Stray Cat Blues

DAVE THOMPSON: “Rodney Bingenheimer knew that glam rock was never going to take off in the United States in the same way it had in Britain. There was no room at the American table for such treats as Sweet, Gary Glitter, Alvin Stardust, and Wizzard, and even T.Rex had stumbled after scoring one hit. But Los Angeles, with its built-in obsession with satin and tat – that was another matter entirely. When Bowie suggested that he open a club that catered exclusively to the glam rock scene, Bingenheimer knew what he had to do.”

MICHAEL DES BARRES: “Los Angeles was the Babylon that we were looking for. We were looking for the playground, and it was here. There’s a simple reason for that – the weather. You can’t have a girl running around with two sequins on her tits and a Silverhead sticker on her pussy in twenty-below London! The other reason is this is the place of Errol Flynn’s ghost, the collective consciousness of Irving Thalberg, Clara Bow, and Errol Flynn… it’s here, in the bricks and the mortar and the concrete. Hollywood’s been the birth of fantasy, man, since 1914.  It’s in the fucking air. It’s the mecca, the holy grail for beauty. It’s the magnet that attracts the cheekbones and great asses, and you put all that together with three chords and some pancake and you rock the fuck out, know what I mean?”

ANGELA BOWIE: “Rodney liked young girls, and his club was full of them. Visiting rock stars off the leash from their wives in England would go to the English Disco to look for young girls under the auspices of arranging record promotion with Rodney. The club was Rodney’s storefront, where he did his business. Knowing Rodney or being prepared to interact with Rodney was a prerequisite to going to Rodney’s English Disco.”

RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: “At my club, and even before I had a club, David Bowie turned me on to the concept of the live DJ in a booth playing records… Rent was $300 a month.  Pinball machines and Watney’s Beer took care of the rent.  I always had a slide show and super-8 movies showing against the wall.  Glitter people liked to be on display because we had a mirror on the dance floor and people like to look at themselves with strobe lights going… I liked to play records at my club and see the people dance.  Girls in satin hotpants, tube tops, and platform shoes.  The music could be played loud.  I’ll never forget, around 1972, David Bowie called me at home one night from the studio in England where he was producing Mott the Hoople’s ‘All The Young Dudes.’ He played it for me over the telephone.  It was incredible.  And then the promo people at Columbia Records supplied me with an advance white label copy.  I had the club and broke the record nationally…  A magazine once described my club as ‘A glitter cathedral in a neon jungle.’  It was time for fun!”

NICK KENT: “Most of the teenaged creatures in the Hollywood region were all over the freshly imported glam bandwagon like a rash on a wild dog. There was even a new club in town exclusively devoted to catering to their tastes: the English Disco fronted by Rodney Bingenheimer, a sad-eyed West Coast Zelig with no discernible personality of his own but an abundant love of all things English and celebrity-driven. Night after night he’d bludgeon the tiny mirror-walled dance hall with the shiny-sounding glam racket of Sweet, Slade and Suzi Quatro compelling hordes of scantily clad, barely pubescent girls to cavort suggestively whilst trying to stay aloft in their preposterous stack-heeled platform shoes. For jail-bait connoisseurs and recruiting local chicken hawks, the place must have been a glimpse of heaven on earth, but it was really more like watching film director Russ Meyer’s hilariously sordid Hollywood pop spoof ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’ being re-enacted badly by a cast of pill-popping, conniving twelve-year-olds.”

MISS PAMELA: “The love of music had become secondary to preening in ‘Star’ magazine, standing next to Anybody In A Band. It was scary out there. It was fictitious and haunted. The magic dust on the Sunset Strip had turned into sticky wads of filthy goop that stuck to the bottom of my platforms... Whenever I went to the Whisky, I steered clear of the skinny prepubescents littering the Sunset Strip in their itty-bitty minishorts and towering platforms. I considered them more of a nuisance than a threat – even though one of them dared to call me ‘an old bag’ in front of Elton John one rude night. They teetered around in a pack, just like I had with the GTO’s, but these brazen junior high schoolers were competitive and just plain backstabbingly mean, especially their acne-scarred platinum boss-baby Sable Starr. There was Queenie, Corel, Lynn, and Sable’s closest confidant, a dusky, gangly child with layers of thick black curls who called herself Lori Lightning.”

STEVE PRIEST: “The groupies were pretty obvious. They were just underage girls who wore red sequins and that’s about all. And they weren’t timid. They all acted like Mae West.”

TONY ZANETTA: “The crowd at the club ranged in age from twelve to fifteen. Nymphet groupies were stars in their tight little world. Some dressed like Shirley Temple; others wore dominatrix outfits or ‘Hollywood underwear,’ a knee-length shirt, nylon stockings, and garter belts. These stargirls streaked their hair chartreuse and liked to lift their skirts to display their bare crotches. As they danced they mimed fellatio and cunnilingus in tribute to Bowie’s onstage act on Ronno’s guitar.”

RICHARD CROMELIN: “Once inside, everybody is a star. The social rules are simple but rigid: all you want to hear is how fabulous you look, so you tell them how fabulous they look. You talk about how bored you are, coming here night after night, but there’s no place else to go. If you’re not jaded there’s something wrong. It’s good to come in very messed up on some kind of pills every once in a while, and weekend nights usually see at least one elaborate tearful fight or breakdown. If you’re eighteen, you’re over the hill.”

NICK KENT: “Hollywood was suddenly crawling with these packs of fourteen-year-old girls stoned on their mothers’ tranquillizers and waving their fathers’ credit cards all over the place in hot pursuit of sexy, emaciated-looking rock dudes to have sex with. The teenage lust factor was considerable of couse, and it was partly their way of rebelliously extending the permissive standards of the sixties. But it was also a hell of a lot to do with wreaking revenge on their inconsiderate (and usually divorced) parents. Most of these girls were only seen on the weekends when they weren’t constrained by school schedules, but there was a hard-core bunch who didn’t feel compelled to attend school at all. They’d always get the manager of whatever rock group they were having sex with to write them an absentee note and hang out along the Sunset Strip seven days a week.”

NICK KENT: “The groupie situation had lately gone into a state of red alert. Valley girls were prepared to tear each other limb from limb in order to beat the competition and bed a Led Zeppelin member. Jimmy Page told me about an incident where one deranged female had placed razor blades in a hamburger bun one of her rivals was about to eat as a way of eliminating her from the competition.”

LORI MADDOX: “In the back of the VIP booth at Rodney’s there was this big poster of Mick Jagger…

AMY FREEMAN: …with lots of red lipstick marks – Mary Quant Black Cherry, that was what we wore to Rodney’s – all around Mick’s crotch.”

NICK KENT: “I got to know several of these girls during my stay in LA – though not in the biblical sense, you understand. They’d start talking to you and never stop. By the time you got a word in edgeways, you’d been given their entire life history to date. It was always the same: rich divorced parents, no love at home, lecherous stepfather, trouble at school. And they were all blindly convinced they were bound for glory. ‘I’m thirteen now but when I’m sixteen I’ll be as famous as Marilyn Monroe’ was their personal mantra. All they needed was for Andy Warhol to walk into the English Disco one night and see them in action and – shazam – they’d be all set for their journey into the stratosphere. They’d fallen hook, line and sinker for that ‘everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes’ crap of Warhol’s to the point where it had become their ditzy, all-consuming religion. The sad reality: they were just lost, damaged little girls like the Jodie Foster character Iris in ‘Taxi Driver’ – deluded broken blossoms who’d grown up too fast and had all the innocence and wholesomeness fucked out of them at too young an age.”

DAVID BOWIE: “Alone in LA, Rodney seemed like an island of Anglo ‘nowness.’  He even knew British singles and bands that I wasn’t aware of.  Rodney single-handedly cut a path through the treacle of the sixties, allowing all of us ‘avants’ to parade our sounds of tomorrow dressed in our clothes of derision.”

KIM FOWLEY: “I walked into the English Disco in a rabbit coat I’d bought in London, picked up this amazing bitch and took her back to the Marmont.  If David Bowie was Jesus Christ, then Rodney’s was the Sistine Chapel.”

MICHAEL DES BARRES: “Sixties groupies like the GTOs were these flowery girls, whereas Sable and Lori were that much more sophisticated, as evolution would dictate. Sable was a true rock’n’roll girl: fearless, sexy, and ready for anything, not in a crude beans-in-the-bath-with-the-shark way. I found them incredibly inspiring. They were as inspirational to me as Chuck Berry ‘cause they loved the scene and they nurtured it and they believed in it and they made you believe in it more. Those girls created the ambience in which the lifestyle could be lived and the songs could be written and the music could be recorded… it was one fantastic sort of orgasmic organism.”

BEBE BUELL: “There were also a large number of strange-looking young girls dressed up like Christmas ornaments rushing around, or just camping around in front of some rock star’s (hotel) rooms with their coolers and radios. This was a new breed of groupie. They were about fourteen (sometimes twelve) and were aggressive. They were harsh on other females attached to their heroes. You could easily get tripped, kicked, smacked, or have your hair pulled.”

NINA ANTONIA: “Sable Starr was one of the loosest Lolita’s on the scene, but she had a charming candor and the beguiling appearance of a cheerleader turned teen tramp.”

STAR MAGAZINE: “... Queenie, how about the groupie clique called Miss Pamela and the GTO's?”

QUEENIE: “Well, they aren't around anymore. We don't have to worry about them. They're too old. God, they're real old. Like in their late 20s and early 30s.”

STAR MAGAZINE: “That's old?”

QUEENIE: “Sure. A lot of them sit at home and babysit and make clothes and stuff. A lot of them are traveling around with old men getting their money and using their credit cards.”

SABLE STARR: “Yeah, they're just blocked out, you know. Like they'll be sitting there talking to a band. And as soon as we walk in, they might as well jump out the window.”

SABLE STARR: “I didn’t really live in Hollywood, I was about forty-five minutes away. But my friend called me up one day and said, ‘Do you wanna go to the Whisky A Go Go?’ This was when I was fourteen. And I was nuts to begin with, I always liked getting in trouble, so I said sure. Hollywood – I thought I’d see movie stars or something. So I went to the Whisky, and I’ll never forget the girls there, I was so intrigued. I was still ugly then, I had to work on it for about a year when I was hanging out in Hollywood. I didn’t get my nose fixed until I was fifteen.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “When Iggy and the Stooges arrived at the end of `72, the queen of the LA scene was Sable Shields, aka Sable Starr, a self-styled fifteen-year old groupie and wild-child… Sable was often accompanied by her older, sensible sister Coral, who was more reserved but equally beautiful; with Sable’s curly blond mop and Coral’s waist-length dark hair, they reminded many onlookers of Snow White and Rose Red.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Sable was the loudest and most outrageous of the girls and she was rapidly becoming notorious around Hollywood. She also had fantasies of becoming a conventional housewife, so every now and then you could see Hollywood’s most celebrated groupie washing the mountain of dishes accumulating in Iggy Pop’s kitchen.”

LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Sable had a good heart and I liked her, but she was on a general rampage of buying Billboard magazine and working her way down the list to someone she hadn’t fucked yet. Wayne County came to stay with us at Iggy’s house and Sable came on to Wayne very heavy. Wayne said, ‘BUT I’M A FAG!’ Sable’s thinking was probably, But you’re next on the list! So Sable took all her clothes off, cut her wrists, and dove into the pool. She was floating facedown in the deep end with blood going everywhere, and I was saying, ‘Wayne, we have to get her out of here!’”

SYL SYLVAIN: “There were two magazines, on the East Coast we used to get ‘Rock Scene,’ and on the West Coast there was ‘Star’ magazine, which used to feature all the Hollywood starlets. Me and Johnny used to get import copies of ‘Star’ and there’d be pictures of Sable Starr in it, and Johnny used to say, ‘Wow, this girl Sable, I love her. When I go out to LA she’ll be my girlfriend.’”

SABLE STARR: “We got each of the Dolls something when they showed up at the Riot House. I got Johnny Thunders some silver Frederick’s of Hollywood underwear, which was my favorite. I gave Johnny his present and he goes, ‘Why don’t you come upstairs with me?’ It was so weird because I knew he was going to be mine. For a week we never left that room, we fell in love instantly. I was 15, he’d just turned 21. Marty Thau was outraged. ‘Johnny, you can’t do this, she’s only 15!’ He said, ‘Marty, I’m going to marry her.’ He phoned his mother and said, ‘I’m bringing this girl home and I’m going to marry her.’”

MICHAEL DES BARRES: “Sable and Lori were the most committed of them all in terms of being able to manifest the ultimate groupie fantasy.”

LORI MADDOX: “Sable was funny, always on it, very quick-witted, that was why men liked being with her. But she would decide to do things absolutely out of nowhere; like maybe in the middle of the night decide to put on Hollywood underwear and a garter belt and drive around town.”

SABLE STARR: “Those days were crazy, every day I was on the go, from one hotel to another, cause Silverhead were staying at the Hyatt House and Bowie was staying at the Hilton, and it was just back and forth all the time.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Rodney’s regular Nancy McCrado remembers Sable and Queenie sneaking into Mick Ronson’s room on the first Spiders From Mars tour, stripping off their clothes, and waiting for him naked: ‘Mick was really upset about it – pushed them out and locked the door.’ Later, Lori sneaked with Sable into David Bowie’s room; according to Maddox, David was tired but eventually proved more obliging than his lieutenant.”

SABLE STARR: “If you're the aggressive type, the flashy type, you make it. You have to be very flashy, sometimes even sleazy-looking. In a way, sort of cheap-looking. You just have to be noticed, you know, because you just can't stand in the crowd hoping that one of the guys in the band will notice you. If you want to be a groupie you should hang around their limousines or you hang around backstage or at the hotel. I usually know where a band's staying...I know where their hotel is because I've got connections, got big ears too! Most groups stay at the Continental Hyatt house here on the Strip, but the super heavy groups stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel. And so, you're always there.”

KIM FOWLEY: “There was a splendid isolation for the next group of butt-broke strivers in the cocaine-laced ‘70s, living in tumbledown rattraps with evil people. Without police looking through your window because everybody was evil and tolerated each other… You had leopards, monsters, egomaniacs, murderers, killers, phonies, and geniuses doing horrible things or lovely things, or spiritual things, or wasting their lives or their time, and driving Porsches and ending up with nothing but a mattress. Whatever it was, so what? It was a little bit of the South of France, a little bit of Hawaii, a little bit of a mountain. Hollywood is a bunch of mountains. It’s a bunch of valleys. It’s Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy. It’s that extension into a musical outlaw culture of the ‘60s. All living the way people did in the 1800s.”

SABLE STARR: “I had just turned sixteen, it was summer, and my mother was starting to make me register for school. So I ran away. The Dolls manager wouldn’t let me go to San Francisco. He said, ‘If she comes I’m going to call the tour off,’ so I came straight to New York. My mother called the police and they followed the Dolls with detectives, and they grabbed another groupie instead of me. She was going, ‘I’m not Sable Starr, I’m Cyrinda Foxe, and don’t you forget it.’ She had white hair just like me.”

MICK WALL: “These were the days when televisions routinely flew through windows, followed by refrigerators laden with champagne, young women’s underwear and whatever else came to hand. One Holiday Inn manager looked like he’d spent the night in a haunted house after Led Zeppelin checked out the morning after a show. ‘Five hundred pounds of whipped cream?’ he jabbered. ‘Who could possibly use that much whipped cream?!’”

NINA ANTONIA: “Miss Starr, a California girl, was finding New York tough. She’d all but starved while Thunders was away. If Alice Cooper’s girlfriend Cindy Lang hadn’t taken her out for dinner at Max’s on a regular basis, Sable might have slipped through the cracks in the sidewalk, leaving behind only a pair of high-heeled wedgies for posterity.”

CYRINDA FOXE: “I could tell Sable wasn’t going to fit in. She wasn’t hip enough. She was a real L.A. girl, where she lived at home and could go home and change her clothes and then go out and play. She thought it was just a lot of glitter and glam – and then she hit New York. These streets are tough, aren’t they?”

SABLE STARR: “Johnny was crazy! Crazy and vicious. Sick. Disturbed. Being Italian had a lot to do with it as far as the crazy jealousies go. If I was ever caught talking to a guy… So after Johnny tried to kill me four or five times, I thought I’d take a trip back home.”

SABLE STARR: “It’s funny because I was so much a part of the scene. Debbie Harry and I stayed in touch for years. I have no regrets. Iggy sums it up in that song he wrote for Johnny and I, ‘Look Away.’ It may sound horrifying, I’d been with him also, when I was 13, but it wasn’t back then, it was all fun. Although, when I left the scene, I left it for good.”

SABLE STARR: ”I remember being totally disgusted with the scene. Punk rock was really coming in and I didn`t care for it although I did like the Sex Pistols. When I left New York at 19, I vowed I would never go back and I haven`t. I went home, back to the very exclusive place where I`d grown up, went back to school, got on the tennis team and got back to normal.”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “Lori Maddox was a pretty girl, tall and dark like Jimmy Page, with prominent features and giant eyes. She reminded people of a prepubescent Bianca Jagger.”

LORI MADDOX: “I went to school with a girl named Lynn, and she was friends with Sable. They were working with Star magazine. That’s how I got dragged in – Peterson Publishing discovered me. I didn’t know anything. I was still a virgin, I knew nothing when they started putting makeup on me and dressing me up for magazine covers. The whole glitter rock scene was decadence; that’s when we really captured our style and got bold. Platforms got bigger and skirts got shorter, hair got wilder.”

MISS PAMELA: “Lori, Sable, and their lip-glossy mob reigned over the scene for another few years, especially when the ‘Mayor of the Sunset Strip,’ Rodney Bingenheimer, opened his integral glitter-palaces, the E Club and Rodney’s English Disco. You could see them draped all over musicians of the moment, haughtily perched on velvet-clad laps within the coveted, roped-off center of the room.”

LORI MADDOX: “I was twelve and a half when I started going to Rodney’s. The first time, David Bowie said, ‘Lori, come with us.’ I was terrified. I was still a virgin.”

LORI MADDOX: “Sable was fucking Michael Des Barres, so we were always hanging out with Silverhead. He took photos of Sable and me on the Hyatt House balcony, wearing little red boas. When he went back to London, he showed the pictures to Jimmy Page and said, ‘You gotta meet this girl. She’s thirteen, she’s this big, and she’s got hair just like you.’ Then Star magazine came out and he saw how young I was. Jimmy loved young girls, and that’s how it happened.”

LORI MADDOX: “We were all at the Riot House. We’re walking down the corridor of one of Zeppelin’s floors and suddenly I got snatched – kidnapped – into the room. It was dimly lit by candles and at first I couldn’t really see. And then I saw Jimmy, just sitting in a corner, wearing this hat slouched over his eyes and holding a cane. It was really mysterious and weird. He was just sitting there, tapping this cane on the floor, in a chair in the corner. He looked just like a gangster. It was magnificent.”

LORI MADDOX: “I made a few hundred dollars on a job and that would buy my little outfits – I needed money for platforms after all! I didn’t even know what money was when I was dating Jimmy. Once he sent me out to buy a dress and gave me $300. I said, ‘I can’t spend that much money!’ Once I wanted this beautiful scarab necklace and he got it for me. He liked me in long, flowy skirts. He wanted me to look like a gypsy all the time; an innocent gypsy. He was so romantic and wonderful. I never thought of him as crazy – he was so possessive and protective over me. He wouldn’t let me drink, and one time I was smoking cigarettes and he went crazy. He made me smoke a whole pack of Salems until I was gagging. I never smoked again. He was like a dad sometimes.”

 

 

LORI MADDOX: “You’d hear a lot about Jimmy being a sorcerer, but the only evidence I saw of that was just what I felt over myself. I can’t explain it, but I think he’s got a lot of power in his own little way…I always felt like I was under his spell. Sometimes when we were making love and it had been going on for hours, honest to God, it was like being in a magic spell; dizziness, going into different places, not even taking drugs, and just feeling…feeling like you’re in space somewhere. He was the most amazing lover in the world, a lot of power, but really soft and sensitive. I’m just sure that every girl he ever touched has fallen in love with him.”

 

STEPHEN DAVIS: “Although Miss Pamela and most of the other girls in Jimmy’s past and present were there, Bebe Buell was Jimmy’s designated escort. Lori was in a state about this. She had taken a Quaalude and wandered about the party looking dazed, beautiful, bruised. Somehow she had bloodied her nose and her snow-white dress was stained red. As Jimmy and Bebe were leaving, Lori jumped out from behind a statue, crying to Jimmy ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ Jimmy tried to ignore her and jumped into the limo. He later told Bebe that Lori was too young to know how to mix fantasy with reality.”

BEBE BUELL: “When I took off with Jimmy Page, I was trespassing on the groupie territory previously dominated by Lori Maddox, Sable and Coral Starr, and Pamela Des Barres, the cream of the LA groupies. They were baying for my blood. I never felt like I fit in with the crowd out in LA, because I felt girls out there were a little bit cruder and a lot more hard-core. Girls would just go back to the hotel and have sex with anyone. I was always amused by them, but I never saw them as comrades or equals, or women I wanted to hang out with. I mean, I knew these girls. I knew Lori Maddox and Sable Starr. They didn’t have many scruples; I never operated on that level. And it was difficult for me, because I felt I couldn’t trust the girls in LA. I felt they were always trying to fuck the men I was with behind my back, and they definitely were. I called them ‘the body snatchers.' Rock-star snatchers is what they were.”

MISS PAMELA: “As much as I loved Zeppelin, they kind of fucked things up in LA. Something about their energy really altered the joie de vivre of the scene. They thought they could get away with anything and they could, because everybody wanted to get near them. They were very debauched and the girls got younger and more willing to do anything. It got to be incredibly sick."

JIMMY PAGE: “I’m still searching for an angel with a broken wing. It’s not very easy to find them these days. Especially when you’re staying at the Plaza Hotel…"

MORGANA WELCH: “We arrived back at the Hyatt House minutes before Led Zeppelin made their way to the lobby. The first stop was Rodney Bingenheimer‘s club, the former Ooh Poo Pa Doo’s on Sunset. Upon our arrival, Sable, Lori Maddox, and Queenie, the very young groupies, noticed who were at the VIP table. Tyla and I thought they were ridiculous, sleazy, and obnoxious. We knew Queenie before Sable and Lori hit the club scene. We used to hang out and dance from time to time. Now she is one of them. We were having a good time listening to the music and watching Rodney, who is a bit too weird for me. At the main table sat Robert Plant, Tyla, me, John Paul Jones, some girl we had never seen before, and John Bonham. It was John Bonham’s birthday, and the band was celebrating.”

MORGANA WELCH: “The waitress came to the table with several more pitchers of beer and a birthday cake. No one saw that a photographer, Richard Creamer, was about ready to snap some pictures. Sable and Lori must have known because all of a sudden, they were at our table. John Paul Jones must have seen it coming too because he jumped up and flipped someone off, Rodney I think. Sable tried to position herself on Robert Plant’s lap, and when she did, he gave her a funny look. Lori tried to get as close to John Bonham as possible. Tyla and I were watching them in disbelief. That began to fuel a feud that was about to begin between Tyla and Sable.”

MORGANA WELCH: “Once the pictures were taken, John Bonham threw the birthday cake at the photographer. We all had a good laugh at that one. He was not happy at the intrusion, nor was anyone else. When the things calmed down, Tyla and I went to dance to give a little show of our own. The Led Zeppelin music was blaring. We were having a great time knowing the band might be watching us—again that voyeurism thing. Sable and Lori, seeing an opportunity, also started dancing. That was when the catfight started. Sable got too close to Tyla, and they spat out a few unpleasant words. Then Tyla kicked Sable’s leg hard. Tyla went into the bathroom, and Sable followed. Wicked words were exchanged. Tyla set the bleach blond straight.”

LORI MADDOX: “It was like being with the pope. You don’t get concerts like that anymore, massive stadium concerts with a hundred thousand people. And you don’t see that kind of magic anymore, that great rock era –three nights at the Forum, thirty thousand people with candles shining.”

LORI MADDOX: “The English Disco was what kept everybody together and I think it all fell apart when Rodney’s closed – everybody went in different directions. Times changed, Star magazine closed, Peterson Publishing folded, punk started coming in. That was when Sable moved to New York with Johnny Thunders and the New York Dolls. I bailed ‘cause I was more into the rock scene. I never got into punk, like Stiv Bators. I thought it was all dirty and ugly – I was never into heroin chic. It was also tragic for me because during that period Jimmy got into heroin, which killed me.”

NICK KENT: “If it wasn ‘t quite ‘The Beautiful and the Damned,’ it was certainly the pretty and the damned. Everyone was, you know, ‘going to hell’ and nobody cared. It was as if they’d all taken up residence in Leiber and Stoller’s ‘Is That All There Is?’ To me, that was the song of the seventies, even if it was written in 1966. I mean, quite honestly, Rodney himself was one of the most boring and sexless human beings that ever existed – he literally just wanted to spend his time hanging in the shadows of David Bowie talking about Jobriath. Fowley at least had a brain: as Iggy once said to me, ‘Kim Fowley is bullshit, but it’s a better class of bullshit.’”