And the music being released that year was often outstandingly good. It was Tamla Motown’s last golden year for example - starting with the Jackson 5’s irresistible ‘The Love You Save’ and building to Marvin Gaye’s transcendent ‘What’s Going On’ - and you’d hear these singles constantly blaring out of transistor radios in public places, boldly lifting the spirits of the nation. On the white side of the tracks Rod Stewart - the rooster-haired, dandy-dressing Sam Cooke soundalike who’d left Jeff Beck’s employment at the turn of the last decade to join the remnants
of the Small Faces as their resident singer - was on constant rotation in pub jukeboxes throughout the country with his first-ever hit recording, ‘Maggie May’, a bitter-sweet smoky-sounding rumination on the perils of falling in love with an elderly prostitute. Everybody had mad love for the man sometimes referred to as Rod the Mod that year: rock critics swooned at the sound of his gritty self-deprecating voice, student drinkers were in seventh heaven over his habitual public displays of boozy camaraderie with the Faces whilst teenage girls were particularly smitten by his big-nosed cock-of-the-walk charm and tight satin trousers.
Another former sixties London ‘face’ making bold inroads into the mainstream pop landscape of the early seventies was a brash little hustler who called himself Marc Bolan. Three years earlier, Bolan could have been found sitting cross-legged on the wooden stage of any self-respecting UK hippie venue, strumming a cheap acoustic guitar and warbling arcane pseudo-Tolkien gobbledegook whilst an extremely stoned individual played bongos haphazardly alongside him. This quaint spectacle were known as Tyrannosaurus Rex and they quickly came to enjoy the patronage of several key underground taste-makers, most notably John Peel, who played their records ceaselessly on his Radio One broadcast and even contributed some dubious spoken-word snippets to one of their early albums.
But John Peel couldn’t help Bolan achieve what he really wanted, which were big hit records and a shot at Elvis-like mega-rock superstardom. So ‘the bopping elf’ - as he was sometimes known - rudely brushed aside his DJ champion, sacked the stoned bongo player (who called himself Steve Peregrine Took), bought an electric guitar and started shaping his gauche, nonsensical lyrics around rudimentary riffs archly filched from old fifties
vintage rock chestnuts like Chuck Berry’s ‘Little Queenie’ and Eddie Cochran’s ‘C’mon Everybody’. His ‘Queenie’ rewrite - entitled ‘Get It On’ - became one of ’71’s national pop anthems and he and his new electric ensemble now known as T.Rex were suddenly on a serious roll that year with a succession of chart-topping singles and a hit album called
Electric Warrior
. At first Bolan seemed like a breath of fresh air: a new breed of rock star - haughty, androgynous and glamour-fixated - who was unapologetic about his thirst for fame and utter self-fixation. He was the first to cut loose from the late-sixties notion that rock was one big sharing, caring community where musicians and audience members stood together on equal footing. Bolan was more interested in creating an in-concert ambience that separated the two entities into ‘the superstar’ and his ‘slaves’. T.Rex concerts in 1971 were actually the first public manifestation of the seventies ‘me decade’ consciousness in action. Bolan would primp and pose around the stage like a narcissistic guitar-strumming girl in front of a giant full-length mirror whilst his mostly teenage female fans would scream ‘Me! Me! Me!’ back at him hysterically from the stalls. Certainly it was a shallow and sometimes unhealthy spectacle but infinitely more entertaining than having to sit through yet another twenty-minute-long drum solo. Prog rock’s halcyon days were suddenly numbered. The kids wanted vanity instead of virtuosity and Bolan was ideally suited to spearhead the new sea change - at least until his nemesis David Bowie swept in and stole his audience the following year.
Stewart, Bolan and Bowie were all flashily attired young fops who’d already tried to become superstars in the sixties only to languish in the musical margins of the decade. Their early failures had simply strengthened their resolve to make their mark on a
new era. A similar case was Cat Stevens; in 1967 Stevens had enjoyed two UK pop hit singles - ‘I Love My Dog’ and ‘Matthew and Son’ which he’d written and recorded whilst still in his late teens. Ill health then dogged him for the rest of the decade and he fell off the pop radar for a while. But at the very outset of the seventies he bounced back as a bedroom mystic troubadour hippie Rod McKuen and by 1971 - when he had two new albums out,
Tea for the Tillerman
and
Teaser and the Firecat
- he’d become the new Messiah of the sensitivity set.
In early October I moved in to a dormitory overlooking Regent’s Park, where Bedford College was actually located. The single room I occupied there became my new living quarters and my first home away from my parents’ hearth. A month earlier I’d had my heart broken for the very first time: Joanne had chucked me. My first reaction was to feel like a victim in some maudlin country song about small-town cheating hearts but fortunately I didn’t have the time or circumstances to mope too much. After all, I was one of maybe only three males living in a building with twenty-seven females, many of whom were soon inviting me into their rooms to get better acquainted.
That’s when I experienced first-hand the hold Cat Stevens then had on young middle-class women throughout the British Isles. Practically all my female fellow students were head-over-heels in love with the guy and played his albums as though their lives depended on it. They were mostly nice girls from the provinces with lank hair and long skirts who were adjusting to their arrival in wicked old London by immersing themselves day and night in Cat Stevens’s soothing airy-fairy blather until his discs became their own personal comfort zones. Sometimes their record-listening habits would stretch to superior musings like
Joni Mitchell’s ‘River’ or anything by Leonard Cohen but they’d always return to the Cat-man piously proclaiming morning had broken. I couldn’t stand it. His music was so drippy and saccharine it made my teeth ache. I quickly developed an irrational hatred of the man, which only intensified the following year when I started knowing several bona fide rock groupies in the biblical sense and all these women turned out to be dating Cat Stevens at the same time. One of them even phoned him up when we were together to tell him what she was up to. Now, of course, Cat Stevens is internationally known as a devout Muslim who left the lust-filled music industry to dedicate his life to his strict religious beliefs but back in the day the
Tea for the Tillerman
man was getting more pussy than Frank Sinatra.
Talking of pussy, I actually lost my virginity at the end of my first week there. Before that, I’d engaged in what can only be described as tentative oral sex but I’d never been inside a woman. I seem to recall being worried about actual penetration because so many of my school-going cronies had gotten their girlfriends pregnant and been prematurely forced into matrimony and a dead-end provincial job. But I’d finally escaped that sorry fate and was now free to make up for lost time and fumbled opportunities. A pretty, moon-faced Welsh girl named Ann - one of my student co-tenants at the dorm - latched on to me and wasted no time in inviting me to share her bed. God bless you, Ann, if you happen to read this. You set me free to roam freely in the world of adult pleasure and promiscuity-a great place to take up squatter’s rights in when you’re still only nineteen. I received a better life education from being in your carnal caress than I ever did from attending any lectures.
The only problem I had as a student was the actual course I’d
enrolled in: linguistics, or the study of the English language. For some reason I’d envisioned reading and discussing mostly modern literature and so was deeply underwhelmed when I discovered I had to decipher the original texts of Geoffrey Chaucer instead. Chaucer is rightly renowned as one of England’s first book-writers but that doesn’t automatically mean he’s one of the best too. His original
Canterbury Tales
is like a bad
Carry On
script written by a halfwit and having to translate it into a modern-language idiom was a task I couldn’t work up the remotest inkling of a desire to pursue. When we weren’t focusing on Chaucer’s silly texts, we were getting bombarded by lecturers hopelessly in thrall to the ancient words and thoughts of my old pal John Milton. One old biddy who taught us would even occasionally break down and weep when discussing his timeless magnificence. Meanwhile, I was weeping invisible tears of utter stultifying boredom.
Soon enough I stopped turning up to these lectures altogether and spent my time instead furtively exploring current London-based culture. The city had some great live venues like Finsbury Park’s Rainbow Theatre and Camden Town’s Roundhouse: Sunday afternoons at the latter were a real poseur’s paradise. The artsy cinemas had special late-night showings that were always instructive to attend and the hip bookshops regularly put on literary happenings and poetry readings: I saw Patti Smith boldly reciting some early texts of hers without the aid of musical accompaniment - her first-ever public performance in Europe, I believe - that winter to an audience of no more than fifteen people. I knew there and then she’d go on to become one of the decade’s creative players. I’d already been impressed by her work because her poetry had lately been published in a Michigan-based
periodical called
Creem
which you could only buy here in the UK from one source: Camden Town’s Compendium bookshop. One issue I bought that year featured a review by staff writer Dave Marsh of a Question Mark and the Mysterians reunion concert in which the term ‘punk rock’ was first coined. A new genre was making its first tottering baby steps courtesy of the international rock press.
Meanwhile,
Creem
’s rival
Rolling Stone
was going from strength to strength - like its namesakes, the journal enjoyed its all-time creative peak throughout 1971. That year, Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal gonzo screed
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
got published in its pages, months before it appeared in book form. John Lennon laid his soul bare to editor Jann Wenner in an extraordinary two-part interview. A freelancer named Grover Lewis - assigned to cover the Allman Bros. on a draining US tour - almost got beaten up by the group and retaliated by writing a wonderfully observed warts-and-all exposé of their charmless lives and nasty habits. And another freelancer, Tom Nolan, turned in a mesmerising extra-length feature on Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, the first article ever to pull back the curtain on the madness and dysfunctionalism that reigned behind their rugged all-American image. This was new journalism at its very best. The writers weren’t blandly observing their subjects from a respectful distance any more, they were right there in the scrum as wilful participants soaking up the essence and then channelling it into an art form of their own. That’s exactly where I wanted to be. That’s exactly what I wanted to do.
It wouldn’t be long now. I could feel it in my bones. Being back in London had started a fire in me. The city was mine again - and it owed me a living. Destiny would take care of the rest.
1972
It was in January of 1972 that my future destiny as the Zeitgeist-surfing dark prince of seventies rock journalism actually started to experience lift-off. The year began inauspiciously enough. I returned to my student digs in Regent’s Park in readiness for a new term at university only to discover I’d arrived several days too soon and everything was still boarded up. I decided to hitch-hike up to scenic Barnsley deep in the northernmost bowels of England on the off-chance that I’d encounter two friends, Nigel Good and Chris Roddick, who’d lately moved up there to work on an underground paper called - if memory serves -
Styng
. At 8 a.m. one grey January morning I stood at the North London entrance to the M1 motorway with my thumb outstretched. Five hours later, a large articulated lorry and its obliging driver had deposited me in Barnsley town centre. There was only one drawback: I had no address or phone number for the people I was searching for. Not to worry, though: long-haired youths were few and far between in this neck of the woods so I just had to describe their appearance to some locals congregated in a market square and they gave me exact directions. ‘Try the nearest pub’ was their advice, and of course they were right. It was a joyous reunion. My pals couldn’t believe I’d temporarily abandoned swinging London to spend time in their sleepy little backwater. And I was
just happy to not be spending the night alone sleeping in a bus shelter.
In due course they took me back to their communal homestead - a two-storey house with minimal furniture and no central heating - and I got to meet the rest of the Barnsley counter-culture. There were only five conscripts at this juncture - Nigel, Chris, a fellow called Roger Hutchinson who was very much the man in charge, his pal, a bespectacled youth whose name now escapes me, and his pal’s girlfriend - so it was hardly a thriving community; but they approached their role as rabble-rousers to the drowsy North with great zeal and commitment. Partly, this commitment involved publishing from time to time new issues of their broadsheet stuffed with features detailing the latest conspiracy theories and calling for a full-blown social revolution. Mostly, though, it involved sitting around a smouldering log fire, smoking copious amounts of pot and passionately voicing their drug-drenched dreams for the future. In this regard, we were very much kindred spirits. Well-read, streetwise druggies with a vague work ethic were my kind of people, I was quickly discovering.
I only spent some forty-eight hours in their midst but those hours would prove to be deeply significant ones for me personally. I got to take speed for the first time-a black bomber - and felt my brain suddenly rushing through my skull like a locomotive train ablaze with thought. Twenty-four eye-popping hours later, the comedown began, leaving me distinctly drained and disorientated, and yet I had no regrets. The drug had freed up something in my cerebellum and offered me a more intense way of perceiving the world. It was an experience I was determined to try again at the earliest opportunity.