Read Online Apathy for the Devil by Nick Kent - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nick Kent
Tags: Non-Fiction
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empty ‘subversive’ ranting and hard-core pornography. International Times , its sister publication, was struggling on, still baying for revolution, still trying to stick it to the man - but fewer and fewer hirsute young Brits were laying down their hard-come-by shillings and pence to hearken to the call.
The same was true of Frendz . It had begun life in 1969 as Friends of Rolling Stone - a London-based outgrowth of the seminal San Francisco fortnightly - but then Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone ’s editor and owner, had quickly grown dissatisfied with their efforts and cut off all funding; finding new backers, the original editorial team persevered into the seventies, retitling their project Frendz and throwing open their doors to any drug-diminished dissident or street-dwelling nutcase who wished to contribute. As a result,
the journal had a short turbulent history that’s best evoked in the printed reminiscences of those who manned the staff, edited together in the final section of Jonathon Green’s illuminating oral history of the sixties counter-culture Days in the Life . In the book there’s an unforgettable description of a female acid casualty who haunted the office whilst dragging an old mattress behind her. She’d vanished by the time I turned up, I’m happy to say. I couldn’t have handled her: there were already more than enough LSD-impaired individuals flocking around the premises for me to contend with. Syd Barrett even appeared one day - his last group Stars was possibly going to be managed by Frendz ’s ersatz accountant, a fellow in a grimy white denim suit and satanic goatee called Dick - and stared like a lost dog at anyone attempting to communicate with him. He looked in a bad way - but frankly no worse than any of the other space-cases littering the room.
Frendz had one big trump card at this precise epoch: the unquestioning support and unstinting patronage of Hawkwind. The Ladbroke Grove-based self-styled space rockers had lately been promoted to the lofty position of resident Pied Pipers for the district’s great unwashed. You’d see them everywhere - under the Westway on top of a mud-caked pick-up truck bashing out one of their endless space jams for free to a gaggle of saucer-eyed onlookers or striding around the streets purposefully in a swirl of hair, denim and cheap rococo jewellery. Most of all, I’d see them in the office of Frendz as they tended to use the premises for their own haphazard business purposes. Whenever they had a gig to play - which was practically every evening - they’d congregate there throughout the afternoon and the room would duly become transformed into an ongoing scene from a Cheech and
Chong movie with pot-smoke billowing from every corner and high-spirited badinage spouting forth from every pair of parched lips in the immediate vicinity.
As a musical collective, Hawkwind were closer in sound and spirit to a small army of psychedelic buskers than anything that you could conceivably refer to as ‘virtuoso-driven’. In fact, several of the original members had actually started out as buskers or street entertainers and evidently hadn’t felt the urge to improve on their instrumental techniques when they chose to go electric. This made them a somewhat unpredictable commodity. You never knew exactly what would happen when you booked the band for a show. I’d first seen them in a club in Crawley in mid-1971; only three members had turned up to perform. The audience that night were treated to Hawkwind’s very own stripped-down version of ‘Jazz Odyssey’. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall backstage when they tried to get their fee from the promoter afterwards. But by early 1972 they’d grown to twice that number and seemed to be adding new recruits by the month.
Dave Brock was their guitarist, tune-smith and - sort of - leader; he seemed somewhat older and grumpier than his colleagues and suffered from an acute haemorrhoid condition that the rest of
The same was true of Frendz . It had begun life in 1969 as Friends of Rolling Stone - a London-based outgrowth of the seminal San Francisco fortnightly - but then Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone ’s editor and owner, had quickly grown dissatisfied with their efforts and cut off all funding; finding new backers, the original editorial team persevered into the seventies, retitling their project Frendz and throwing open their doors to any drug-diminished dissident or street-dwelling nutcase who wished to contribute. As a result,
the journal had a short turbulent history that’s best evoked in the printed reminiscences of those who manned the staff, edited together in the final section of Jonathon Green’s illuminating oral history of the sixties counter-culture Days in the Life . In the book there’s an unforgettable description of a female acid casualty who haunted the office whilst dragging an old mattress behind her. She’d vanished by the time I turned up, I’m happy to say. I couldn’t have handled her: there were already more than enough LSD-impaired individuals flocking around the premises for me to contend with. Syd Barrett even appeared one day - his last group Stars was possibly going to be managed by Frendz ’s ersatz accountant, a fellow in a grimy white denim suit and satanic goatee called Dick - and stared like a lost dog at anyone attempting to communicate with him. He looked in a bad way - but frankly no worse than any of the other space-cases littering the room.
Frendz had one big trump card at this precise epoch: the unquestioning support and unstinting patronage of Hawkwind. The Ladbroke Grove-based self-styled space rockers had lately been promoted to the lofty position of resident Pied Pipers for the district’s great unwashed. You’d see them everywhere - under the Westway on top of a mud-caked pick-up truck bashing out one of their endless space jams for free to a gaggle of saucer-eyed onlookers or striding around the streets purposefully in a swirl of hair, denim and cheap rococo jewellery. Most of all, I’d see them in the office of Frendz as they tended to use the premises for their own haphazard business purposes. Whenever they had a gig to play - which was practically every evening - they’d congregate there throughout the afternoon and the room would duly become transformed into an ongoing scene from a Cheech and
Chong movie with pot-smoke billowing from every corner and high-spirited badinage spouting forth from every pair of parched lips in the immediate vicinity.
As a musical collective, Hawkwind were closer in sound and spirit to a small army of psychedelic buskers than anything that you could conceivably refer to as ‘virtuoso-driven’. In fact, several of the original members had actually started out as buskers or street entertainers and evidently hadn’t felt the urge to improve on their instrumental techniques when they chose to go electric. This made them a somewhat unpredictable commodity. You never knew exactly what would happen when you booked the band for a show. I’d first seen them in a club in Crawley in mid-1971; only three members had turned up to perform. The audience that night were treated to Hawkwind’s very own stripped-down version of ‘Jazz Odyssey’. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall backstage when they tried to get their fee from the promoter afterwards. But by early 1972 they’d grown to twice that number and seemed to be adding new recruits by the month.
Dave Brock was their guitarist, tune-smith and - sort of - leader; he seemed somewhat older and grumpier than his colleagues and suffered from an acute haemorrhoid condition that the rest of
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