Thursday, November 16, 2017

Something I Forgot to Confess

Well, now Al Franken has been accused of sexual harassment. It appears as though no man alive won’t be so accused in the current climate (many, of course, rightly), so I’d better come clean about my own transgressions. 

The first was in around 1973, at the infamous Rainbow Bar and Grill on Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood, where an occasional B-list rock star was occasionally glimpsed, but which was much more the domain of kids from the hinterlands dressed up as rock stars and groupies. I was there with the guy in my first band with whom I used to chase skirts when this teen idol type came in with a pair of twins, one per arm. My personal lust-o-meter shot immediately into the red, as the twins were spectacularly wanton-looking, all excessive liquid eyeliner and white foundation, huge dyed black hair and blood-red lippy, and scandalous  attire. There wasn’t a streetwalker on Sunset Blvd. that night who looked more streetwalkerish. 

They were ultra-Elvira-ish years before Elvira first appeared on TV.  They were Motley Crue before Motley Crue, Siouxsie Sioux when said personage was still a puffy, plain teenager in the southeast Lonoon sticks.They were The Ronettes times ten. Compared to them, Amy Winehouse at her most dissolute would have looked like Karen Carpenter. 

They were everything I’d ever wanted in a woman, at least visually.

I’m not kidding about this, though everyone always thinks I am, just as when I say I adore gloomy weather, and am exultant when it starts getting dark before five in the afternoon. My two best friends, both bass players, seemed to prefer cheerleader types. One of them explained that he enjoyed the idea of debauching such a young woman. I always wanted one pre-debauched. The guy in my band would forever after refer to the twins as The Sisters of Death. 

I was nonetheless able to get him to sign onto the idea of inviting the Sisters to join us in our booth. Teen Idol invited himself too, and began tellling us what a big star he was in the process of becoming, which is what one did at the Rainbow. As he droned on and on, I put my hand on the fishnet stocking-clad leg of the Sister beside me in the booth. She didn’t seem to dislike the idea, and my hand headed higher, and then higher still. I think she viewed me as a better prospect than Teen Idol. But then she said, “Don’t,” and I immediately withdrew my hand. I felt a little spurned, and neglected to get her phone number.

A few weeks later, I was walking down the squalid part of Santa Monica Blvd., with its wall-to-wall adult theaters, when whom should I spot but the victim of my unsolicited touching, or her sister. She seemed to be employed in a massage parlour. I made the mistake of considering What People Might Think, as my friend and I had, in the interim, met another pair of maidens at the Rainbow — one the daughter of the star of a popular sitcom. They’d been gratifyingly gobsmacked to be meeting the John Mendelssohn, and when we exchanged phone numbers, one of them, the one I fancied less, had observed her having mine was like a young man having that of Joey Heatherton, who was quite hot stuff at the time. 

She never phoned, and when I returned to Santa Monica Blvd., the massage parlour said the apple of my eye had been accepted into medical school in Boston, and I am course of just kidding about that last part. 

We might have been so happy together.







Formerly Wanton http://amzn.to/2htyAlo is a detective story set in the tawdry milieu of late-‘80s Hollywood hair metal. Who Is Keri Fetherwait? http://amzn.to/2zIrFPM is a satire about a no-talent little dweeb from a TV singing competition who attains Taylor Swift-ish success. Every paragraph will make you roar with laughter! The Mona Lisa’s Brother http://amzn.to/2hDxQh6 is a heartwarming fable about an amateur guitarist who does a good deed and suddenly finds himself playing like Hendrix, except better! 

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

What If It Turns Out Joan Jett Isn't the Queen of Rock and Roll?

I have just read Camille Paglia’s new biography of Fleetwood Mac frontperson Stevie Ray Nicks, and found it fascinating. I have always disliked her singing, and Stevie’s too, and was unaware that her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham-Palace had been abusive, as I’d further been unaware of her having been the second cousin, once removed, but later replaced, of the 37th president of the United States, the one who spelled their surname Nixon, resigned in disgrace, and then made a fool of himself by trying too hard to look exultant as he boarded the helicopter that whisked him out of American public life. 

Honestly, I can understand trying to put on a brave face while enduring the most intense public humiliation of any American politician ever, but all that desperate grinning and tennis backhand waving and V-sign-flashing, intended to evoke his glory days on the campaign trail, succeeded only in making us think, "Jeepers, he really is stark raving mad."I have often wondered if, when inside the chopper, and out of sight of the photographers, he let out a bloodcurdly wail, burst into tears, and tried to slash his own wrists with a shard of broken glass. I'd be willing to bet Donald Trump doesn't show us half Nixon's courage when he makes his own Last Walk to Marine 1. 


I know Stevie Ray Nicks, in any event, to be a person of great shortness from having stood next to her for a moment in the early 1980s, at a time when young people routinely pelted her with stuffed animals and bouquets every time she stepped on stage. Even in her trademark platform boots she barely came up to my solar plexus, and I’m only 6-1. 

Of course morbid shortness is hardly rare in popular music. I think Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones is around 5-4. The band had to hire Brian Jones to play rhythm guitar just so Bill wouldn’t feel self-conscious about being so small, in much the same way Tom Cruise, who’s 4-11 if standing on last week’s Variety, is always cast opposite a very, very short leading lady. I think a great many rock stars became rock stars in the first place because they thought it was the only hope anyone as stumpy as they had of getting laid. When I met Tom Petty backstage at the Whisky a Go Go in Hollywood, I felt as though being introduced to an eight-year-old. Benmont Tench, his organist, came to audition for my band The Pits before Tom became the dance sensation that swept the nation, and was shortish, but not an embarrassment. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there are no photographs of him and Tom standing side by side.  

I was intrigued to learn that, when Bon Scott drank himself to death, AC/DC tried, in the interest of continuity, to draft the then-unknown Jon Bon Jovi to replace him, but that he demurred because he was even then making plans to captivate the world with his affected singing and hypergeneric rock music. The band then approached Stevie, but she was iffy about changing her name to Bonnie, worrying that people might think she was trying to leap aboard the Bonnie Tyler bandwagon, even though she had by that time sold many, many more records than the raspy-voiced Welsh songbird, whose marriage to Steven Tyler was rumoured to be on the rocks. One has to wonder about a person who decorates his microphone stand with scarves. 

Stevie apparently decided to stay with Fleetwood Mac largely because of very lucrative offers from McDonald’s and Kraft Foods. The former wanted to licence the band’s name for a new midrange hi-fat/lo-nutrition menu addition for diners who found the Quarter Pounder inadequate but the Big Mac excessive. Kraft, on the other hand, believed that Fleetwood Macaroni would be very popular among college students, and those on fixed incomes. In Mark Haddon’s The Pier Falls, there is a deeply harrowing story you should read about a morbidly obese man who eats a ghastly paste he makes out of sugar and butter. 

Stevie Ray's Wikipedia entry suggests that she's widely acknowledged as the queen of rock and roll. I'd always imagined it was the prolifically talented Joan Jett, about which I am of course only kidding. No sensible person disputes that the late Chrissy Amphlett of The Divinyls is the greatest performer in the genre's long, and soon to end, history.






[And now a word from our sponsors. I've written three rock-themed novels you may very well enjoy. Formerly Wanton http://amzn.to/2htyAlo is a detective story set in the tawdry milieu of late-‘80s Hollywood hair metal. Who is Keri Fetherwaite? http://amzn.to/2zIrFPM is a satire about a no-talent little dweeb from a TV singing competition who attains Taylor Swift-ish success. Every paragraph will make you roar with laughter! The Mona Lisa's Brother  http://amzn.to/2hDxQh6  is a heartwarming fable about an amateur guitarist who does a good deed and suddenly finds himself playing like Hendrix, except better! 




Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Statutory Rape and Me

Having seen much lately about David Bowie’s allegedly having deflowered then-14-year-old Lori Maddox [not pictured], who later went on to inspire Jimmy Page to compose Layla, or whatever the story is, I thought, in a spirt of full disclosure, that I’d recount my own past as a statutory rapist.

If my (that is, Wikipedia’s) reading of California law is accurate, my first girlfriend and I statutorily raped each other for around three months between our promising each other eternal adoration and our turning 18 a week apart. (I was immobilised by shyness and self-doubt as a teen, and got a very late start on dating.) There was no actual coitus, but a great deal of erotic touching and what is still known as petting in parts of the country that wish to be perceived as either quaint or cute. I then statutorily raped Second Girlfriend. who was 17 (to my 19) during the first month of our romance. With her, much coitus! Then, with Third Girlfriend, the one with the fantastic thick blonde hair she so delighted in flinging about attention-demandingly when she danced, no coitus (we didn’t last very long), but more statutory rape, as she too was 17, and I a worldly, world-weary 20-year-old by then. 

Three years later, Bowie visited the West Coast for the first time. I wrote about him for Rolling Stone and we became BFFs. He was at the time an unknown who looked like Lauren Bacall and performed the songs of Jacques Brel with a straight face and much earnestness, and I The King of Los Angeles, so I was rather the bigger catch, in spite of his cute English accent. He cavorted just before flying home to London with a gorgeous (very, as in around 16) young woman called something like Keysia, who's in at least one of the more rigorously researched Bowie biographies, I think David Buckley’s. She was on the phone to me pretty much the moment he left for the airport. We might have gone on to wed and spawn gorgeous children but for the fact that she was either terribly vacuous or terribly shy, though not so much in bed. 

One living — nay, embodying! — the glamorous rock and roll lifestyle in those days was hardly expected to pay attention to age-of-consent laws, just as he or she was expected to use drugs, operate motor vehicles while under the influence, look thoroughly disreputable, and have stolen his or her instrument, preferably from a music store, rather than a fellow musician. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Keysia (now a home economics teacher in the Antelope Valley Unified School District (I’m just making this up)) was actually much more experienced sexually than I, and I didn’t worry even for a moment that I’d debauched her. 

One of the members of my first signed-to-a-label band openly lusted after very young girls. I found it distasteful. Another of us dated the very young Terri Nunn (later of Berlin and Top Gun soundtrack hit fame). I don’t know what went on between them. The drummer’s girlfriend was around 16, but I didn’t think it any of my business. She and I couldn’t stand each other. 

I would occasionally swan into Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, Lori Maddox’s home away from home, to seek the companionship of a lovely maiden. The closest I came was whisking one away in my blood-red Porsche one summer night, and up to my house in chic Laurel Canyon, but she was very nervous about the whole thing, and I drove her back to Rodney’s without so much as kissing her. I saw La Maddox and Sable Starr there pretty nearly every time, and found them the opposite of attractive. Every Saturday afternoon, Sable and other Rodney’s girls would dance lasciviously on The Real Don Steele Show on LA’s Channel 9, TRDS’s cameraman must have been the dirtiest old man in southern California at the time. You wouldn’t have believed some of the angles. 

I pause to marvel at Mr. Buckley (or whoever it was) finding Keysia, whose surname I didn’t know, as I strongly suspect Bowie himself didn’t either. I suspect neither of us spent more than a couple of hours with her. His blink-of-an-eye affair with her being recounted fully 28 years after the fact takes my breath away, to quote Terri Nunn’s biggest hit.

The central notion of statutory rape laws is that persons under a certain age are incapable of making informed erotic decisions. I have known a great many 45-year-olds who didn't make very good erotic decisions. 


Sunday, November 12, 2017

A Boy's Guide to Sexual Harassment


[Suggested listening.]

In 2003, I wrote and directed a scripted sketch comedy revue in London. My cast comprised two men and two women. One of the women, KD, was the second most gifted I’d ever worked with — and by far the most insufferable personally. She was one of those who’s never happier than when she knows people are waiting ever more nervously for her, and never showed up less than 20 minutes late to a rehearsal — even when we rehearsed upstairs in the pub she lived next door to. One night, she showed up for a performance around five minutes before I thought I'd have to tell the venue that one of the cast hadn't shown up, and the show couldn't go on. I wanted to bellow at her until her eardrums burst, but instead advised that she could continue showing up whenever she deigned to do so —with the understanding that anyone in the show (including me) who turned up after the agreed-upon time would forfeit his or her payment for the performance.

She was incensed, and advised the guy who ran a theatrical help-wanted board on which I commonly advertised that I’d sexually harassed her. I had not. For the actors-wanted board guy, though, accused was convicted, and he refused henceforth to run any of my adverts.

I’ve been thinking about KD a lot this week, as more and more famous people are accused of sexual impropriety, and the atmosphere comes ever more vividly to evoke that during the height (or, if you wish, nadir) of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s campaign to rid the government of Communists. I suspect that the vast majority of the current accusations are true, and it breaks my heart to hear what my women friends have had to endure in silence. But when I suggested this past week that we need to consider each case on its own merits, and not to rush to judgment, a couple of women of course called me A Privileged Male Asshole Who Doesn’t Understand. Even if, as is certainly the case, I’ve never harassed or coerced a woman, I’m apparently part of the problem because: male privilege.

Sorry. No sale. My sins against women are legion. They include petulance, deceit, selfishness, and even a bit of (verbal) cruelty. They include no trace of harassment or coercion, though, and I’m unwilling to be held even a little bit accountable for the horrid behaviour of Brett Ratner, Bill Cosby, Louis CK, or Harvey Swinestein just because of our common anatomy.

(Noble I ain’t. What’s made coercion unthinkable to me is the realisation that having to force myself on someone would ultimately make me feel less good, rather than better. I suspect I’ll never hire a prostitute. Having to pay someone to pretend to enjoy my company would make me feel less desirable than I do already.)

The real culprit in all of this is of course the patriarchy, which doesn’t oppress only women. I don’t believe for a millisecond I’ve suffered anywhere near as much as a woman who’s been raped or assaulted or humiliated, but suffer I have, as I believe everyone but a very few alpha males has. Through my boyhood and adolescence, the patriarchy kept whispering into my ear that I was somehow less than I ought to be. I wasn’t good with my fists, or at tying intricate knots. As a teenager, I didn’t want to tinker with cars, and found the idea of hunting absolutely repulsive. Beer had no allure for me — I didn’t like the way it tasted, and still don’t. I was good at traditionally feminine things like writing and art, but hopelessly inept mechanically. I wasn’t taciturn. Worst of all, I compensated for what I felt to be my inadequate manliness in the most shameful way imaginable, by reviling and ridiculing my gay brothers. If I had no prayer of making the varsity football team, by God, I could nonetheless be as loudly homophobic as its captain. The patriarchy had done its work.

When I worked for a controversial magazine publisher in 1980, his sister-in-law, nominal head of human resources for his publishing empire, decide that she…wanted me. If I’d reciprocated her interest in the first place, which I so did not, I’d have stopped reciprocating it immediately on learning that her husband was the publisher’s bodyguard/head of security, and that a young man in the mailroom to whom Sister-in-Law had earlier taken a shine had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. She was relentless, though, and I was actually relieved when the cocaine casualty who ran things day-to-day fired me. I then worked at a magazine whose woman editor called me into her office my second day and asked me to turn around slowly while she and the features editor gurgled at me lecherously.

If getting raped by a physically repulsive shithead like Harvey Swinestein is a 100 on the 1-to-100 humiliation index, what I’d suffered might rate a .00025. I’d actually been more amused than anything by the women editors' defiant lust. (And no, I do not mean to suggest that women should be comparably amused in similar situations.) But maybe it gave me a slightly better understanding of sexual harassment than the guy who’s never been on anything but the dishing-it-out side of the equation, and maybe that understanding lends some small credence to my feeling that reflexively ruining men’s reputations on the basis of a sole accusation is hardly fairer than dismissing a woman’s accusation out of hand.