I’m a fan. I
became a fan when my musical taste came on-line in late 1971—which I think of
as “The year Led Zeppelin IV was released.” Since then, fandom has
occupied most of my time, energy, and money. Any attention span I have left
over, I spend writing. Sometimes I combine the two, as I did in my story “The Burn Out.”
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| Fission # 3 |
I was born at the
wrong time to absorb the British Blues Boom as it happened. Tons of Sobs,
Free’s first album from 1969, was on my Must Buy list as I worked backward from
’71. On the list also were Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck. All the heavy rock bands
worked the same Blues coalface back then, and the similarities between Truth
(Jeff Beck’s first), Led Zeppelin I and Free’s Tons of Sobs are
plain. The band slams through such classics as the barnstorming lust
locomotive, “The Hunter” (Albert King)
and the deathbed macho boast “Goin’ Down
Slow” (St. Louis Jimmy Oden, via the
Howlin’ Wolf version). Free’s sound is raw and aggressive, testosterone-laden
sweat flying from the speakers.
Free comprised
four white British teenagers (15-18 at the time of recording) and it seems
bizarre that they should attempt songs with lyrics begging the listener to
write the singer’s mother and tell her the shape that he’s in (and moreover,
that his health is fading and he needs forgiveness for his sins). They do, they
pull it off brilliantly, and a lot of that credibility comes from the
guitarist, Paul Kossoff, who effortlessly soars through the solos with a
gossamer-light feel underlying a snarling attack that rages continually against
the dying of the light.
Koss, 17, almost
certainly did not know that he himself was going down fast. He was dead inside
eight years.
I never saw Free
live. The ban split up when Kossoff’s drug problem became too hard to handle.
Koss made efforts to get clean but never got back to full health. I bought his
solo album, Back Street Crawler
(1973) but despite its solid white blues feel, and a guitar sound like heavy
whipping cream poured over double chocolate cake, something about it seemed
off—it conjured up its own title, let’s put it that way.
When I heard that
electric folkie John Martyn had taken the faltering Kossoff under his wing in
1975, I was elated. I put aside my anti-folk bias and ventured to Leeds to see
them play together. I went with a friend. As we neared the auditorium in the late
afternoon, we heard an inordinately loud Marshall-amplified Les Paul. The
rehearsal/sound check was underway. Koss was the only person who could produce
those sounds from a guitar, and the realization stopped me in my
tracks.
“Probably just a
roadie,” my friend said, urging me along. I was 16 at the time and that is
still the most cynical thing anyone has ever said to me. I assumed I’d hear
more that evening, so I moved on without objecting. My assumption proved to be
incorrect.
I wasn’t a big
John Martyn fan. I knew his Solid Air of course, and “I’d Rather be the
Devil” (Skip James) but I had little interest in a man who was perpetually
drunk and had what we nowadays call a “problematic” relationship with women. He
was a rowdy folk singer accompanied on this tour by an even rowdier stand-up
bass player (Danny Thompson) and a drummer (John Stevens). I didn’t know, going
in, that shenanigans had started much earlier in the day. Koss had already got
himself punched by the offended boyfriend of a girl he coveted, followed by a beating from Martyn himself for lying about the incident backstage. But I
heard about all that much later.
I knew Koss would
not come on stage until the encore, but John Martyn kept me interested in the
meantime. He played an acoustic guitar with a pickup taped across the soundhole
as well as a contact pickup taped to the body. The signal was fed to an Echoplex effects box, producing a
hypnotic, pulsing reverberation
above which he played chords and melody. Married with his famously slurred
voice, the effect was hymn-like and meditative, an effect that was shattered
every time a song ended and the band recommenced swearing at one other.
Eventually, Paul
Kossoff appeared, swigging from a bottle of Crème de Menthe. The bottle was
half empty and Koss made a strenuous effort to finish it during the set.
Together the band played three songs. I was delighted to hear
him play live but I noticed a significant deterioration between his playing
during the sound check and the post beating, post liquor evening performance.
He had less than a year to live. Koss died on 19th March 1976. He
was 25 years old.
There are two stories out there giving a cause
of death. The book Heavy Load claims “Unconfirmed reports have Kossoff
picking up some pills before the all-night flight ‘off some dozy bird who was
hanging around’.” No source for the information is given in the book.
Later, it presents this version:
“Paul’s death certificate read cerebral and
pulmonary edema. Drugs didn’t appear to be in his system. Sandie, Paul’s
girlfriend at the time, says drugs are what led up to the tragic conclusion
that day but did not cause his death on the flight. ‘No one told us that you
should not fly with a blood clot condition for about a year,” says Sandie. ‘And
after his heart attack and the blood clot in his leg…I think the altitude moved
the clot to his lungs’.”
A second book, Free at Last, elaborates
on the first claim. Bandmate Terry Wilson is quoted as saying,
“Paul was on his
way out. He'd died earlier; his heart had stopped, about a year earlier in
England when we were back there after the first record. Paul was in the
hospital and they brought him back and told him if he ever did drugs again he
wouldn't live.” Wilson goes on, “There were times when Paul had so many friends
around who just wanted to comfort him. […] I walked into his room and he had a
couple of his friends there that brought some barbiturates and some other
stuff. I walked in and was so pissed at the girl who was there. Her name was
Leslie I think, but went by the name of Dale. […] A day later we were on the
plane going to New York to play Atlantic Records the new album when Koss
died—from the very drugs Dale or Leslie or whatever her name was scored for
him. It turned out he had gotten heroin, valium and Seconals from her.”
I have participated in various fandoms ever
since that late 1971 musical fangirl awakening. Whether it was Led Zeppelin, or
Star Wars, or Harry Potter, I’ve long been immersed in fan culture and hung out
with the fans. The realization that a fellow fan may have killed a hero
of mine really frosted my cookies.
I understand a
fan’s dedication to the object of their fandom. The word is a shortened form of
‘fanatic’ after all. Anyone who has observed a weeklong argument on social
media over whether a Star Destroyer could defeat the USS Enterprise
knows that fandom is serious business, and anyone who has seen a young girl in
tears outside a concert hall because she got to touch the star’s hand knows
that emotions run sky high. I was 55 years old when my current crush answered a
question of mine on a fan forum, and I told everybody who would listen that
he’d written back to me. I didn’t wash my eyes for a week. I’m quite aware what
a fan will do to get close to a star.
Write what you
know, they say. To get the bad taste out of my mouth, I wrote a short story
about a tween fan who gives a gift to the member of the boy band she most
admires but then has to watch helplessly as the gift puts him on a self-destructive
path . I’m a science fiction writer, so the gift is not a drug, but a
technology.
That story, “The Burn Out,” is featured in Fission #3 from
the British Science Fictions Association (BSFA). The online anthology is
available to BSFA members and the print
version can be obtained from Amazon right now.
