Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [17]
It was during this hiatus of rock-star tomfoolery that Billy K penned ‘Love at the Speed of Light’. Many of the original drafts still remain on public display, as Billy K wrote, scratched, sprayed, carved and burned the words and music on to whatever surface was at hand when the muse called. The toilet door from New York nightspot the Confession Club has been suspended by steel cables in the domed reception, adorned by the lipstick-painted lyrics to ‘The Last Show on Earth’:
On this night of dying light,
your shadow on the floor like a stain
or ghost,
the book face down and
streaming words,
I watch you strip,
see the universe blaze on skin,
the runaway stars
come home.
Stadiums, concert halls and clubs packed out and pulsed with Billy K and the Notorious. New songs still jumped and jerked on the raw energy of youth, but now navigated the listener through deeper, more complex emotions.
Until Zdenka appeared on the front page of Fame, massaging tanning oil into the corpulent body of her former husband, Gene Fontaine, on his Monaco yacht, Billy K had focused the band with the acumen of a master conductor.
Little is known about his brief disappearance after the headline infidelity of his supposed lover. Ricky Wise cancelled dates in Barcelona and Madrid, covering up the vanishing of his star with a tonsillitis scare. Only a week later, a day after the attempted shooting of Fontaine in his swimming pool, did Billy K surface again, performing a subdued set for disappointed fans in Berlin.
While the gendarmes questioned him about the ‘missing week’, no formal inquiries were pursued. However, Gecko lawyers issued writs and demands for retractions of tabloid speculation venturing on accusation.
From Sydney to San Francisco, for a month after the split with Zdenka, Billy K played and sung for his very life. Performance was his raison d’être, and the world beyond the stage was nothing more than distraction between him, his guitar and a microphone.
But tiffs and tantrums marred the post-gig comedowns. Billy K fired roadie Mitch North, then immediately rehired him as his personal drug mule, buyer and pimp. ‘He was just permanently wired,’ recalls Mitch. ‘Before he had a bit of peace after a concert, downtime. Then after Zdenka it went nuts. If he wasn’t singing, he was snorting, smoking, or having sex.’
His guitar was his security blanket. No technician was permitted to touch his beloved Les Paul, let alone soundcheck. Then to watch him play, caress, and fan his fingers across the six strings, who would have dared come between Billy K and his object of desire?
Thanks to Ricky Wise and an envelope stuffed with euros, Billy K dodged jail for his rented lover in Rome. Another time, against a charge of ‘Gross sexual indecency in a public place’, the state prosecutor of Oregon wasn’t about to be palmed off by a record exec in a tailored suit – though the saxophone-playing judge would later be spotted in a Chicago nightclub at the table of Wise.
Before a set of 20,000 fans, the ‘gross sexual indecency’ was allowing 22-year-old Veronica Fry to climb onstage and unbuckle his trousers. Billy K did not resist her advance.
On his release, the Seattle Star quoted Billy K as saying, ‘I had the time of my life.’ Two weeks of prison, before the judge threw out the case, had allowed him to take a breather from the baying press and screaming fans. During the internment he scratched a whole new album on to the ceramic walls. He even asked if he could purchase the tiles lining his cell. Warden Brubaker refused, declaring his etchings, ‘Nothing more than typical and wanton disregard for state property that is endemic of a generation lacking respect and, dare I say,