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.

24: Snake-Hipped and Svelte

My star kept rising. No sooner than I’d introduced David Bowie to the readers of Rolling Stone than Warners threw a big party for Faces at one of their big soundstages in Burbank. I’d reviewed their most recent album for Rolling Stone, and said, with rare accuracy, that much of it wasn’t very good. They regarded me with bruised expressions when I made my grand entrance; the very gods cowered before me! Rolling Stone invited me to write a feature article about my own aspirations to rock stardom, newly boosted by the interest of a young go-getter at an actual major label.

My band was taking up more and more of my time, and how I was enjoying it! I felt at last as though part of a gang. We rehearsed in the guitarist’s parents’ garage in West LA, or, very much more glamorously, on the A&M soundstage. We dined together at a place in Westwood where it was said that no man had ever managed to finish their gigantic seafood salad, and this decades before the obesity epidemic. I finished it and ordered dessert, and was nonetheless snake-hipped and svelte. The bass player and I chased skirts together. My egomania clouded my judgment, and I allowed one of our succession of managers to talk me into moving out from behind the drums to stage-center. I went from being a mediocre drummer to a worse lead singer, but after we played the Whisky, someone asked, not sarcastically, at least as far as I could see, if I were a professional dancer. I’d never felt more complimented in my life. But I was about to feel a great, great deal more complimented.

My No. 1 friend had gone to work for the selfsame old-school Hollywood publicist who six months before, at Elton John’s famous debut at the Troubadour, had scurried around in a huge cowboy hat screaming, “Fan-fucking-tastic!” into the face of anyone who looked vaguely like a writer. Said publicist had also come to employ P—, literally the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person, and I began inventing excuses to visit my friend at his office. I made one such visit the week that hot pants hit Hollywood. P— was wearing a pair, and I’m not sure how I lived through it, or even how — after my friend ascertained that she was commuting to work for hours from her mother’s home in Orange County — to offer her the use of my apartment while I went to New York to advise that city’s tastemakers of the glory that was Procol Harum’s new album. While in New York, I was made to feel hot stuff by Lisa Robinson, and worked up the gall, with the help of much vodka, to call P— just to shoot the breeze.

She picked me up at LAX in my Porsche when I got home, and then drove me to West Hollywood. Her bags were all packed, but when we got back to Selma Avenue, I asked her to stay, and to my astonishment she agreed. So now the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person and I were as one, and living together in über-hip Laurel Canyon, Rolling Stone was printing my little autobiography over four pages with photos by Annie Liebovitz, albeit not very good ones, the Porsche still looked really nice, and I had a small fortune in the bank. When I and P— went to Pasadena together to see Badfinger’s local debut — I no doubt smirking smugly, and in new platform boots made for me in London’s Kings Road — we schmoozed afterward with Gus Dudgeon, Elton John’s producer, but, much more important, formerly the Bonzo Dog Band’s. Spencer fucking Davis suggested we have lunch together. The world finally seemed repentant about having made me suffer so as a boy.

I continued in print to play the same character as which I’d first become famous — an acid-tongued curmudgeon with strong, usually negative, opinions about everything. The guitarist in my band noted that I wasn’t loved and respected, but feared. Gene Clark, once of The Byrds, was apparently telling a mutual acquaintance that I was doing my karma irreparable harm. But I wasn't yet a believer in karma.