The Dark Stuff – Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1995 – Review

The Dark Stuff

Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1995
by Nick Kent (Da Capo Press, 1995)
by William Ham

Nick Kent is the closest the UK ever came to producing a Lester Bangs. Like Bangs, he has been immortalized in song (he was the “man from the television/crawling to the train” in Elvis Costello’s “Waiting For The End Of The World”) and in punk legend (he played in an embryonic version of the Sex Pistols; later, Sid Vicious creased his skull with a bike chain at a crowded London club). He even learned the finer points of his craft at the foot of Bangs, following him around for days while Lester taught him to peel away the masks of rock in search of its elusive soul. Consequently, his talismans became much the same: The poetry of dissipation, the superego-defying crazies (literal and figurative) that provide rock with its most legendary moments, and the inspiration (and horror) of substance abuse. But Bangs, for all his sound and fury, was an idealist at heart. Kent has a more jaundiced eye which looks askance at all the depravity and excess (even while willingly participating in it) that his subjects wallowed in. And he got out, alive and with his journalistic faculties intact, something that can’t be said for most of the artists profiled in The Dark Stuff.

Some succumbed to madness. Syd Barrett’s quick rise and swift fall is a story often told, but rarely with the succinct, unromantic clarity that Kent affords it here. Even sadder is the fate of Beach Boys genius Brian Wilson; “The Last Beach Movie Revisited” looks at his long decline and slow return with the grace of a dry-eyed tragedian. Roky Erickson (of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators) is a sad case study as well, but Kent allows for grim laughter by interspersing excerpts from a failed interview with the Texas nutjob.

Other pieces provide you-are-there-but-you-wish-you-weren’t glimpses of self-abusive icons in the full flower of their decadence. Lou Reed is seen circa ’74, embodying the worst aspects of his notorious Lost Decade: Emaciated, jitter-wracked, and thoroughly unpleasant. (The Iron Cross hairstyle was a nice touch, though.) “The Four Ages of a Man Named Pop: Pictures of Iggy” and “Elvis Costello: Horn-Rims From Hell” follow Messrs. Osterberg and MacManus through their ultimately triumphant struggles with their legendary alter egos. Shane McGowan and Jerry Lee Lewis – ’nuff said, I think. And Kent gets his belated revenge on Sid in a unrelenting spurt of vitriol entitled “The Exploding Dim-Wit.”

But there are others whose singular personalities made them thrive, and Kent brings them to light – Roy Orbison, Miles Davis, Morrissey, and Neil Young shine that much brighter in the company of the aforementioned dark stars. And then there’s, um, Guns ‘N’ Roses. As Bob Dole would say, “Whatever.”

Full of sharp, witty phrasemaking (“The words trail off into a pause so pregnant I thought of alerting a midwife”) and a historian’s sense of completion, The Dark Stuff is that rare bird: Rock literature not fawning hyperbole, with a sense of lasting import. Get it.