a stagehand who’d displeased him in some way. I tried to include a little tantrum in my own every performance, but the little club in Reno was the wrong place for it. I made a big display of wreaking an awful vengeance on a mic stand that refused to stay upright, with the result that when we finished our performance, the club’s manager pulled a gun and told us to pay the fuck up. We reached the following compromise: we wouldn’t pay for the mic stand, and he wouldn’t give us a dime for having driven up from LA. Anything for art!

I managed to persuade Procol Harum’s young producer, later famous, to produce us too. I think he agreed mostly so he and his little family could spend a mouth in the sunshine. His first official act was to demoralize us completely — to tell us, at the end of the first night, that he despaired of getting anything listenable out of us. It didn’t even occur to me to try to strangle him. Against all odds, a young executive at Warners with quirky taste was eager to sign us, to the profound horror of everyone else at the company. At our live audition at the Paradise Ballroom, I spent most of the performance trying to make it appear as though I was on my belly intentionally, and not because I’d become hopelessly entangled in microphone and guitar cords.

We opened for Foghat at the Whisky. P— overheard two girls talking about us between songs. They agreed that I had nothing going for me but my looks; I wasn’t sure, when I heard that, if I felt bad. Folk rock heartthrob Neil Young came to jeer at us because I’d jeered at his Harvest album in Rolling Stone. I introduced Rod Stewart even though he wasn’t really there, and hugely pissed off the club’s management when a waitress got knocked over in the resulting stampede to the corner in which I’d said he was seated.

P— and I went to Europe. My photograph appeared every week at the top of the column I wrote in the UK for the snappily entitled music paper Disc & Music Echo. In Selfridges, a quartet of teenaged girls recognized me and squealed, as though at David Cassidy. My friend Bev Bevan, earlier of The Move, introduced me to the work of Monty Python, and I nearly died laughing. We went to dinner with the Bowies, and were seen in a whole new light by the previously snooty staff of the trendy hotel in which we stayed in a room with a round bed. While P— shopped on a drizzly afternoon, I played pinball in an arcade in Soho while the latest Slade No. 1 thundered over the PA system. I thought I might be in rock and roll heaven.

Our record came out. It featured some glorious orchestral guitar arrangements, but was otherwise woeful, in no small part because of my own dreadful singing. When Rolling Stone said it was the worst music that anyone had ever made, many gleefully agreed I’d gotten what was coming to me.

I was taking a lot of speed. It made me feel really positive and confident, and then really horrible when I ran out. I kept getting famouser and famouser. The Porsche kept running and the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person continued to love me, but there could be no mistaking that there was something severely wrong with me. I got home from San Francisco, where I’d been treated like a bona fide rock star while doing radio interviews, to the stylish home in Laurel Canyon I shared with the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in person, went downstairs to the bedroom, and wept. Everything seemed so boring and futile.