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By Root 578 0

flesh merchant he hooked up with. David Bowie, that chickenhearted straw man of suck rock you love to hate. Can you come to terms with a genuinely deviant sensibility, after all the goodtime burlesque acts, or would you rather just shoot the worthless pretentious motherfucker dead and put a stop to all this utter fraudulent bullshit about what a superstar he is? Especially since the entire thing is a ruse from his musical empire to his sexual self-hype: usual disreputable sources have it that his favorite quail is prepubescent girls. But whoever he humps makes no difference, he's still scum. Yeah, says the dazed reactionary fan, let's kill faggots and get rid of all this arch Broadway/music hall shit. There's a sense of utter despair in the atmosphere and if our heroes are gonna turn to pure crap we might as well blame somebody. Especially since it's happened before.

Lou Reed. Done in. And brought it on himself to a large extent. Although you begin to wonder about those theories, prevalent that summer of ‘72 when the Stones were on tour while Lou was in London trying to make a comeback through advanced stages of combination toxicity The theories said that Bowie's whole tactic was to eliminate the competition by buying them up. Either that or fucking them. Same thing. A friend went to London on Bowie junket, observed the Bowie/ Reed phenomenon at fairly close hand, came back accusing Bowie of outright vampirism. I laughed.

But what is it, really, that's so infuriating about these stories? Not an attack of defensive conservatism in the face of the homo peril. Naw, it's the incest angle that rankles. Somebody oughta make a law that no pop-stars are allowed to have romantic or sexual entanglements with each other on pain of death. For movie stars it's okay, but where's the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of Liz and Dick? Rock people are too self-conscious to do it with any grace. Somehow it blows all the Jagger charisma to see him and Bowie dancing and lolling on each other's laps at David's “retirement” party while their wives made out with quiet dignity in the glare of the paparrazzi… great pictures from that party: Bowie staring intensely at nothing, looking best; Jagger looking tattered, old, used-up, unelegant, plain bad, definitively flaky, head bent as he stares into his wineglass and purses his lips as if about to spit a rancid sip back; Lou Reed pudgy faced, matted shock of hair, nervously glancing to the side, beginning to resemble Porky Pig … as good as the famed Iggy-David-Lou pic in its way, because this time everybody really looked like garbage … and other pix of Mick dancing, incredibly stiffly, with that bitch he supposedly immortalized in song on his new album. This is rock aristocracy? Do we need aristocracy? Bad companions. But maybe he's found his level, between these creeps and Bianca's social contacts. And the capping irony is that there is really nothing on Goat's Head Soup as strong and Stoneslike as “Watch That Man” on Aladdin Sane. Eliminating the competition …

A fan's notes: Mr. Nice Guy's Mick's rep, after all that devil crapola, but somehow it's just impossible to care much anymore. Last year he was singing about what he looks like this year. It sounded better than it looks. Just like Jagger on the Goat's Head Soup album cover, the filmy scarf or whatever it is making him look sorta like Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis… don’t like that smile, it's just vacant… who is this guy, anyway… and inside Charlie and Bill no longer likeable, but not even interestingly unpleasant… the whole thing is just pretentious, Mick Taylor is a big asshole obviously trying to look bad, amoral, like early Lou Reed or something: four years and he's finally pushing toward what he sees as consonance with the Stones image. But that's not their image anymore, Mick. What is? Nothing. Nondescript fabulousness. A fade in general. The only one that looks human is Keith, and that's only because he really looks like he's on the edge this time, his eyes are so out of sync they don’t look like they belong to the same face. Oozing