I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo

by Nik Cohn

  I AM STILL THE GREATEST SAYS JOHNNY ANGELO

  Despite presistent rumours of his death fifteen years ago, Johnny Angelo’s legend continues. Johnny Angelo is a rock singer, and this is his story from the beginning. As a child he is a dreamer and a solitary, a thief, a killer of birds and cats. As a man he is a god to his fans, an emperor to his cronies, a hoodlum to his enemies. Girls lie at his feet. He becomes rich. He commits murder. At the end, police shoot him down in the street.

  In a cool and highly original style Nik Cohn has written a bizarre fable for our time, capturing its sickness and horror yet staying true to its grandeur and allure.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nik Cohn is the original rock & roll writer. Arriving in London from Northern Ireland in 1964, aged 18, he covered the Swinging Sixties for The Observer, The Sunday Times, Playboy, Queen and the New York Times and he published the classic rock history Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom in 1968. Later he moved to America and wrote Tribal Rites of the Saturday Night that inspired Saturday Night Fever. His other books include Rock Dreams (with Guy Peellaert), Arfur Teenage Pinball Queen (which helped inspire the Who’s Tommy) and Yes We Have No.

  PRAISE FOR NIK COHN

  ‘A thrilling, inspirational read’ – Guardian

  ‘Set the template for a whole new style of rock journalism, informed, irreverent, passionate and polemical’ – Choice Magazine

  ‘The book to read if you want to get some idea of the original primal energy of pop music. Loads of unfounded, biased assertions that almost always turn out to be right. Absolutely essential’ – Jarvis Cocker, Guardian

  ‘Cohn was the first writer authentically to capture the raucous vitality of pop music’ – Sunday Telegraph

  to Elvis and Jesse,

  the Presley twins; and

  Franny Mae Lipton

  To Jill

  Introduction

  I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo was my second novel, written when I was nineteen and published at twenty-one. It was my attempt to create a rock ‘n’ roll myth, raw and wild and over the top, inspired in large part by meeting P J Proby.

  Proby, for those who weren’t around in 1965, was a big, swaggering Texan who burst on the British pop scene like John Wayne storming Iwo Jima – if you can imagine the Duke in a blue velvet boiler suit with silver buckles on his shoes and an 18th Century page-boy bob. For a brief spell, he was all the rage, but his prodigious gifts as a singer and showman were outweighed by an even greater gift for self-sabotage, and he quickly imploded.

  The first time we met, he was still riding high. I was then covering the pop scene for The Observer and went to interview him at a hotel near Regent’s Park. It was a sunny afternoon outdoors but the curtains of the suite were drawn and Proby sat hunched in semi-darkness, wearing only sky-blue knickers and a grubby T-shirt, as he downed bourbon and coke by the tumblerful. Publicists and other flunkies bumbled about, trying to pump up the master’s spirits, but he wasn’t having any. All the world was against him, he claimed. He was surrounded by back-stabbers and conspirators. Nobody saw his true greatness, or treated him with due reverence. ‘I am an artist and should be exempt from bullshit,’ he said.

  All through the afternoon he talked and talked, while I sat scribbling at his feet. He told epic tales of childhood traumas, of Hollywood nights and cutting demos for Elvis, of crazed drunken orgies, of cheating women and thieving women and women who cut up his heart for sport. Eventually, the stories blurred one into another, their twists and turns so byzantine, their language both so filthy and so grandiose, that in the end I lost track of them, and nothing was left but the sound of his bourbon-soaked Texas drawl.

  I’d never met anyone like him. The darkened room, the obscenity, the madness – Proby scared me quite a bit but thrilled me even more. By the time I stumbled back onto the street, and daylight, I knew I’d been handed the bones of a book.

  That isn’t to say that Johnny Angelo is simply P J Proby with a few cosmetic details changed. What Proby provided was a springboard. The rest was all my own imagining.

  I became obsessed with the notion of rock stars as self-made gods. Reinvention, a word that’s become so cheapened it now covers anything from spiritual armageddon to getting a nose job, was still comparatively fresh then. The great transforming power of rock, I saw, was to let you throw off the identity you were born with, whatever drab and gutless existence was meant to lie in store, and make yourself into anything you had the nerve to conceive. Thus Elvis, white-trash mamma’s boy, curled his lip and swivelled his hips, and bingo! became a messiah. Thus Phil Spector, born to have sand kicked in his face, the class wimp with the bad skin and worse hair, became a teen millionaire. Thus John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, and, in the years yet to come, David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Boy George, Prince. Thus P J Proby. And, of course, Johnny Angelo.

  Truth be told, I’d have killed to possess the same power myself. Just grant me five minutes of heroic madness, down on my knees in a blue-velvet jumpsuit, with the bass pumping and trumpets braying and all the young girls screaming, melting in puddles at my feet, and I would have sworn off writing in a heartbeat. But no. The closest I could get was to sit in my North London bedsit with a toilet that didn’t flush and a damp stain the shape of Winston Churchill’s profile on the ceiling above my head, and pound out I Am Still The Greatest.

  At root, the book was an act of vengeance – against the world and its unfairness, but even more against myself. It’s filled with narcissistic self-loathing, a revelling in excess for excess’s sake. When it was first published, some critics called it sick, and I took this as high praise.

  ‘Sick’ was not the only brickbat thrown. Rock wasn’t generally regarded as a fit subject for a serious novel in 1967 and I Am Still The Greatest got thoroughly trashed by the mainstream. At the same time, it attracted an underground following, and more than its fair share of imitators.

  This influence has never died out; on the contrary, it has grown with time. Over the years, the virgin turf that Johnny Angelo staked out has been worked and reworked, in a slew of other novels, as well as concept albums and films. Quite a few stinkers have resulted, but I’ve mostly felt flattered anyway.

  The homage that would have meant most to Johnny himself, though, didn’t come to my attention till a couple of years ago, when I happened into a huddled little bookshop in Westport, County Mayo. On the top shelf, safely out of reach of children, was a small selection of porn. A row of paperbacks with raunchy covers leered down at me. Their author? Johnny Angelo.

  Nik Cohn, 2003

  PART ONE

  The Wall

  At the age of four, Johnny owned a red suit, a bright red suit. It had tight red trousers that tapered gently to the ankle, and a chunky-cut jacket, low-hung to below the waist, which was given added style by its bulky shoulder-padding. Attached was a matching red hood and, on top of this hood, there was a brilliant white pompom.

  Again, the whiteness of the pompom was echoed by a white scarf, twirled once, twirled twice around his neck and then slung casually over his left shoulder to trail half way down his back.

  At the far end of his mother’s back yard, there was a high brick wall, ten foot high by thirty foot long with a thickness of nine inches across the top. It was a crumbling and weatherbeaten wall. And one day Johnny did a catwalk on top of it.

  He climbed the wall in his red suit. He climbed it painfully, by centimetres and millimetres, inching up and falling back again, crawling up it by his fingertips. Twice he fell back to the bottom again. On the third attempt, he made it.

/>   His head appeared over the top, the shrewd fat face of a baby, puckered with concentration and framed by the big red hood with the white pompom.

  It was a very windy day. His mother was hanging out washing in the yard below, sheets and blankets that were caught by the wind and billowed up in her face. And the wind blew grit in Johnny’s eyes, but he pulled himself up by his shoulders, until first his left knee and then his right were wedged solidly on top of the wall. Then he stood up and dusted himself.

  He looked around. He had never been so high in his life. His mother was working in the yard below and Johnny shot her down with his forefinger. Then he did the catwalk.

  His knees were stiff and his back was straight, his head was held high, his eyes looked straight ahead. His red suit shone.

  He marched from one end of the wall to the other, then back again, then back once more. He marched stiffly, in the style of the Nazis, his leg held rigid at knee and hip. His white scarf billowed behind him in the wind.

  Mrs Canning from 23 was the first to see him. She was washing her windows and she saw him on the wall, a child aged four, fat and squat, very solemn. She threw up her window and yelled at him. ‘Johnny! Johnny! Come down off that wall!’

  Johnny took no notice. He turned once more at the end of the wall and began the slow march back. His mother looked up and saw him. Then everyone knew and windows were raised all along the street. Come down, Johnny, come down. Come down off that wall. But Johnny didn’t.

  He kept on walking still. Once his foot slipped, a brick broke from the wall and fell and split in two. Johnny Angelo marched from one end of the wall to the other in his bright red suit. He looked tiny and he had a very long way to fall. His mother began to weep.

  Then Mr Stein from 34 came down in his shirtsleeves and tried to climb the wall. He was too heavy, he couldn’t make it. Then the other people arrived and stood in the yard, shouting instructions. And Johnny walked above their heads and wouldn’t come down.

  They stood in clusters and watched him. The whole street was awake. A ladder was placed against the wall and Mr Parkes from 8 began to ascend. But the wood was rotten, a rung gave way and Mr Parkes fell heavily, turning his ankle.

  Johnny Angelo wasn’t reachable.

  At the age of four, he walked the wall and everyone watched. His white scarf was whipped by the wind, his red suit gleamed and, when he was bored, he swung his legs over the side, glanced once at the crowd below and shinned down to the ground.

  Then they all went home to tea.

  The Attic

  Mrs Angelo was forty-one years of age. She was thin and tired and grey-faced. She coughed in the mornings and gasped for breath and stopped to hold her side halfway up a flight of stairs. Johnny Angelo didn’t like her: she smelled of exhaustion.

  She wore a white housecoat that was stained to grey and brown. It was frayed at the hem and almost worn through at the elbow. She wore it in the kitchen when she read the paper. She was wearing it in the morning when Johnny went out to school and she was still wearing it when he came home in the late afternoon.

  Her home fell into disrepair. There was a front room and a back room. The back room was the centre of everything. It was the kitchen and the washroom and the dining-room. Johnny slept in it with his two sisters while his mother and his father slept in the front room, which was the best room. Then there was the back yard and there was also an attic, where Johnny Angelo was alone.

  When he was six, he began to be disgusted.

  The brown paint peeled off the back room walls and nothing was done to put it right. Johnny was ashamed to return from school. The beds weren’t made, the sink was stacked with dirty washing, the drains were blocked. There was a sad sick smell everywhere.

  His father was a silent man who worked in the docks. He used to spend all his spare time in his allotment and not come home until dark. Then he sat in an armchair and didn’t speak.

  Johnny’s mother woke up coughing. He heard her scuffle in the front room, gasping for breath. When she came through into the back room, her flesh was grey and her hair hung all in rats’ tails about her neck. She lit a cigarette. The milkman knocked on the door, his mother turned a blank face towards the noise. The tap was running. Then Johnny Angelo rolled over and turned against the wall.

  The same thing, day after day. The exact same faces and expressions, the same walls – Johnny Angelo was bored and he walked the wall in his bright red suit.

  He was sent to bed at seven.

  His sisters, who were older, played card games on the kitchen table. Johnny lay in his bed, pretending to be asleep, but his eyes were open.

  Inside the front room, his mother was talking to his father but his father didn’t reply. The door was closed: light came through the cracks.

  Each time a card hit the table, there was a slapping sound. Johnny Angelo waited for it. Five seconds passed and a card hit, slap. Then the two sisters watched each other across the table and Johnny waited. In between each slap, there was a silence and then another card hit, slap, and then another, slap, and the sisters watched each other and there was silence and Johnny watched from beneath the bedclothes.

  Then his sisters saw him and were angry: ‘Johnny, go to sleep.’

  ‘Johnny, you are watching.’

  ‘Johnny, I will tell.’

  At the age of six, that’s when Johnny Angelo retreated to the attic upstairs.

  It was dirty, dank and damp, ten foot by seven. The roof slanted in on him and the attic was filled with discards of every description, with thrown-out clothes and books and broken toys. Rain came in through the roof, the skylight rattled in its frame. Everything smelled of dust and Johnny sat cross-legged on the floor, counting. This was his personal property.

  He climbed up to his attic by rope ladder and drew it up behind him. He drilled a peephole in the trapdoor and squatted on the attic floor, his eye to the hole, watching.

  He saw the people who came to visit. He heard his mother coughing, he knew his father was sitting in the armchair. Then he watched his sisters playing cards, he watched the cards slap on the table and he heard his sisters singing.

  His mother shouted when his dinner was cooked. Johnny, come and eat. Come down. But Johnny stayed where he was and didn’t come down.

  He turned into a jackdaw.

  He stole anything that he came across and hoarded it in his attic. Books, caps, football boots. Toy cars, comics, badges, popcorn, spanners, socks and saucepans. Each item sorted and catalogued, as follows: one dumdum thirty-eight; one cowboy hat; three spotted handkerchiefs; one hundred bangbang caps; one Dan Dare mask, flawed.

  He filed everything, stored them in order, then gloated on them in the secrecy of his attic. What did he want? He wanted more.

  In particular, he wanted turnip watches. Big flat turnips with umpteen hands. When he opened them up, it was like dissecting a frog, there was so much to notice, to study and compare. Hands that turned fast and hands that turned slowly, the ticking of engines, the whirring of motors. And the miniscule cogs that interwove that twined and drew apart, over and over. Then he closed them up again and the fronts were smooth and smug, very fat and it was a comforting thing, a turnip, to jiggle in his hand. To look at in the attic. To keep as a pet.

  When he had collected twenty watches, Johnny Angelo took them all to pieces and, using the very best parts of each, he manufactured a turnip of his own design. It had five hands and they all went round at different speeds. They kept their own time, they moved in private cycles, 11 or 18 or 29 hours to their day.

  In this style, Johnny made his speeds the way he wanted them, he retreated inside a secret place and, when he was eight years old, he went thieving in the market.

  He was tall for his age, pretty and he had soft gold hair that fell across his eyes. His eyes were big and black. He fluttered his lashes, bit his lip and old gentlemen adored
him.

  In the Sunday morning markets, he cruised. Fruit markets and flower markets and fish markets. There were winkles and eels and cockles and whelks. Canaries and mockingbirds and nightingales. Fields of yellow silk and the stalls all thrown together in a heap, everything mingled, where the market flowed on like a river. Then Johnny Angelo turned around and turnips winked at him from everywhere he looked, sitting all snug inside their pockets. His hand snaked out and plucked them one by one. Round and smooth and sleek and warm, they nestled like white mice in the palm of his hand.

  Back inside his attic, he had a mirror in a gilded frame. He set it up against the slanting roof, jammed between the ceiling and the floor. Then he studied himself.

  The skylight rattled in its sockets, rats skittered in the walls. And Johnny Angelo had a black Gladstone bag, inside which there jingled a dozen assorted turnips of varying description.

  For instance, he selected a golden watch with silver engravings and he held it flat in his right hand. He smiled in the mirror, he frowned, he winked. Or he chose a heavy silver turnip with a false compartment for photographs and a sepia snapshot of a man with curled moustaches, then he placed it in his breast pocket so that the winder just peeped out coyly over the top. He looked soulful. He turned down the corners of his mouth and he drooped his nostrils. He sat cross-legged and watched himself. His mother was calling him for tea. He sat with his back to the mirror and sneaked glances at himself over his shoulder. He had golden hair and golden flesh: he was considered beautiful. He had many watches all laid out in a row.

  His tea was burned. The back room was filled with smoke and the windows were steamed over. Johnny’s father sat in the armchair and didn’t speak. This man had worked in the docks for twenty-eight years. When he reached retiring age, he would be given a silver turnip watch.