Beggars Banquet

‘But angry, yes?’ your agent says.

You drop the receiver back into its cradle.

Then you get word of the filming. A TV special, to be recorded over two days. The audience will be in fancy dress. Top acts and circus sideshows. You go along, but are disappointed. On the studio set, you’re too obviously a spectator rather than a participant. There’s a distance there that you ca

You pick up a girl, take her home. She sees your place and immediately becomes less impressed. You play her the record, but there’s no way of proving that you were there, that you’re part of it. You play her a section from one of your interviews, but the words seem to bore her. She only really perks up when you wheel out the drugs. You owe Jeff the Nose sixty quid for the goods, and only went to him because you owe the others so much they’ve stopped your supply. Friends aren’t as patient as they used to be. You were in a pub in Camden the other night, telling your story, and someone called out: ‘Change the fucking record. That one’s been played to death.’

Everyone laughed, until you swept your arm across the table, sending the glasses flying.

Your agent is discouraging. ‘No one’s going to hand over a single halfpe

So you write a fourth.

And then it’s 1969. And Brian’s out of the group.

And Brian’s dead.

You’re there for the free concert: just another face in the crowd. The entourage – the powers – know you never finished your article. They think you never will. When the box of butterflies is opened, you’re close enough to the stage to see that many of them have already expired. It’s July: hotter than hell’s fire. Mick looks well. He’s heading for Australia to make another film. You didn’t even bother trying for permission to tag along.

But you have finished your play. It ended up being performed in Hampstead, didn’t transfer to the West End. The critics were scornful, but it got your name back into contention for a little while, and you’ve been offered some film work, script doctoring in Hollywood. You know a few writers out there, Brits who went for money over sensibility. One novelist who wrote the first two parts of what was going to be England’s great postwar trilogy, then legged it at the first sniff of dollars and a nicely ta

You jumped.

Hated Los Angeles. Heard that Maria

The script doctors got together to tell stories about past Hollywood prisoners: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Chandler, all of whom had liked a drink. Alcohol hadn’t bothered the moguls. Drugs didn’t seem to bother them either – just as long as the work got done. That was your problem: hope and work just didn’t mix. You had an apartment in Studio City, but the walls were too close together and the view from your window was a concrete wall. You joked that there was more room in your car, a T-Bird you’d bought from a TV actor who was up on a DUI charge. He was hoping to persuade the court that he was shedding his old life. The consensus was, he’d win his case; he played pretty well to an audience, had some stage work behind him.

You liked to get out of the city, drive up the coast, even when it was hazy. Especially when it was hazy. You loved the feeling of driving into something you couldn’t see; loved when each curve in the road surprised you. It was like driving into the future. You told a girl about your feelings. She said the image wasn’t new, mentioned its use in a novel a few years back.

It was the first novel by the sleepy American. He still hadn’t produced a follow-up, and amazingly this had only increased his profile, the non-book taking on heroic status. All he had to do was claim he’d finished another chapter, and it was the talk of the coffee shops.

You saw him once in Haight-Ashbury, stumbling along at the roach-end of the hippy dream. San Francisco had the Airplane and the Dead, but LA had The Doors, and it seemed to you that LA was the true indicator of the way things were going. Nobody much cared when Le

Then there was Vietnam, and the Panthers: violence no longer content to bubble beneath the haze. And then the band came to the Los Angeles Forum, riding on the back of hiked ticket prices and rising bad will. The underground press (no longer underground) had the knives out from the start, which didn’t stop you paying your $8.50. You made a half-hearted attempt at breaching the backstage defences, but didn’t recognise any of the faces.

‘Do you have any authority?’ one of the security goons asked, and you had to admit to yourself that you did not.

The show itself was okay. They were playing tracks from the new album – your moment of fame was already history. The band had moved on; the new songs seemed obsessed with downfall and mayhem. The last track seemed to you to be waving goodbye to everybody’s good times. You doubted the Panthers and the Angels would disagree.

It was typical of the band to want to replicate Wood-stock’s good feelings. Typical that they misjudged the way the world’s mood had travelled since then. Their own free concert was by way of an apology for ticket scams and all that ill-feeling. You knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.

For a start, the drugs had moved on. Everything was bad: diluted, cut with poison, lethal. You were a pro; you could probably give Keith lessons on where to score. You had managed to pull yourself away from the siren call of heroin, but the acid seemed to be giving you more bad trips than good ones. Nevertheless, on the day, you took a proffered tab from a complete stranger.

And tripped.

In cold black light, explosions strafing the sky. The sound system consisted of alarm bells and artillery. The crowd was hungry, tired, concussed. They needed everything they weren’t getting. The medicos couldn’t cope with the trauma victims. Word went around: ‘Don’t touch any acid you’re not sure of.’ But you already had. And you’d handed over money for a single sheet of further trips, little purple stars: an ironic comment on the war in Vietnam? Who gave a shit – you were beyond irony by this point.

You had about a week to go before your employers threw you out. You’d added nothing of inspiration to a ‘modern western’ they’d asked you to pep up; had failed dismally to pitch them a black comedy about the drug scene in LA. You were not justifying their early faith in you. You were on the road out of Tinseltown.

Back to Blighty: a dismal prospect. You’d already traded the T-Bird to pay off a debt which had come with the promise of a switchblade attached. They’d threatened to cut off your eyelids. That was the way things were now. The most potent threat anyone could make was to stop you ceasing to see.

You’d hitched down here with a friend. The traffic had forced you out of the car five miles from the field, and you’d promptly lost your friend in the crowd. Not that he’d be your friend for long: you owed him money, too, and were pla

You were way past ‘making good’.

You noticed them early on, the Angels. They revved their engines, clearing a path for several dozen hogs, which they parked in front of the stage, creating a security cordon. And then the guest bands started coming on, and it got colder, and trouble flared. Pool cues and motorbike chains. Ugly cries and gashed heads. Pleas from the stage going unheeded, an Angel going up there to pick a fight with a stoned musician.