Rant in D Minor: That 70s Show

“You’re born too late,” sang Steve Forbert a million moons ago, “and everything you love is gone.”

Is it possible to feel timesick for an era you never experienced? I was still in short pants when Iggy sported silver spray-ons and Ziggy played guitar. Many of us who came of age in the 80s felt rock ‘n’ roll swindled: our big brothers had the Pistols and The Ramones, we had Howard Jones and T’Pau.
But nostalgia – even the vicarious kind – is death. Who wants to live through a fabled period of pop history only to spend the rest of your life feeling like the volume’s been turned down, repeatedly answering questions (or indeed, writing memoirs) about what happened 35 years ago? To be defined by a bygone epoch is a curse that negates the present moment, even if that present moment is infested with autotuned atrocities.
This month sees the publication of two very different books set in roughly the same milieu, penned by linguistically gifted individuals who rejoiced in the same androgynous, ratty-haired, mascara-eyed sartorial elegance. Patti Smith’s Just Kids and Nick Kent’s Apathy For the Devil are chronicles of impossibly romantic bohemian times, the early 70s in London and New York, when the apocalyptic crash ‘n’ burn of the hippy dream morphed into glam decadence and then punk sedition.
Smith’s book is ostensibly a biography of her soul-twin, the artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1989. Her account of life in the Chelsea Hotel alongside Allen Ginsberg and Harry Smith, of nights spent hustling in a Max’s Kansas City populated by Warhol-ites and leather boys and drag queens, is often gutter-fabulous stuff, Midnight Cowboy shot in CBGBs.
Kent, on the other black-nail-varnished hand, offers testimony of a time when the boundaries between subject and writer were blurred (usually by drugs) to the point where it was possible to spend days or even weeks in the company of Iggy or the Stones or Led Zeppelin, and later report something approximating the truth. He snapshots the jaded excesses of Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco in LA, the heyday of Bangs-era Creem magazine in Michigan, and the mercenary cut ‘n’ thrust of the Pistols’ early days, not to mention the squalor and waste of his lost heroin years in the latter half of the decade.
Both books are flawed enough for their authors to be called on it. Smith’s is at times overwritten, contrived and stilted. Kent’s is riddled with cliches and I-was-there-first big-ups. But both works are powered by big beating hearts, possess a strong moral point of view, and climax with closing chapters that might just leave you wet around the eyes. More than anything, they transport the reader to a time when a generation of degenerates made art out of trash, which in time became alchemised into gold.
Read ‘em and weep.