Marc Tracy and the descent into decadence

Phil had gone home, somewhat disillusioned and financially fucked. Geoff had got himself a job as a grill chef in Quaglinos - mucho kudos! I was grinding to a halt in the Hammersmith Labour Exchange, and the flat at Earls Court had been infiltrated by an Australian called Brian who brought along his American girlfriend and Geoff's new love interest, Maria Vega - a New-Yorker who was dark, Hispanic and beautiful. Then gradually things started going downhill. People would ask to crash and then become resident - A guy who styled himself "The Joker" (pain in the arse relic from the beatnic era who would exclaim at random intervals "Hatha Yoga" and adopt a suitable meditative position); a fat girl called Josie who stayed alive by begging for cigarettes and spare change; a junkie friend of Geoff's who stole our food and squirted the detritus of his syringes onto the bathroom mirror, and finally, another American who claimed to have been the drummer for "Joey Dee and the Starlighters", a Yank band who'd had a hit record some years earlier with a song called "The Peppermint Twist". He didn't play any more, on account of his addiction.



Maria had to go back to the States, and Geoff and I took the opportunity to quietly leave what had become little more than a flop-house - a home for the wasted.



We got ourselves a bed-sit in Bayswater and I began writing a book called "Irving Glottenheimer Gets His Man", while Geoff managed to get romantically involved with the then American Ambassador's daughter. Things came to a head when she stayed at our place for two straight days and her father reported her to the police as missing. This led to an early morning knock on the door courtesy of the Met's finest. We were summarily quizzed while the young lady in question was bundled into a limo and whisked away to the safety of the embassy.



All this activity attracted the attention of a guy who had a room on the opposite side of the hall from us. After the police had left, he knocked on our door and introduced himself.



Marc Tracy had to be seen to be believed. He was strikingly good looking in a Freddie Mercury kind of way and wore a frock coat with a wing collar shirt and flaired pin-stripe trousers. In one hand he carried a jewelled cane, and in the other a large joint. He invited us into his rooms for a smoke and introduced us to his flat-mate, Cliff, who played guitar.



Cliff and I hit it off immediately, as did Geoff and Marc, who were both people of the peacock variety.



Marc was into all kinds of money-making schemes, but his financial mainstay was a young prostitute who was deeply in love with him. She would turn tricks (mainly rich old guys), and shower gifts on Marc - new shirts, expensive meals, tickets for the best gigs etc.



A couple of weeks after we met him, Marc found accomodation in Sloane Square - an up-market area not far from the King's Road. A short time later I finally caved in and quit the Labour Exchange job. It was a spur of the moment fuck-this kind of thing but the end result was me not being able to come up with my share of the rent money, and Geoff and I having to quit the Bayswater scene and crash at Marc's place.



Geoff loved it. Every Saturday he and Marc would cruise the King's Road and pick up girls who they would bring back and fornicate with. In the meantime Cliff and I would rehearse songs for a band we were planning to put together. It was 1967, the summer of love, and all things seemed possible. My own sexual activities concentrated on frequent liasons with an Indian girl who had been my supervisor during my Hammersmith gig. Try as I may however, I could not get her involved in the Chelsea scene. She had a conservative aspect to her personality that made her deeply suspicious of the whole hippy thing.



A drummer friend of mine called Allan Price appeared on the scene and crashed at Marc's as well. Looking back, it was beginning to look like a replay of the Earl's Court debacle. Tempers got frayed. Marc's pet whore gave Allan a fiver prompting Marc to yell at him (when she'd left!) - "You can't ponce off her because I'm poncing off her!"



By now Allan and I had got a little jazz trio together with Iain Hines on keyboards. We played Hatchett's, a very cool and popular club just off Picadilly a few times, and then got a series of gigs playing at American air-force bases throughout England. It was during this time that Iain introduced me to the likes of Oscar Peterson and the Modern Jazz Quartet which offered up an entirely new musical landscape to explore.



Financially things were hard. At one point with no job and hardly any gigs coming in, I found myself surviving for a week on two chocolate bars a day which I bought from the machine in the Sloane Square tube station. Shortly afterwards I got a job as an invoice clerk at T.J. Poupart's, a fruiterer in Covent Garden. It wasn't such a bad gig. The canteen was subsidised and the food was not only cheap but good. The other guys who worked there were weird - they seemed to spend most of their time winding each other up and trying to arrange fights during the dinner hour. Apart from that, I discovered that downstairs where the fruit was checked and processed, the inspectors would condemn a whole tray of peaches or apples if just one of them was rotten. They were then available for the staff to buy at something like sixpence (2 and a half pence) the lot. We ate a lot of fruit while the job lasted.



Geoff had by this time left Marc's place and moved in with somebody he had met at work. Cliff had gone back to Watford and the landlord was knocking on Marc's door for unpaid rent.



I switched jobs for a position as porter in a branch of Boots the Chemist in Victoria. All money was being shamelessly spent on gigs (the Marquee being a favourite venue) drugs and good times. When times were really hard I would purloin bars of diabetic chocolate from the storeroom. I struck up a lustful relationship with one of the girls who worked there - she would make an excuse to visit the basement storerooms when I was working there and we would engage in frantic five-minute copulation sessions. Very risky, and very exciting.



It was during my brief tenure at Boots that I witnessed something of an epoch making event.


It was my lunch hour, and I strolled around to the local sandwich bar and treated myself to a cream-cheese, ham and honey combo - at least, that's what I remember it being. I ate it walking back to the shop, then sat down on a bench and took in the sights of London in the summer of 67. Across the street a crowd had gathered outside a record store. I was curious. Why were they there? What was going on? Suddenly the street was full of music, and the crowd just gazed with rapt attention at the two hi-fi speakers placed strategically above the shop doorway.


I, and all the others, were listening to the brand new Beatles album - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. I didn't go back to work. The universe had suddenly achieved a spiritual cohesion hithertofore unknown to me and I intended to thoroughly immerse myself in the experience.