There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

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  Portions of this book appeared previously in Vanity Fair magazine.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Lisa

  There goes gravity : a life in rock and roll / Lisa Robinson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-63208-6

  1. Robinson, Lisa (Music journalist) 2. Music journalists—United States—Biography. 3. Rock musicians. 4. Rock music—History and criticism. I. Title.

  ML429.R62A3 2013 2013037121

  781.66092—dc23

  [B]

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  For Fran Lebowitz

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  My first job in the music business, in 1969, was filing for a few hours every afternoon for Richard Robinson. At that time, Richard was a syndicated newspaper columnist, had a syndicated radio show, and was the assistant to Neil Bogart, the president of Buddah Records. He also hosted the all-night “graveyard” shift at WNEW-FM radio in New York City. I was, for a short time, a substitute teacher in Harlem, teaching first grade. I heard Richard on the radio late at night and thought he had a great voice and great taste in music. Despite the fact that this was the beginning of so-called “free-form” radio and the disc jockeys were supposed to be able to play whatever records they chose, the truth was, they could not. Richard was fired—and then brought back—on three separate occasions. The first time was for playing “unfamiliar” music, which, at that time, meant black music—like Otis Redding and Tina Turner. The second time he was asked to leave was when he played Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner”—deemed “unpatriotic” by the station’s executives. The final blow was when he used the words “rock and roll.” He was told in a letter he still has somewhere that “Surely your fertile mind can come up with a better phrase.” When I saw him introduce a Janis Joplin concert at Hunter College, I thought he was great looking, tracked him down, and interviewed for a part-time job. Each day after teaching school, I’d change into jeans, fake lizard boots, a raccoon fur jacket I bought at a thrift shop, and go downtown to his office in the Graybar Building next door to Grand Central Station. I earned $25 a week to do his filing. Three months after we met, I quit my $300 a week teaching job and, despite my mother’s warnings, went to work for Richard full time for $100 a week. Two months after that we were married, and remain so to this day.

  At first, with all the free albums and concert tickets, it didn’t feel like a job. It was a time when things just sort of . . . happened. There was no agenda. Nothing was planned. I had not taken any journalism classes. I had no plans to write. There were about five people in New York City who were writing about rock music then, and Richard was one of them. In 1969, he got tired of writing a weekly column for the British music weekly Disc and Music Echo, so he turned the column over to me. I didn’t think I could do it, but he said if I could talk—which I certainly could—I could write. He opened the door, I walked right through it and never stopped.

  For the first decade of my career, I certainly wouldn’t have described it as a career. It was, as Keith Richards has said about so many things, a “lucky accident.” In the 1970s, there were only a few rock publications aside from the fledgling Rolling Stone, and Richard and I wound up editing two of them: Hit Parader and, with Lenny Kaye, Rock Scene. Both Richard and I wrote for Creem magazine—he did an electronics column called “Rewire Yourself” and I wrote about the then unheard of topic of rock fashion and style. I called the column “Eleganza,” after a clothing catalogue that appeared to cater to the pimp trade. My column in Disc eventually led, two years later, to a job writing the New York column for the more prestigious British music weekly the New Musical Express. Things were just so different then. One thing after another just sort of fell into place. By 1972, there were maybe twenty-five people in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and London who were writing about rock and roll. Some people took it very seriously. Some of us—who thought it was supposed to be about fun and sex and the thing that got us out of our parents’ house and changed our lives—did not.

  *

  Being born and brought up in Manhattan automatically gave you the feeling that you were already at the center of the universe. I would never know how it felt to drive into Manhattan and see the skyline for the first time. I never felt that I had to get out of somewhere and come to New York City—I was already here. When I was a teenager, I listened to Symphony Sid’s jazz radio show on a transistor radio under the covers in bed at night. This was my introduction to Miles Davis, Horace Silver, Ahmad Jamal. It opened up a sexy, sophisticated world. I heard the hip, British monologist Lord Buckley and memorized the Lenny Bruce records that were on Phil Spector’s Philles Records label. I was way underage when I put on makeup and high heels and snuck out of my parents’ apartment on the Upper West Side to go see Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot in Greenwich Village and Anita O’Day and Stan Getz at the Village Vanguard (I probably looked ridiculous, but I was allowed in). I went to see rock and roll shows starring Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Scream-in’ Jay Hawkins at the Brooklyn Fox. So, in 1973, by the time I met Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, adorable as he was, and despite his band’s superstar status, I thought he was a bit provincial. He was, after all, from some farm in the north of England. Even the Rolling Stones, with the worldly and urbane Mick Jagger, were from England, which is, let’s face it, the size of Rhode Island. All those English boys had really bad teeth, were slightly ingenue, and were enamored of American black music—a subject I knew well. And while it’s still hard to get people to believe this, not a one of them was as witty or smart as David Johansen of the New York Dolls, who came from Staten Island.

  *

  When I was very young, I went to Loews 83rd Street movie theater every Saturday afternoon. I loved movie musicals, I loved movie magazines, and I loved anyone who was considered even slightly rebellious. I had a Marlon Brando scrapbook and one for the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe. When I first saw Elvis Presley’s black and white and pink and green self-titled album cover—the one the Clash would copy thirty yea
rs later—or saw those “Rock Around the Clock” movies at Loews—it was instant recognition. Either this hit you, or it didn’t. And, all over the world, it hit a lot of us at the same time. Hard.

  One

  It was three in the morning on July 5, 1975, and I was just falling asleep when the phone rang in my Memphis hotel room. Mick Jagger was on the line, and he was slurring his words. “Listen,” he said, “I’m with two girls and they’ve got a cute guy with them and I’m trying to get a girl for him because he’s lonesome. He’s not here right now, he’s got his own room. I just thought you might be interested.” I declined. “Well,” he said, not skipping a beat, “who should we call? He’s thirty years old and he’s not bad looking. He’s American and he just wants a little company. I’ve got the room list in front of me.” He proceeded to run down the names of all the women on that 1975 summer tour, picked someone and suggested I call her—“girl-to-girl.” I told him he should call. He said that would make him a hustler. We talked some more. He said they wouldn’t have to fuck, they could just “rap” (his word, not mine). We hung up. I went back to sleep.

  • • •

  I will always remember 1973 as the year that Eugene from Cinandre ruined my summer because he cut my hair too short. That summer, I also met Mick Jagger for the first time. It was at Nassau Coliseum, at an Eric Clapton concert. I knew Richard Cole from traveling with Led Zeppelin—he was Eric’s tour manager, and he placed me at the side of the stage. Mick was there too, and within minutes he sidled—there is no other word for it—over to me, and in a high, campy Monty Python–ish voice, said, “Jimmy Page was wearing a pink satin jacket.” This was how I knew he had read things I wrote—either in the British weekly the New Musical Express, or my “Eleganza” column in Creem magazine. To him, I said that his shoes—sequined-covered Pappagallos or, more likely, Repettos—were tacky. Later that night, after Eric’s show, Mick, Eric’s manager Robert Stigwood, Richard Cole and I hung out at the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Bar and gossipped for hours. Mostly about how Mick wouldn’t share his costume ideas with David Bowie.

  • • •

  By 1975, I had traveled with, and written about, Led Zeppelin. The New Musical Express was read by all the English musicians and, more importantly, because their children were musicians, their parents. The bands, Zeppelin especially, wanted their families to know how big they were in America. I also spent many, many nights in the winter of 1974 at CBGB’s with Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Television, writing about the scenes behind what was always incorrectly referred to as the New York punk rock scene. Having one foot in the bigtime Led Zeppelin camp and all the access and trust that had come with it, and the other foot in deep at CBGB’s, is, I am certain, what made me different as a music journalist. Also, I wasn’t a critic. I wrote gossippy columns and conducted interviews. This was somewhat of a rarity in the early 1970s when “rock journalism” was in its infancy and mostly populated by boys who had ambitions to become the next Norman Mailer.

  In 1975, Mick Jagger was concerned; the English press had called the Stones—along with the Who and the Faces—a dinosaur band. The fact that the Stones had carted Lee Radziwill, Truman Capote and Andy Warhol around the country with them on their 1972 tour didn’t help. That tour, which became known as the Stones’ “jet set” tour, positioned the band—who just four or five years prior had been considered rebels—as aging rockers. Then. While he claimed otherwise, Mick was ever-mindful of the press and public opinion. He wanted to appear in touch. Jane Rose, now Keith Richards’ longtime manager, was, at that time, working for the Stones’ tour manager Peter Rudge. She recommended to Mick that I help him navigate the rock press. Mick was determined that the 1975 Tour of the Americas—which affectionately became known as TOTA—be different. He got Giorgio Sant’Angelo to design his costumes (and indeed, costumes they were). The Broadway stage and lighting designers Jules Fisher and Robin Wagner—who had done the production for David Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” tour—helped design the band’s elaborate stage. And he stole the makeup artist Pierre Laroche away from David Bowie. In 1975, when punk was peaking, just having a makeup person on tour, unless you were Bowie or deeply involved with the fading glamrock scene, was telling.

  • • •

  In May 1975, the band pretended to spontaneously drive down six blocks of lower Fifth Avenue on a flatbed truck singing “Brown Sugar” and announced the tour. I had several meetings with Mick and Peter Rudge in Rudge’s office at 110 West 57th Street. We agreed that I would come on board as a “special press liaison,” which basically meant I would tell Mick who to talk to in the rock press, and try to pry photos out of tour photographer Annie Leibovitz to supply to the rock press. I was paid a fee, would travel with the band on their plane and stay in their hotels. “Conflict of interest” was not a concept in the rock press at that time. I could continue to file stories that summer in the NME and the various rock magazines I edited or contributed to (Hit Parader, Creem, Rock Scene). My editors at the NME were thrilled that I had this kind of access to the band.

  Before the tour started, when I interviewed Mick, he said, “There really is no reason to have women on tour, unless they’ve got a job to do. The only other reason is to fuck. Otherwise they get bored; they just sit around and moan. It would be different if they did everything for you like answer the phones, make breakfast, look after your clothes and the packing, see if the car was ready—and fuck. Sort of a combination of what [logistics director] Alan Dunn does and a beautiful chick.”

  *

  Shortly after my initial meetings with Mick and Peter, I went out to the Montauk, Long Island, compound owned by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, where the Stones lived and rehearsed before the start of the tour. It was the middle of the afternoon, and Mick—ensconced in a cabin with Ava Cherry, a former Bowie paramour—was wearing a paisley silk bathrobe. In the main house, a cook named Lisa prepared breakfast. Up to this time, I’d been in various backstages, hotel suites and recording studios—with Zeppelin and other bands—but the only band house I’d ever seen was the Stooges’ house in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1969. That place was a pigsty, with guitarist Ron Asheton’s Nazi memorabilia prominently displayed on the walls. Another feature was the blood splatter on the walls—presumably from syringes. The Stones’ Montauk house seemed spartan; big, but not luxurious. Scarves were thrown over lamps, guitars were strewn about, and The Harder They Come LP was on the turntable in the living room. Charlie Watts wandered into the kitchen, muttering how the cook was working for “this thankless lot.” Bill Wyman came in, looking uptight. No one introduced us. He held 35 millimeter slides up to the light and asked Charlie for his opinion. In Ron Wood’s bedroom, several striped suits from London’s trendy shop Mr. Freedom were hanging in the closet, and a towel over his bathroom window proclaimed: “A little love can warm up a lonely place.” The Stones might have been considered the greatest rock and roll band in the world, but the general ambience and disarray in this house resembled what I would discover in time was the norm for a group of guys on the road. There was that musty smell, a combination of patchouli or musk and cigarette smoke; half-filled glasses of alcohol, half-empty bottles of beer, dirty clothes. To this day, you can walk into any musician’s hotel room or dressing room, or be in a van or a car or a limousine or a plane and there is still that smell. It was not unlike the smell of stale cigarettes and beer in a bar around closing time at four a.m.—when closing time was four a.m. and when you could smoke in a bar.

  On that day in 1975, Ian Stewart (more about him later) hustled us all out of there—only an hour later than the original appointed time—into station wagons to get to the planes that would take us to the real rehearsals on the real stage in an airplane hangar on an Air Force base in Newburgh, New York. In the station wagon, Mick and Charlie made fun of journalists and me in particular: “Jimmy Page was wearing a pink satin suit and he was with Lonnie Mack’s wife. . . .” And then: “Do you still feel as if you are a
member of the group as much as you felt this morning when you woke up? Or do you feel that your rebellion is not the same as when you formed the group last night?” Mick, Ava and I flew up to Newburgh in a four-seater plane. Mick took over the controls for a few minutes. I asked him if he had a pilot’s license. He laughed. I was then, as I am only slightly less now, terrified of flying. At Newburgh, I got a look at the band’s lotus-petal stage for the first time. The big deal, and the reason it cost the rumored one million dollars, was that the “petals” opened to reveal the band. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Freddie Sessler was there. Freddie, who looked a bit like Harpo Marx, had been introduced to me on a Zeppelin tour two years prior as “a pencil dealer with connections.” Basically, he provided pharmaceutical cocaine to Zeppelin and the Stones, but he was really a friend of Keith’s. We eventually developed a friendship because we both loved Keith, I didn’t want any drugs from Freddie nor did I have any use for the underage girls he had hanging around, and he knew that the unspoken tradeoff for getting this sort of access was that I wasn’t going to write a drug exposé. After the rehearsal, one of the promoters asked me if I wanted a ride back to New York City. I accepted, not realizing that the “ride” was a two-seater plane. So I, with my fear of flying, got into a two-seater plane with someone I barely knew. This was what it was like to be young. Stars were all around us in the sky and it was a beautiful sight. Later I was told that the guy who had flown the plane was a notorious drunk.

  *

  In one of our first meetings at Peter Rudge’s office, discussing plans for the tour, Mick said to me, “These kids are all on downs, aren’t they? They take some quaaludes and then some more downs and smoke pot, then they take heroin and cocaine and then some Ripple wine, right? Maybe we should take all that stuff and see what we would feel like and what would entertain us.”