Sick On You

by Andrew Matheson

  I am about to tell him that Keith Moon thinks we’re great when Ken says, “Keith Moon seemed to think you were quite good, but then again he was smashed on rum and coke and whatnot.”

  He then spends some time extolling the many virtues of his new company, Worldwide Artists: record label, publishing, films, the works. At the moment they’ve got Black Sabbath (hate ’em), the Groundhogs (hilarious), and Stray (never heard of ’em), among others, and Ken makes it clear they want to offer us a deal. My contract-signing hand begins to quiver with excitement.

  Another bottle is ordered, and this time the label is not so much as glanced at and the waiter is completely ignored. To the brim, garçon, and vite about it.

  It slowly becomes clear that we are not going to be ordering food. For once, we don’t care, though, and content ourselves with surreptitiously gnawing on the breadsticks that are poking out enticingly from a white porcelain container. We dip them in the wine, bite off the end, use the stub to illustrate a point, and dip again. It’s all very classy.

  When the third bottle is drained and our heads are filled with a few more fantastic stories, Ken sits back, runs his fingers through his immaculately tousled hair, and says, “Right, you’ve met the brains, now let’s meet the brawn.”

  What this means we have no clue, but we follow Ken out of the restaurant.

  Blinding afternoon sunlight as we walk north along beautiful, posh, rich Dover Street. Ken stops to put something in his car. Gadzooks! The man drives a purple MGB. This guy just keeps getting better.

  On we tread, until we reach number 27 and in we go, through a beautiful entryway and up a sweeping staircase to the offices of Worldwide Artists. They have the entire gorgeous floor, with vast windows overlooking Dover Street. The receptionist, Mandy, stands up and shakes our hands, says she’s heard so many good things about us. I am glad I’m still wearing my sunglasses as it enables me to ogle her rather curvaceous exterior while maintaining a gentlemanly veneer.

  Ken leads us through the busy office to the rear, where two immense white doors open into what must be the inner sanctum. We go into a large, beautifully appointed office, cluttered, yes, but with only the most important, expensive-looking clutter. A white leather sofa and matching chair face a desk the size of a modest aircraft carrier.

  And behind the aircraft-carrier desk sits a man who looks like he could bite a chunk out of an aircraft carrier and chew it like an hors d’oeuvre. He looks B-movie menacing. He looks like he very well could have been at the other end of a leash with a club, smashing a radio a couple of weeks ago at the squat. Ken introduces him as Wilf. Wilf, it turns out, is the boss.

  Wilf stands up slowly. The altitude doesn’t decrease the impression of menace one iota. He sticks an arm like a tree trunk across the desk. I shake his hand. It is a hand with tattoos. Four of the fingers that subsequently crush mine spell “LOVE,” only not that neatly. More tattoos crawl up his arm. He decided on the matching set for his left arm, though the letters on his left hand spell, and this is a surprise, “HATE.”

  Casino and I sit on the sofa, Ken sinks into the armchair and lights his four hundredth cigarette of the afternoon. And baby, this is living. This is the culmination of everything we’ve been working toward. I drink it in, head on a slow swivel, eyeballing the hideous though no doubt pricey art on the walls. This is one exciting afternoon. This is where we belong.

  Then Wilf says, in a voice you’d never, ever want to hear in your life, “Andrew. It’s Andrew, right? Andrew, take off your sunglasses.”

  As it happens I was just about to but now, for reasons that can only be associated with red wine intake overriding any basic survival instinct, I come up with this riposte: “No.” Silence.

  Ken starts to make some light comment but Wilf holds up the “HATE” hand and Ken obligingly shuts up. Wilf hasn’t taken his eyes off me. “I said take off your sunglasses.”

  “I like them on.”

  More silence. Casino doesn’t move. He stares intently at his knee. His foot taps slowly, nervously, to some music in his head. Chopin’s “Funeral March,” perhaps.

  “You like them on, do you?” Wilf’s voice goes down a decibel or two, and then a couple more, so that he’s almost whispering. “You like them fucking on, do you?”

  Funnily enough, when his voice gets quieter it doesn’t get more reassuring, as you might ordinarily think. It gets bloodcurdling. Deep in my underwear my nuts begin to shrivel like I’ve just seen a girl from Sheffield.

  Wilf says nothing. Second after eerie second ticks by. Then he slowly reaches out the “HATE” hand, switches on a desk lamp apparently equipped with a surplus Second World War antiaircraft searchlight bulb, and twists it round so that the beam is directed right at my face. I am six feet away and I can feel the heat. Even with sunglasses on I can’t see a thing other than the planet Scaldo heading straight for me. Does he keep this blinding contrivance on his desk in the slim chance that just such an occasion might one day arise? If so, well played.

  This is how the scene stays for the rest of the meeting. We chat cordially enough, and the battle of wills fights it out with the battle of won’ts. Despite it all, at the end we are told that Worldwide Artists and something with the unlikely name of Gladglen want to sign us up. Wilf comes around the desk, smiling, and crushes both of our hands. He laughs and punches me lightly but meaningfully on the shoulder. “Andrew, Andrew,” is all he says.

  Ken sees us out. When we part company he is shaking his head but smiling. He hands us an envelope and says he’ll call tomorrow.*

  Down on Dover Street, we open the envelope to find five tenners therein.

  Fifty quid? We’re on our way.

  On the way back to Mill Lane, in a taxi, I’ll have it known, we stop and pick up loads of lager, a bottle of whiskey, and chicken and chips for four. At the squat, where Lou and Brady have been anxiously awaiting our return, we scream the news at their pale, needy-urchin faces and we all begin to bounce off the walls with excitement.

  We’ve done it. The Hollywood Brats have got a record deal. And Ken Mewis, incredibly, is exactly the manager we’ve been craving. Can you believe it, he even knows the sainted Andrew Loog Oldham? This is science fiction. I hate science fiction, but what else can it be compared to? Maybe a Sal Dalí painting?

  On the spot, a unanimous decision is made that the best course of immediate action is to crank up some rock ’n’ roll and get disturbingly, irretrievably, obnoxiously drunk. This we proceed to do.

  Twenty minutes later there is a knock on the door and we freeze in terror. Brady scratches the needle across Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger. Lou timidly opens the door a crack. Turns out it’s just Zlatan the Mysterious, inquiring as to, in his words, “Why the maximum merriment?” When told, he says, “I’ve had occasion to hear you playing in the kitchen. You’re groovy, very groovy. Crack me a lager, gents, and we’ll celebrate with a couple of monster jays, featuring narcotic ingredients recently delivered from my ex-accountant, formerly of Wapping but now in exile in Bangkok.”

  Later—an hour, three minutes, I don’t know—through a cloud of blue smoke I begin to ask Zlatan about the recent visit from the bruisers with the canines. From his position, flat on my bed, staring out glassy-eyed and uncomprehendingly at the phlegm wall, he interrupts, raising a hand and waving languidly as if to brush away a moth. “Did I not tell you things would be cool?”

  “Yes, you did, but we were just . . .”

  “And things, how would you describe them?”

  “I’d describe things as, well, so far, so placid, but those dogs . . .”

  “Ah-ah-ah.” He holds up a forefinger. “Are things or are things not . . . cool?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose they are.”

  “Well, cool, man.”

  And that was that.

  I raise my can of Long Life. “Lads, here’s to Zlatan rendering the situat
ion cool.”

  We all raise our cans and toast: “To Zlatan.”

  He acknowledges the praise, drinks a long drink, then belches a long belch. Lou replies in kind, only more dramatic, and we all roll around laughing, like carpet hyenas. Finally, we recover somewhat and are all catching our breath, sighing contented sighs, when I ask Zlatan, “What is your last name, Zlatan?”

  “When?” he replies.

  “Now. What is your last name? Just curious.”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  He looks at me blearily, meaningfully. “Because it’s a mystery, innit.”

  Oh, yeah.

  * * *

  Two days later we take our remaining cash, as well as Mick’s (well, he’s in Hemel Hempstead), and, at Brady’s behest, go to this club we’ve been reading about in the music press. It’s at Hungerford Arches, beneath Charing Cross, and it’s called Global Village. Sounds like a hippy commune, I know, but despite that crippling handicap it turns out to be rather lively, with pounding music, a cinema, and maximum opportunities for posing. Also, it is jammed with attractive girls.

  Onstage tonight is a band operating under the severely daft name of Silverhead. Despite the risible handle they are getting great press. We’ve been reading about them more and more, and we wonder if they are in any way to be considered competition. The singer is called Michael Des Barres and he looks half-decent in a pinched, vulpine sort of way, but I’ve seen pictures of the rest of them and there appears to be a mustache or two in evidence and maybe even a goatee.

  They come on and yep, Des Barres looks good, and yep, a mustache and goatee pop up elsewhere. Des Barres is the real thing in terms of a front man, and he has great hair, all fluffy, bouncy, and photogenic. But not for long. One song into the set and the great hair of three minutes ago is hanging soaked like a hundred rattails clamped to his skull. I’ve never seen anybody outside of Louis Armstrong perspire this much. This guy is drenched.

  Verdict: a not bad, if sweaty, front man, an ordinary band, and naff songs. Dreck.

  Good club, though. Lots of action. We stay late and drink much.

  Two young ladies from New Jersey are kind enough to offer Brady and me lodging for the night. Wonder of wonders, they have a car to get there, too. Outside, we pass by a queue for taxis. A hundred-odd souls are hunched in the light drizzle of predawn London. Who should we spy in the middle of the line, about number 68, but none other than Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin? Imagine that. Jimmy Page, wealthy beyond wealthy and standing in the rain in a fifty-yard-long queue for a taxi outside a poxy club at three in the morning. Call yourself a rock star?

  After the Volkswagen Beetle, suicidally driven on the wrong side of the road by one of the drunk American college students, screeches to a stop in front of their pad in, of all places, Kangaroo Valley, we discover that, alas, there is only one bed. And, as everybody knows, to the singer the spoils. So the guitarist and his get the floor.

  Next morning, I don’t know what’s the matter with my guitar slinger but he looks deathly ill. He’s got a face like a haddock, talks in feeble grunts, and walks like a gimp. I immediately begin thinking of replacing him, but when we are finally sitting on the upper deck of the bus home his color seems to improve a bit. That is, until the bus stops adjacent to a butcher’s shop, and Brady catches a glimpse of today’s special, a huge tray of offal: brains and pig heads, tripe and trotters. All good stuff.

  Brady groans and then explosively pukes everywhere; people are ducking for cover and I am vehemently denying ever having met the disgusting creature. I get off at the next stop and take another bus home.

  XVII

  Life picks up speed. Coincidentally, so does Brady, twelve tabs from Zlatan, and we stay awake and whacked out of our brains for two straight days and nights, playing records, singing songs, yelling and screaming, adding to the rich tapestry of the phlegm wall, and fighting the urge to scrub the stove.

  The following day we pull it together, spruce up till we look like 1940s department-store mannequins, and go to the office to meet again with Ken Mewis. This time we bring Lou along because he doesn’t believe it when we tell him how frightening Wilf is. Five minutes into the meeting, and Lou and Wilf are jabbering away, laughing like old army buddies. I don’t get it. Too bad there isn’t a lock that needs picking so Lou can really win his heart.

  Ken wants to stick us into a studio and throw some tracks down, in one take, just to see where we are. Bring it on, oh man in a suit. So he does. Says it’s already booked.

  Gooseberry Studio, 19 Gerrard St., W1, at 1 p.m. on August 9. Right back where we were in the Dark Ages, in another life, with Chris Andrews. A tube full of Long Life and Ken leaning back in a leather chair beside the engineer at the console, as if to the mannerism born. We set up what’s left of our rubbish gear, nix the engineer’s suggestion that I go into a booth, push aside the screens he has hidden Lou behind, and let them know, through the glass, that we are ready to go.

  We can’t hear them, but we see the engineer and his tape-op speaking to Ken with earnest, imploring looks on their mugs. Ken is nodding, smiling, drinking, and waving an arm languidly in the air. These are good signs. Finally, with a slight, uncomprehending shake of his hairy little bonce, the engineer presses the talk-back and announces, “Right, then. Shall we start?”

  Start we shall, and start we do. One take, the lot of them. Just to set the tone, we kick it off with: “Kiss My Ass.” Followed by: “Nightmare,” “Southern Belles,” “Courtesan,” “I Want to Be King,” “Son of the Wizard,” “I Ain’t Got You,” “Chez Maximes,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Drowning Sorrows,” “The Boys in Blue,” and “Tiger Lily.”

  Ken seems to absolutely love every note he’s hearing. We see him laughing and bopping around the control room. Many times the engineer tries to say something to him, but he just keeps smiling, shakes his head, and sticks his hand in the engineer’s face, palm at a right angle like the Supremes when they do “Stop! In the Name of Love.” This is scarcely credible. For once, someone is standing up for us, fighting our battles.

  Afterward, I see some notes he’s made beside the track list. His handwriting is terrible, scratches like a drunk chicken wading in ink, but I see he has scrawled one star beside “Southern Belles,” two beside “Courtesan” and “I Want to Be King,” and three stars beside “Chez Maximes.”

  There is no discernible star beside the Matheson-Brady opus “Kiss My Ass.” I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that, at one point in the recording, Mr. Louis Sparks went off on a rather mad tangent.

  While the rest of us were hurtling through the coda, Lou, oblivious to the dark glares from yours truly, came out of a drum roll thumping away at an entirely different song. One could sense the panic, the dread, the sheer loss of talent as the boy fought to regain the beat. Alas, as all drummers can attest, once the beat is lost it is one hell of a slippery eel to get back. He dragged the beat but the slow must go on, so the psychotic Micmac did his best and plowed “Kiss My Ass” steadfastly through to its grim conclusion.

  In the vinyl analysis it’s no big deal. It’s a rubbish song, really.

  At the end of the session Ken hands us an envelope with another fifty nicker. What a pleasant habit this is getting to be. He does something else, too. He reaches into his leather bag and pulls out an album—it’s the New York Dolls. We step back like it’s radioactive.

  In the taxi on the way home we pass the album back and forth, checking it out microscopically. This is nerve-wracking and has certainly dulled the celebratory edge of the session. But, for all the trepidation about what awaits us inside the cover and deep in the vinyl grooves, there are positive signs.

  For a start, it is produced by Todd Rundgren. Who came up with that bright idea? What does he know about rock ’n’ roll? Rundgren has never made a rock ’n’ roll record in his life. He’s a sop
py balladeer singing sweet songs to sad girls, a self-styled “genius” hooked on layering track over track over track. Millions of harmonies, saccharine sentiments wrapped in spotlessly clean recordings; that’s Todd Rundgren.

  Give him David Cassidy to play with, someone safe. Must be Mercury Records scared stiff of a little rough stuff erupting and spilling into the tracks. Can’t have that now, can we? This does not bode well for the Dollies but it’s good for us.

  The picture on the cover, though, is the aspect that is the most encouraging. In every picture we’ve seen of these guys they’ve looked great. On the cover of this, their debut album, they just look plain ridiculous. They look like they’re commiserating backstage after placing ninth to thirteenth in America’s Hottest Transsexual Contest.

  They don’t look chic or edgy or like the look is natural to them, which is how they’ve looked in every shot we’ve ever seen of them before. Here, in black and white, beneath a stupid high-school lipstick graphic, they look like some art department’s idea of what the Dolls should look like. They’ve been around for five minutes and they’ve already caught the down escalator and descended into parody.

  The singer, who has until now made a living out of looking like Jagger’s mutant kid brother, now looks like Jagger’s elderly auntie from Palm Springs looking down the back of the sofa for a gambling chip. He’s got a perm. A perm, for Christ’s sake.

  They should have just lined up in an alley in the Bowery, handed a Kodak Instamatic to a wino, and said, “Here’s ten bucks, take some shots, buddy.” Would have been a million times better. Hey, if they’d called I would have told them.

  Back at Mill Lane, we top up on the studio suds and drop the Dolls disc onto the turntable. Six, eight, ten bars in, we’re smiling, thumbs pointing to the floorboards.

  We listen to both sides, relief growing with every track. When it’s over, the verdict is in: good band, weak songs, horrible production.

  No contest.