When I first let my
hair grow long, there were maybe half a dozen males on my college campus with
long hair, and we lived in dread of being gang-raped by fellow male students
who hated us for our perceived bisexuality. When I would walk past the football
team with my girlfriend, they would bellow, “Which one’s the girl?” You couldn’t
win. I was thus thrilled to note that in my Italian 101 class, there was another
long-haired boy, though he seemed to have no interest in communing with me. That
boy turned out to be Rusty Mayo, who I later found out to be a singer, and to
have an elder brother, Ronnie, a multi-instrumentalist.
A year or two passed,
and the brothers, who’d got wind of my playing the drums, sort of, asked if I wanted
to look into forming a group with them. They and I and my friend Dennis Castanares
— who was superhumanly musical, and who could sing McCartney-ish high harmony,
and who regularly attracted huge audiences on campus when he sat down with his
guitar and performed the whole of Sgt. Pepper, except Within You, Without You —
convened in the basement of the dormitory I inhabited. Ronnie played lead guitar,
of all things, and Rusty bass, both about as well as I played the drums. Castanares
sneered. It was their notion to call themselves The Bel-Air Blues Band, Bel-Air
being the second-richest neighbourhood in Los Angeles. (The richest is so rich
that one dares not utter its name: Holmby Hills, where the Playboy mansion is.)
The Bel-Air Blues Band
never actually materialised. I detested the blues, and I don’t think the Mayos were
that wild about them either, and Ronnie wasn’t exactly Peter Green. But then, a
couple of weeks after my graduation, they contacted me to say they’d put a new
group together with an engineering student of comparable sympathies, and needed
a drummer. They\d apparently forgotten that I barely knew on which side of the
kit to seat myself.
They’d written a sheaf
of songs based quite brazenly on hits of The Kinks, to whom I was in the process
of becoming linked because their record company had hired me to suggest ways in
which they could be made to seem more interesting to an American audience that
had turned its collective back on them. We rehearsed at a veterinarian’s office
in the San Fernando Valley. After our first rehearsal, the engineering student,
who played lead guitar marvelled at how terrific I was.
But then it got ugly. The
Mayos, it turned out, wanted to be cute (no, I’ll say the actual word: precious),
whereas I thought we should be The Who — deafening, violent, and a little
scary. Ronnie didn’t look pleased. I was soon invited to cease belonging to the
group.
But I need to backtrack. They had a backer —
their original drummer, whose silver Slingerland kit I got to play. He paid for
us to go into a studio, where we recorded some godawful demos of the Mayos’
very precious songs. In spite of the presence of the engineering student, who
would go on to get a lot of production work because he was good with sound, they
mixed my drums so low as to be barely audible. Nonetheless, no record companies pleaded to
be allowed to release the record. The Mayos’ fervent anglophilia somehow became
known to boy wonder Rod Tundra, formerly of The Nazis, Philadelphia’s answer to
The Who, and he recorded an album with them for the label of Bob Dylan’s former
manager, who renamed them Spackles. It was just awful.
But then the Mayos jettisoned
everyone in the band to whom they weren’t related, and flew over to England,
where Rusty’s wildly theatrical, unapologetically cutesy falsetto, fake Scottish accent, and Ronnie’s catchy melodies, clever word play, and Charlie Chaplin impression made them very huge for around two weeks.
In fairness, Ronnie did develop into a good songwriter, though he was never
anything but wry. Half a decade later they enjoyed a resurgence when they made an awful New Wave sort of semi-hit
with one of the lesser members of The Go Gos, and went on to have a career as Cult
Favourites spanning over four decades while I, in the meantime, processed words
at a big fascist law firm in San Francisco, redeemed empty soft drink bottles,
and wondered, “Why not I, Lord?” a lot. And my present, second, wife regards Rod Tundra as The God Who Walks Among Us.
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