Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon (32 page)

Read Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Online

Authors: Pamela Des Barres

During the first week of September Janis and the band checked into the notorious rock-and-roll Landmark Hotel in Hollywood for the
Pearl
sessions at Sunset Sound Studios. An ugly stucco building on Franklin Avenue, the Landmark catered to a questionable clientele. Several of my all-girl freak band, the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), lived there for a while. So did Alice
Cooper. Painted sunburst orange and bear brown, the lobby featured psychedelic swirls on the walls and a very tolerant attitude. The hotel’s manager, Jack Hagy, said, “It was Janis’s kind of place.”
A few weeks earlier Janis had met twenty-one-year-old Seth Morgan and was falling hard for the dark, cocky, intelligent Berkeley student. His brash self-confidence enabled Seth to deal with Janis/Pearl’s superstar status, and since he came from an affluent family, for once Janis didn’t feel she was being used. She encouraged him to stay in school, thinking it would be a kick to share her life with a college graduate. Other than a few temper flare-ups, they had been living a fairly quiet life in Larkspur, reading the morning papers over coffee, strolling through the woods. She announced that she would limit her touring, maybe even get pregnant. Janis had even cut back on her drinking, and the couple were talking about a wedding at sea when she left for the sessions in L.A. The plan was for Seth to join her at the Landmark on the weekends.
When Seth turned up in L.A., Janis was wrapped up with Paul Rothchild, listening to tapes and choosing songs for the album. Seth felt like an outsider and didn’t spend as much time with Janis as she would have liked. She wanted total adoration from Seth, but nobody had ever been able to give Janis the attention she demanded. When she discovered that Peggy Caserta was also staying at the Landmark—
and
still addicted to heroin—Janis was irate, insisting that Peggy find another hotel. But it wasn’t long before Janis was doing dope with Peggy. She had been clean for five months this time, and when she got back on the needle, Janis explained it away by saying she couldn’t drink and get to the studio on time. She said she needed to mellow out after a session and would stop shooting dope when the album was finished, no problem. She told a friend she shot junk again just to see if she wanted to do it anymore.
Janis started out buying only fifty dollars’ worth at a time but was swiftly heading back into the trap. She had been back on heroin for a week when Jimi Hendrix died. To Peggy she said, “It just decreases my chances. Two rock stars can’t die in the same year.” To her publicist, Myra, Janis reflected, “I wonder what they’ll say about
me
after I die.”
Janis had been getting herself a tan at the Landmark pool and had blond streaks woven into her hair. She visited her lawyer, who was drawing up a prenuptial agreement for her marriage to Seth, and signed her revised will: Half of her estate would go to her parents, the other half to her siblings. She allocated twenty-five hundred dollars so that her friends could have a party when she died, and before she left, Janis made her lawyer promise there would be a big party.
The recording was going well, there were high hopes for
Pearl,
but Seth wasn’t around enough and Janis was desperately lonely. He was supposed to arrive in L.A. on Saturday, October 3, but there had been a heated argument on
the phone and he said he would be there on Sunday. Saturday night Janis listened to the instrumental track for “Buried Alive in the Blues,” looking forward to singing the vocal the next day. Then she stopped at Barney’s Beanery for a couple of screwdrivers and at twelve-thirty was back at the Landmark, alone in her room.
Earlier that day Janis had bought a supply of heroin from her regular dealer. She only bought from this particular guy because he was always careful to have his dope checked out by a chemist. Unbeknownst to Janis, the chemist had been out of town that day and the heroin she bought was four to ten times stronger than what she was used to taking.
Skin-popping the drug, instead of finding a vein, delays the high for up to ninety minutes, which is what Janis chose to do that night. She then discovered she was out of cigarettes and went to the lobby and got change from Jack Hagy at the desk. He was the last person to see Janis alive.
When Janis didn’t show up for her Sunday-evening session, her road manager, John Cooke, got a key from the desk at the Landmark and went to her room. Finding her facedown on the floor, John touched her cool skin, hoping it wasn’t too late, but Janis Lyn Joplin had been dead for seventeen hours. Her body was wedged between the table and the bed, her lip was bloody, her nose appeared to be broken, and a red ball of fresh needle marks punctured her arm. Janis was wearing only a blouse and panties and in her closed fist were four dollar bills and two quarters—change from the cigarettes.
Janis under arrest.
The police found Janis’s hype kit neatly put away in a drawer. They called her death an “accidental overdose,” though there was talk about suicide. “Some people say it was murder, some say suicide,” Sam Andrew tells me, shaking his head, “but that stuff is way out. One of the things about heroin being illegal is there’s no controlling the dosage. It’s amazing it doesn’t happen more often. You let it sift through the strainer and it gets real strong,” he says. “There’s such a fine line.” Janis’s supplier lost several more customers that week with his lethally pure batch of heroin. I knew one of them. I ask Sam what he did when he found out Janis had died. “I went out and scored some smack,” he admits. “We all gathered over at the drummer’s house, had some kind of wake. They scattered her ashes in Marin County off the coast. I didn’t go.”
Peter Tork blames Janis’s death on low self-esteem. “She died with a needle in her arm,” he says. “It may be genetic or environmental or both, it’s hard to know. If you don’t have a sense of community or a higher power, then you blame yourself, think bad of yourself, so you struggle and try to divert. One form of diversion is entertaining. If you can make those thousands love you, you’ll be all right. In fact, it makes no fucking difference. It’s a kick when you’re onstage, but an hour and a half later it starts all over.”
Sam Andrew and I finish our coffee and get ready to leave the posh hotel lounge when he takes hold of my arm. “Janis had more fun than people thought,” he says intently, “but then there was that other side—the insecurity was there all the time, too. She’d say, ‘Was I good? Do you love me? Did I go flat on that ending? Was it okay?’ She knew it was okay, but she needed to hear it. At the same time she had more fun than anyone.” Sam looks around the stuffy, elegant room. “Janis Joplin had more fun than anyone in this room will ever have.”
KEITH MOON
“THE LOON”
“
I
think I must be a victim of circumstance, really. Most of it’s my own doing. I’m a victim of my own practical jokes. I suppose that reflects a rather selfish attitude. I like to be the recipient of my own doings. Nine times out of ten, I am. I set traps and fall into them.”
I had much firsthand experience with the Who’s deranged, severely damaged, and very dear-hearted drummer, Keith Moon. I met him in 1971, on the set of Frank Zappa’s breakthrough video film,
200 Motels,
the avant-madcap story of “life on the road” with the Mothers of Invention. I was playing a ga-ga groupie-girl news hen and Mr. Moon was hired to conjure up a maniac nun, which he pulled off quite nicely. His excessive amounts of savage energy and scathing wit frightened me at first, but after observing from a safe distance, I soon realized that his court-jester desire to be loved kept impish-faced Mr. Moon pretty much harmless (to everyone but himself and hotel rooms!). Keith was always on the lookout for mischief, and his huge, wide-open, cocoa-brown eyes never missed an opportunity to shred an otherwise
sane or boring moment. “It was another ’oliday Inn. When I get bored, I rebel,” he told
Rolling Stone.
“I said, ‘Fuck it!! Fuck the lot of ya!’ And I took out me ’atchet and chopped the ’otel room to bits. The television, the chairs, the dresser. The cupboard doors. The bed. It happens all the time.”
Notes written on Keith Moon’s report card in 1959 suggest that his tendency toward lunacy started early: “Retarded artistically,” wrote his art teacher, adding, “Idiotic in other respects.” His physical education teacher had this to say: “Keen at times, but goonery seems to come before anything.” How right he was. The music instructor’s comments were more telling: “Great ability, but must guard against tendency to ‘show off.’” No such luck. It seemed that Keith was born with an unfinished nature that made him impossible to embarrass, and this quirk left him free to do and say things that most thinking people wouldn’t dare.
Keith started playing drums in 1960 at the age of fourteen, left his Wembley school a year later, and joined a series of bands with names like the Mighty Avengers and the Adequates, playing weddings and parties on weekends. By 1964 Keith had lost twenty-three jobs and was fond of telling friends the many, many fascinating ways he had found to get fired. Because he was wildly into California surf music, his next band, the Beachcombers, were heavily influenced by Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys—breezy sun-and-fun, sand-and-surf music far removed from the London chill. One warm California night, many years later, I introduced Keith to Dean Torrence of Jan and Dean, and in the back of a limo the two of them sang, “Goin’ to Surf City, gonna have some fun / Goin’ to Surf City, where it’s two to once … .” It was glorious.
Keith Moon and me—all dolled up with a whole lot of places to go. (RICHARD CREAMER)
Keith had been following a local Mod band called the Detours, headed by a stalk-slim guitarist with an imposing hooter, Pete Townshend. Keith harbored a secret desire to audition for the band and one night, in April 1964, a pie-eyed pal approached the stage, announcing that his friend with the dyed bright orange hair, Keith Moon, could play better than the guy they had on
drums. With his mum watching, not only did Keith pass the test, he played with such reckless ferocity that he busted up the session drummer’s bass pedal and high-hat—a sure sign of things to come. Singer Roger Daltrey asked Keith what he was doing the following Monday. “We’ll pick you up in the van,” he said, and Keith was an instant member of the Detours.
The Detours were already locked in constant combat, Peter and Roger vying for power, and, with the addition of seventeen-year-old Keith Moon, they became an even more volatile entity. Instead of disagreements being bottled up and shoved aside, they were heatedly tackled and thrown into the music. Bass player John Entwistle had difficulty with Moon’s lunatic soloist tendencies. He was all over the place full force, hammering every drum at once with no real backbeat, playing more like a guitarist than a drummer—taking his own leads, thrashing and bashing, twirling his sticks, standing up behind the kit, cocky and insistent, demanding attention. Pete and John already had massive amplification, so in order to keep up, Keith added a second bass drum and loads of cymbals and tom-toms. Soon other rock drummers followed suit until oversize kits became commonplace.
The Detours became the High Numbers and got their chance in the studio, recording two R&B covers for Fontana Records. Despite a mini-rave in
Disc
magazine—“They’re up to date with a difference—they’re even ahead of themselves”—the single wasn’t a hit. Due to the glut of cool records out, including the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” and the Stones’ “It’s All Over Now,” the High Numbers’ single just wasn’t good enough. Still, the band was gathering more and more fans at gigs.
On the outlook for a local group on which to base a pop film, Kit Lambert turned up to see the High Numbers at the Railway Tavern on a tip from a friend. Impressed, the following week he brought his partner, Chris Stamp (brother of actor Terence Stamp), who said, “All we could hear was a great dirty noise. Still, we sensed this amazing excitement all around us, and we knew that it had to be wild.” The pop film was out the window. “Instead, the pair became the band’s managers, converting their name back to an earlier idea of Townshend’s—the Who.
Stamp and Lambert took the boys to Max Factor on Bond Street for theatrical makeup lessons and to Carnaby Street for stage clothes, which they wore on a daily basis to maintain their Mod image. Despite their recording flop, the Who could fill venues and started modifying the stage to accommodate their ever-growing theatrical pranks. Pete had crazed episodes of arm windmilling, mowing down the audience with his machine-gun guitar; Roger leered, whipping his mike cord round and round in a vast circle; and Keith Moon loomed behind his gargantuan kit, sweating maniacally, tossing his sticks in the air, while John gazed menacingly. By this time John, Keith, and Pete were heavily into “leapers,” potent amphetamines that brought out a
lot of innate aggression. Personally, they couldn’t stand each other, and it all came out onstage. But the legendary Who instrument-bashing came about by accident. Trying to control feedback at a club with a very low ceiling, Pete got pissed off, accidentally smashing the neck of the guitar against the ceiling, which created a quirky sound. He repeated the action, and the audience wanted more. During the second set, after a challenge from some art-school friends, Pete banged his axe so hard that the neck broke. “I had no recourse but to completely look as though I meant to do it,” Pete recalled, “so I smashed the guitar and jumped all over the bits. It gave me a fantastic buzz.” The following night the joint was jammed. The destruction may have thrilled the punters, but the band couldn’t afford to replace ravaged instruments. After a disappointed crowd left the club, Keith got so frustrated he kicked his drum kit to smithereens and word soon got around. The next gig was packed, and both Pete and Keith destroyed their instruments to such a huge response that, despite the cost, destruction became a semiregular event. The demolition symbolized the fury of rock and roll and the audience demanded it.
When Lambert booked the Who into London’s R&B Marquee Club, he came up with the slogan “Maximum R&B,” which is exactly what the Who played—spiked, hard-core, rocked-out versions of Chuck Berry, B. B. King, and Bo Diddley. “The Who should be billed as not only ‘Maximum R&B,’ but as ‘far-out R&B,’” announced London’s hip rock paper
Melody Maker,
adding that the Who were one of the trend-setting groups of 1965. The review was timely. A week later the Who released their first single, “I Can’t Explain,” one of Pete’s earliest attempts at songwriting, inspired by the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.”
An amazing slab of pop history, the song is highlighted by the suspenseful, fearless slam-bam flair of Keith’s cut-loose drumming. He had the uncanny ability to climb inside a song, fill it to the bursting brim, and bang his way out with his drumsticks. In the process Keith Moon elevated and reinvented rock drumming, setting a formidable standard that few have been able to follow. And he was rock’s first superstar drummer.
As the record climbed the charts, the Who became regular faces on “Top of the Pops” and “Ready, Steady, Go!” “It wasn’t until Townshend started smashing up guitars and I started smashing up the drums that producers of the shows began to realize that there was more than the singer in a band,” Keith said. “They’d actually line up a camera for the drums, which was a first. People started to actually notice the drummer.” It’s not surprising. Mr. Moon made it his life’s work to be noticed.
“I Can’t Explain” hit the British Top Ten, but all the money went to replace smashed-up instruments. Despite impending success, animosity within the band raged. “Roger is not a very good singer at all,” Pete told
Disc
magazine. “The pretty one,” Keith Moon, did an article for the teen magazine
Fabulous,
entering the room with an axe, which he slammed down on the table. “What’s that for?” inquired the stunned interviewer. “That’s for Roger,” said Keith with manic glee. “You ’aven’t seem ’im, ’ave you?”
As Modism faded with the fashion craze, Pete turned more to pop art for his inspiration. “We stand for pop art clothes, pop art music, pop art behavior,” said Pete. “We live pop art.” For Keith it was “just a way of dressing up the music and putting it across.”
The sales of the second single, “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” were fueled by controversy. Pete had started telling the press that he advocated drugs and was a drug user himself. In a
New Musical Express
survey, Keith listed his favorite food as “French Blues,” certain happy pills that he enjoyed enormously. Though the Rolling Stones actually got arrested for pissing against the wall of a gas station in the English countryside, at the end of a show in Paris the Who peed in an alley and it was filmed live for French and British cameras!
The drug taking got so ferocious that singer Roger Daltrey (who was already cleaning up his act) threatened to quit the band during a tour of Sweden. At a show in Denmark Roger emptied Keith’s profound pill supply down the toilet, and when Keith got pissed off, Roger knocked him out. Weary of the constant aggro, the band then threatened to fire Roger. After a humiliating meeting, Roger agreed to keep his temper in check. The massive drug and alcohol consumption continued to escalate.
The band’s first album,
The Who Sings My Generation,
put them over the top. Every kid in the universe hoped they would die before they got old. Keith Moon’s drumming continued to lambaste any preexisting limits and challenge any and all ground rules. His personality and his musicianship were completely intertwined. Keith was so bombed at the “Substitute” session that he had no recall of playing on the track, insisting that it had been someone else, expressing fear and outrage that he was being replaced. He relished his pop stardom, the rampant, doped-up endless nights, so proud of being
the
very baddest bad boy in rock. He married his longtime sweetheart, Kim Kerrigan, in March 1966, but the wedding vows did nothing to tame his unfinished nature.
War within the band never ceased. When Keith turned up late at a gig, Pete beat him over the head with his guitar, and for a few days Keith tried to persuade John Entwistle to leave the Who with him and form a new band. Keith also wanted to sing, despite his lack of vocal talent, and spiteful rows always ensued.
Keith soon became was the father of a new baby girl, Mandy, but this sobering fact did nothing to sober him up. The parties at his home in Chelsea went on for days with gargantuan amounts of drugs and alcohol consumed, gallantly provided by everyone’s ever-ready host. Kim and the baby would disappear upstairs into an entirely different (and much saner) world.
When the Who finally got to New York City in March 1967, manager
Stamp arranged for regular shots of amphetamines, adding doses of penicillin just in case. Free-spirited females were around in abundance, and the Who took full advantage. Though the gigs proved to be stunningly received, the band was tossed out of the first two hotels due to Keith’s nearly perfect destruction of his room. He eventually made hotel-room trashing into a fine art and, like his drumming, the annihilation was often imitated but rarely duplicated.
In May the Who were invited to play the Monterey Pop Festival, where ruthless, respectful competition with the Jimi Hendrix Experience elevated both bands into the stratosphere. This high-profile exposure got the Who booked on a ten-week American jaunt with Herman’s Hermits, one of Britain’s squeakiest-clean exports, and the Who got their first taste of the long and winding endless road. Keith coped in his inimitable way by securing five hundred cherry-bomb explosives and gleefully blowing up dozens of hotel-room toilets—until word got around and a five-thousand-dollar security deposit was demanded before the Who could check in to any hotel in America. Keith’s twentieth-birthday party was held at the end of a ragged gig in Flint, Michigan (Keith announced vociferously he was turning twenty-one because in most states that was the legal drinking age), and when the Holiday Inn manager had the unforeseen gall to tell the partygoers to turn down the music, the birthday boy took hearty offense. The first to go was the five-tiered cake from Decca Records (by some accounts, right into the manager’s face). Legend has it that Keith raced through the hotel hallway, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and sprayed every car in the lot, ruining many paint jobs, before wrecking his hotel room, stripping naked, and jumping into the pool—which was empty! In an interview with
Rolling Stone
a month before his death, Keith said he drove a new Lincoln Continental into
a full
swimming pool that night. “Today I can think of less outrageous ways of going than drowning in a Lincoln Continental in a ‘oliday Inn swimming pool, but at that time I ’ad no thoughts of death whatsoever,” he told Jerry Hopkins. “There was none of that all-me-life-passing-before-me-eyes-in-a-flash. I was busy planning. I knew if I panicked I’d ’ave ’ad it.” Keith made a Houdini escape from the Lincoln, arrived back at the room dripping wet in his underwear, tripped through the doorway, slipped on some marzipan, and knocked out his front tooth. He was rushed to the dentist and then spent the day in jail. Happy birthday, Mr. Moon, happy birthday to you.

Other books

Battle Cry by Lara Lee Hunter
Mad Love by Suzanne Selfors
Gambling on a Secret by Ellwood, Sara Walter
Vieux Carré Voodoo by Greg Herren
Fail Safe by Eugene Burdick, Harvey Wheeler
After the Abduction by Sabrina Jeffries