I have spoken often in these pages of The Inrhodes having been the Beatles of Santa Monica-by-the-Sea. As usual, though, I’m just trying to make myself look good, by association. The Inrhodes were an offshoot of my first group, The Fogmen. The two Fogmen who actually knew something about music — by virtue of having been in the Samohi Jazz Ponces, or whatever they were called — other than that they wanted to be rich and famous and screamed at priapically by girls in excessive eyeliner abandoned me and ran off with two fellow former JPs, one of whom had almost Brian Jones-ish hair at a time when Brian Jones-ish hair got one (a) laid a lot, and (b) threatened even more often than laid, as long hair was seen as effeminate, and we were going to have to be our most masculine if we didn’t want to spend the rest of our days under the jackboot of Soviet oppression. Or something.
The fact is that the Inrhodes were only the second most in-demand band in Santa Monica, the first being Larry Lucifer & The Infernal Names, from whom you’d have imagined that the nice folks of retiree-friendly Santa Monica would have run screaming instead of hiring to perform at an average of 74 weddings, bar mitzvahs, dances, and even sock hops per year.
Larry himself had earlier been the chief bully at St. Monica’s, the school at which the area’s Catholic youth were educated, but had been expelled for apostasy and smoking, whereupon he’d fallen in with the Satanists who convened for lunch every at midnight the 13th of every month at The Embers, a bar on the wrong (that is, south) end of 3rd Street, now the very chic Santa Monica Promenade. He dyed his hair black, had pentangles tattooed on his cheeks, and wore red contact lenses, all this before either Marillyn Manson or Trent Reznor was so much as a tingling in Papa’s loins.
He stole a cheap electric guitar, a Fender Precision bass, a Farfisa organ, and a Slingerland drum kit from the pawnshop that would later rebrand itself as Ace Music, and kidnapped three boys from the juvenile detention facility in nearby Venice to play them. At first, the drummer was the only one you could hear, aside from Larry himself, as Larry had neglected to steal amplifiers too, but as Larry saw it, that worked to the group’s advantage, ebabling them to sound like no one else, and attracting the attention, as was the fashion in those days, of a corrupt West Los Angeles disk jockey with delusions of grandeur who impressed them with his…connections.
Half a decade before anyone, including its own members, had even heard of Black Sabbath, Larry and his lads were smearing themselves in pig, lamb, and beef blood (you can get it at most butchers’) before personal appearances, and performing a repertoire that was 80 percent about incest, child molestation, and devil worship. It would have been 100 percent but for guitarist Beelzebub (Bub) Blasphemy’s (né Bill Thompson) love of such folk rock icons as The Byrds, We Five, and Ian N’ Sylvia (whose subliterate N’ Guns N’ Roses would pilfer 20 years hence). In one of the group’s most-requested originals, Larry would pelt his audience with pig and other intestines (you can get them at most butchers’) while shrieking, “Partake of the Christian virgin’s entrails, o Dark One! Nourish thyself!” It was hardly a surprise that the group had eventually to cede the lucrative children’s birthday party market to The Inrhodes.
So why have you never heard of Larry? Well, a lot of music scholar theorise that he shot himself in the foot by recording for his debut single "You Were On My Mind", We Five’s version of which hit No. 3 on the Billboard chart the week Larry released his version. Others point to ‘Bub’s and bass player Buddy Holocaust’s growing disgruntlement with their inaudibility. In any event, by the time of The Inrhodes’ performance at Dodger Stadium, the group had disbanded. ‘Bub and Buddy formed an Everly Bros. tribute act years before tribute acts became fashionable, and in spite of neither being able to carry a tune, and starved to death in an unheated storage room on Olympic Blvd., where Route 66 really ends, while drummer Leukemia Thompson oprated a photocopy shop briefly popular with UCLA students who thought it wry to photocopy their naked butts. He later became a successful human trafficker and money-launderer.
Larry himself, of course, became a tiresome born-again Christian and worked at a Toyota dealership until his death from apoplexy in 1991. His red contact lenses are not displayed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
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