Oh Mr. Kent! It’s quite a tale you weave, my good sir, of your tragic figure cutting no mean swath through that hazy decade formerly and still known as, the 70’s, Iggy, Lester, Bowie, Chrissie, Zepp, the Stones, the Clash, and the Pistols, among others, playing their supporting parts in your tragicomedy with unbridled gusto as the heroin jostled with common sense and basic biological needs in your veins and viscera while friendships, love, and employment ebbed and flowed on the tidal wave of your addiction, and of course, your ego. Oh, and can I forgive you for not responding to young Stephen Morrissey’s letters? Perhaps your cold callous neglect helped fuel some of the best music in pop history. Maybe.

It’s a damn wonder that you lived to tell the tale, my good sir. The heroin tried to kill you. Sid Vicious, at the behest of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, or so you report, tried to kill you. Street thugs left you for dead in a vacant lot, but you walked away from it all, not unscathed perhaps, but more perplexing, none the wiser, either.

You felt no pain, you say. The heroin helped. Of course it did. Through it all, you failed to see that it was you trying to kill you. The eleventh hour arrived, you slept. Eleven-thirty, you slept. You went home one Christmas, your mom cried at your ghostly figure darkening your parents’ doorstep. Nothing. Eleven-fifty-nine strikes. An illness takes you to the precipice of your earthly existence. Finally, you wake up, with a little help from your friend methadone, and commit yourself right then and there to a good old fashioned regimen of hard work and perseverance with the ultimate goal being the achievement of full fecal integration. Good on ya, and thank god. This book is just what the world, maybe the music world, not to mention my little world, needs right now.

This is a story yours truly can identify with, or at least would like to identify with. I’ve been through my crap, too, ya know. Who hasn’t? Kent’s memoir is quite reminiscent of Toby Young’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: A young idealist tosses himself into the cynical world of entertainment and fashion, gets tossed to and fro, gets smashed to bits, yet manages to come out of it all still alive and much the better for it. The upshot in Kent’s case is that after going through hell, he finally meets and marries a nice girl, moves to Paris, starts writing again, becomes a father, becomes a Christian, and other gooey good-guy, dominant-culture-reinforcin’ stuff. However, no matter how gooey and gushing it may seem from the outside, I cannot begrudge him of that. In fact, call me a wee bit jealous of his descent into the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.

Like Young, Kent seemed to have a lot of fun along the way, despite his long spell of being a junkie ghost about London, and more far-flung parts. Kent not only wrote about the above-named luminaries, but became friends with them as well. He shacked up with pre-Pretenders Chrissie Hynde, and became good buddies with one James Osterberg, aka, Iggy Pop who wound up saving Kent’s life one deep dark night in Los Angeles. It may be the book’s most harrowing moment as well as its most uplifting. Per Kent, Iggy displayed a kindness and human decency that were “thin on the ground” in the 70’s.

That episode pretty much sums up the whole book and its position in the universe of books, or at least memoirs. I’ll have to say, Apathy for the Devil is pulling a bit of an Iggy in this decade where quality memoirs are ‘thin on the ground.’

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