Three years after my
group CMilk -- signed to Warner Bros. and produced, rather poorly, by
a famous English producer -- agreed that we'd delighted audiences long enough,
I played some new songs for an A&R guy at a publishing company, the sort
who wore a silver coke spoon in his chest hair and started every other sentence
with the word hey, as though to remind the listener how wonderfully candid he
was being. He did a bit of this and a bit of that on the side, including some
promoting, and said if I put a group together, he could guarantee a lucrative Canadian
tour.
I'd never heard of such a
thing, but put a group together anyway, starting with a prodigious Italianate
teenage drummer who idolised his counterpart in Deep Purple, which made me
nervous, but who'd painted his drums pink, which I loved beyond my ability to
express. He was joined by a grizzled (28-year-old) bassist who'd been with the
Motels, and a young guitar hero who could play 64th-note triplets up where
the frets get really narrow. I was iffy on the guitar heroics, but was assured
that audiences had come to demand them.
I taught them 16 of my
songs, which I fancied to be rather Nick Lowe-ish — tuneful, you see, poppy,
often droll. I imagined, given the guitarist's Marshall stack, that we sounded rather
like Cheap Trick, albeit with not-as-good lead vocals (mine!). I named us The
Pits (as in my answer to Cole Porter's 'You're the Top') and decreed that what
we played was (stand back!)...Maximum Pop. I rang the publishing company
A&R guy to relate the glorious news and discovered he'd stopped taking my
calls.
Unable to bear the
thought of my recruits' eyes misting over when I admitted we wouldn't be seeing
Saskatchewan and the Yukon Territory after all, I got us a quick midweek
booking at the celebrated Whisky a Go Go on actual Sunset Blvd., where I
delighted our audience of around 14 by sticking my head at every opportunity
into one of the teenage drummer's mounted pink tom toms. (My ears are ringing
still!) We affixed pictures of ourselves to light poles throughout Hollywood,
and our fame spread. Its booker asked if we'd like to open for Devo for three
nights at West Hollywood's Starwood, whose stock in trade was smirkily
narcissistic lite-metal acts with recent record deals.
I knew little about Devo
except that they were from somewhere deep in the American outback and were
kooky, seemingly for kookiness's sake. After Arthur Brown's celebrated
performance at the Shrine Auditorium in support of The Who many summers before,
a great many locals had taken briefly to setting themselves afire, but Los
Angeles had otherwise never shown much interest in kookiness. In the wake of
David Bowie's show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in the autumn of 1972,
a group called Zolar-X had taken to dressing head to toe at all times in
skin-tight silver lurex and claiming not to be able to speak a terrestrial
language, but everyone except the long-suffering staff of Guitar Center had
ignored them.
Thinking of opening for
Devo — we with our lovely tight-in-the-crotch bellbottoms and long hair, layered
in the popular "shag" style, our 64th-note triplets and my own
occasionally on-key evocations of Boston's Bradley Delp's falsetto – the phrase
blow them off stage came to mind.
We turned up for our
sound check. A couple of slightly disreputable-looking girls wandered in to watch,
leeringly. Life was wonderful. I realised we'd also been joined by a dweebish
guy who looked, in glasses of the sort that nobody with any panache had worn
since Harry S Truman's presidency, like a refugee from a high school
electronics club. His nondescript features arranged themselves into an
expression of mock fascination as the guitar player's nimble digits headed inexorably for the
top of his fret board. Apparently duly chastened, the dweeb slinked back out
into the sunshine and smog. But then, a moment later, while the guitar player was still
going diddly-diddly-diddly at a speed guaranteed to fill our dressing room with
rapacious nymphets while poor Devo played to the bar staff, here he was anew,
brandishing a remarkable joke guitar of his own, with around 48 strings. As our guitarist bent back at the
waist, closed his eyes, and lifted his face to the heavens, fingers a-blur, our
antagonist - and let us here begin calling a spade a spade: Mark Mothersbaugh —
did likewise. I giggled in spite of myself, but thought: Just wait until
tonight, pal, when The People, who I'm assured have come to demand guitar
heroics, decide.
Guess again, Johnny. What
to my wondering eyes should appear glaring vengefully up at us when we took the
stage for our first set but every pimply, misshapen, or otherwise irredeemably dweebish
past member of a high school electronics club in LA and his girlfriend, and oh
boy, were they in no mood whatever for tight-in-the-crotch bellbottoms and
evocations of Boston. We finished every song either to deathly silence or
gentle hissing. And then Mothersbaugh and his men came on in their wacky
matching jumpsuits, all herky jerky rhythms, robotic movements, and bleating
declamation, all fervently...kooky. And the misshapen, pimply, and irredeemably
dweebish were in absolute ecstasy.
Now, as our dressing room remained the loneliest place in Los Angeles, 'twas another phrase entirely that came to mind: Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, though of course I knew very well. Seven years before, I'd been one of Iggy Stooge's most fervent and well-placed (writing for national magazines) early fans. Nine months before, in London, I'd been one of the first living Americans to get wind of the Sex Pistols, produced by the same guy who'd produced CMilk, and had found 'Anarchy in the UK' transformatively exhilarating. But what on earth did the arty, staunchly arch Devo have to do with punk?
Now, as our dressing room remained the loneliest place in Los Angeles, 'twas another phrase entirely that came to mind: Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, though of course I knew very well. Seven years before, I'd been one of Iggy Stooge's most fervent and well-placed (writing for national magazines) early fans. Nine months before, in London, I'd been one of the first living Americans to get wind of the Sex Pistols, produced by the same guy who'd produced CMilk, and had found 'Anarchy in the UK' transformatively exhilarating. But what on earth did the arty, staunchly arch Devo have to do with punk?
This: the Starwood gig
made the misshapen and disenfranchised who attended it realise their numerousness.
None could deny it now: they were a bona fide constituency, capable of
supporting a...scene! Suddenly, punk was everywhere.
The Dils! The Weirdos! The
Screamers! The Germs! The Dickies! The Thises! The Thats! The most unlikely
places - restaurants in Chinatown (few had heretofore suspected that LA even
had one!), bars formerly popular with 72-year-old barflies in birdshit-caked baseball
caps glaring murderously at their own drinks in mid-afternoon — became key venues
for the new music. The curmudgeonly restauranteuse Esther Wong emerged as a key
impresaria even though (or, it occurs to me as I write this, because) her
English was intelligible only to those with a few stiff drinks in them.
Suddenly there were as
many awful, brazen imitations of the Sex Pistols and Clash about as there'd
been awful, brazen imitations of the Rolling Stones a dozen years before.
As in every pop music
upheaval, most of the would-be-cashers-in on the trend got it all wrong,
neither less nor more in LA than elsewhere. In theory, punk made musicians long
on vim and vision but short on chops feel they had nothing to apologise for. In
practice, a lot of no-talent bozos began offering their not having been
troubled to learn to play their instruments as inherently noble, as a
manifestation of the True Spirit of Rock. But if rock and roll had really been
reclaimed from the virtuosos and smirky narcissists, how was it that local boys
Van Halen's debut album was outselling all the punk groups' put together by a
factor of around 1000 to 1?
In a year or so, when
everybody got fatally fed up with punk's chaos and cacophony, it began to be
pushed aside by self-described power poppers in narrow ties, most notably The
Knack, who raised the smirky narcissism bar to an altitude heretofore
unimagined. ("...but the little girls understand," indeed!) Within
two years, Motley Crue, the worst group in the history of Western popular music,
had become the city's darlings. Whereupon a new phrase sprang to mind: Ever get
the feeling you've been cheated?
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