My Year of Sleaze

Accustomed, as I am, to maybe a couple of hundred at most endorsing anything I do on Facebook, I was pleasantly shocked to see that over 1800 had LIKEd the photograph I recently posted of me with my former girlfriend The Nib at Xmas in 1975, I in the same lime green satin bowling shirt I’d worn to my high school reunion, and she, as the Festive Holiday Season prescribes, in red, and an understandably skeptical expression.

I welcomed 1975 in the Rainbow Bar & Grill, where boys hoping to be mistaken for rock stars and gullible girls would grope one another in preparation for hurrying back to one another’s squalid digs in the hinterlands. “Fuck you, 1974, and good riddance,” I said, holding my glass aloft. During the referenced 12 months, my musical career had gone nowhere, Rolling Stone had cruelly spurned the big Rodney Bingenheimer feature article in which I’d imagined myself to do a really good Tom Wolfe imitation, and Patti Armageddon [not her real name] had broken my heart.

The first several months of 1975 were more of the same, except with a lot of promiscuity thrown in. I would go to the Starwood, the West Hollywood nightclub at which acts of insufficient prestige for the Whisky or the Troubadour would perform to audiences made up largely of persons on their way to the Rainbow. I would guzzle a great deal of vodka for courage, and some coffee to keep me lively, and try to persuade some platform-shoed maiden from a suburb I’d heard of in weather reports, but never actually glimpsed, to come home with me. A fair number did.

To perform the new songs I'd been writing, I put together a little group, the most notable member of which was a sensational, if unendurably truculent, R&B drummer from the Palm Springs ghetto (who’d have guessed there was one?). A future member of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers came to audition, listened for a few minutes, made the face of one who has just smelled something unpleasant, and went home without playing a note, but someone at a record company gave us money to record a demo. A prominent manager, scoffing, described it as sounding like Neil Diamond singing Dr. Hook. I’d intended Scott Walker singing Cole Porter, with a big, brash beat.

One night at the Starwood I came upon one of those record biz publicists to whom I’d formerly been ritually awful when I was The King of LA, and amazed him by being cordial. He offered me a job writing a little newsmagazine in my characteristic hilariously cynical style that might make ABC Records appear something other than hopelessly clueless.

My mentor pulled the plug when he discovered that I intended to make the third issue a celebration of Immorality in the Music Business, and to load it with photos appropriated from bondage magazines and of a pompous female executive who’d rubbed me the wrong way, both with the caption, “Stomach-turning scenes like this are all too common in today’s record industry!” At the time, all I knew about bondage was that I really liked the outfits.

[You won't want to miss a syllable of my account of the rest of 1975, coming tomorrow, right here!]

Whores and I

I have never paid for sex. God knows there’ve been stretches, such as after the crumbling of my first marriage, when I thought that, at 40, I’d lost my looks and would never find another gal to love me. It certainly isn’t that I didn’t consider paying for it, but that I figured I’d wind up feeling a chump, as I had on those few occasions when I’d ventured into strip clubs, or whatever they were actually called. The girls there were invariably slightly misshapen, several had bad skin, and all of them leered accusingly, as though to say, “I hate you, and I hate what I have to do here to feed the child I had at 15, and I’m really a lesbian anyway, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

When I was a teenager, my dad had offered to introduce me to sex by taking me to a prostitute. I found the prospect terrifying. I had every reason to believe that he would embarrass me terribly, flirting up a storm with her before finally leaving us two lovebirds alone together.

My zookeeper girlfriend Nancy took me to the Mitchell Bros.’ famous San Francisco porn emporium for my 43rd birthday. (It had turned out that I’d only just begun to lose my looks!) She was the only woman patron there, and we got lots of daggers stared at our throats. As we sat down to watch a succession of surgically enhanced young women behave lasciviously on stage, another girl came by offering lap dances. The guy beside me asked for one as Guns N’ Roses’ "One In a Million," in which Mr. Axl Rose condemns “niggers” and “faggots,” began to play. I’d read about the song while researching my ill-fated David Geffen biography, but never actually heard it. I was surprised by what a blatant ripoff of a Stones song (“Sympathy for the Devil,” if memory serves, but it might not) it was, and said something to Nancy along the lines of, “What a piece of shit!” Whereupon the girl on the lap of the guy beside me launched into a passionate defense of the group even as her customer began to moan pre-orgasmically beneath her. I don’t think I’ve ever debated the merits of a particular artist or group of artists in more unusual circumstances.

I have never paid a prostitute for sex, but I briefly dated one, during the days when I would go to the Starwood, the West Hollywood nightclub popular with those who found the atmosphere at the Whisky a Go Go too rarefied, drink black coffee for alertness and vodka for courage, and swagger through the place letting promiscuous young women observe how much like a rock star I looked. When one on whom I lowered the boom late one weeknight confided that she was a call girl, she immediately became very much more attractive; I found exciting the idea of getting free what others had to pay $250 for. But I soon discovered that her company made me feel more, rather than less, lonely, and broke her heart. Of gold. Actually, I think she found me weird, as did so many of the maidens I met at the Starwood. I used big words they didn’t know and hadn’t much interest in cocaine.

In 2001, I wrote a song for the Mistress Chloe album Like a Moth to Its Flame called "The Prostitutes of London," which I later dusted off and rammed manfully into the repertoires of two of the sketch comedy revues I directed while living in the named city. There isn’t a single mention of prostitutes, though, on my forthcoming Sorry We’re Open album.

[From the blog For All in Tents and Porpoises. Enjoy the archive and subscribe at http://johnmendelsohn.blogspot.com]