This was a poem I wrote in response to political candidates using the homeless as a scapegoat in their pursuit of wininng votes. As someone who was once homeless himself I wanted to say something about this.
By the way, if you like what you hear please follow me on SoundCloud.
Halloween 2022 marks the release of my second album Sea Level Drive. A definite labor of love, it’s my continued foray into spoken word recordings with soundscapes created by me and helped with by my two friends, Sad Boy and Robodyke.
Tracks from Sea Level Drive can be listened to on HearNow (andysevenltd.hearnow.com) and a few will remain on SoundCloud (Soundcloud.com/andysevenltd), too.
Not only do you get to hear me read my own poetry but I also read two pieces by the legendary Maxwell Bodenheim, Death and The Ballad of Jack Rose. Let’s go straight to the beginning and talk about the album:
Sea Level Drive begins with Ghosts of Hustlers, an abandoned gay horror novel I started years ago about a young man moving into an apartment off the Sunset Strip where his evenings are haunted by ghosts of murdered young runaways. It wasn’t bad but concepts are hard to sustain over 160 pages. I made it a poem instead. That wah-wah sound you hear is a trumpet, not a guitar. Too much!
Velvet Candybar comes next and I went for a sweet English melody while chanting about making love in a graveyard. The goth boy can’t help it!
The Hardcore Kid is my poem about the hooligan who refuses to give up the hardcore ghost long after the riot’s ended. “He tied a rag around his boot, spare changes for his loot, still lamenting the dead of Sid, he’s The Hardcore Kid.” The legendary 1-2-3-4 countdown runs the gamut from Johnny Thunders, Wilson Pickett, Little Richard, and Sir Paul McCartney.
Disc Over America (DOA) is a political song about murder in the name of church and state. This country feels more and more like a drug store that’s quickly going out of business.
Sea Level Drive finishes the first half of the album. It’s a small road on the extreme end of Malibu right after you pass Zuma and before you enter Ventura County. You could say it’s technically the very end of Malibu. It’s right by Lechuza Beach, which might be the narrowest beach in Malibu. It’s a poem about a couple strung out on drugs who have nothing but the ocean singing for them at night.
The second half of the album begins with Teethgrinder, a poem about the tension, anger and anxiety pouring out on the internet from all sides. People are angrier than ever, exhibiting not a single note of sensitivity or sympathy for each other. Savaging one another for the sake of winning a worthless argument, and most arguments are worthless in the long run. Everybody’s wrong.
The Ballad of Jack Rose by Maxwell Bodenheim features my Ibanez electric mandolin with a strong delay on my voice. It’s a pretty intense poem about a drug dealer who falls in love with an addict’s sister. This poem reminded me of The Panic In Needle Park and some Hubert Selby prose, too.
All The Madwomen is based on the Sam Fuller film Shock Corridor, specifically the scene where Peter Breck wanders into the nympho ward of the insane asylum he’s committed in. Naturally there are soundbites from the film floating all through the track. The original poem appeared in Horror Sleaze Trash Quarterly.
Sometimes people ask me why there's no guitar on my records, and it's like this: once I saw Allen Ginsberg on a TV show reciting his poetry backed by a punk band, and in theory it should have been awesome, but it was horrible. Poor old Ginsberg read his poetry with all his heart and this band behind him were playing so loud, especially this douchebag guitarist cranked so loud like he was Shitface Ramone and ripping out a solo while Grandpa Beat was trying valiantly to have his prose heard. A real shitshow, but lessons learned. Leave the fucking guitar in the corner, preferably in the garbage bin.
In Bed With The Bomb is about the early days of the atomic bomb, its development and testing. “I’m in bed with the bomb, I’m about to kingdom come, Drop it now! Stop it, how? Duck and cover, my atomic lover”. I enjoyed adding the “Andy, are you okay?” soundbite from Happiness.
Oh, My Love Is Like A Rose is a small abstract piano frisson with some sped-up saxophone and trumpet tracks for the Frank Zappa fans. That sound never gets old.
Death by Maxwell Bodenheim is the first Bodenheim poem I ever read, and I was immediately hooked. Goth to the max with its reference to Death’s longing for me and silver braids of hair, well...I laid down some backwards synthesizer for extra death texture. I also made a video of it, which you can see here.
So that’s my new album, Sea Level Drive. Give it a listen on Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, Apple Music or your favorite streaming sevice. If you’re going to listen to poetry/spoken word give it some electronic skronk with some free jazz horns and some lovely mandolin-driven folk to boot.
The tracks:
Ghosts of Hustlers
Velvet Candybar
The Hardcore Kid
On Her Bed of Roses
Disc Over America (DOA)
Sea Level Drive
Teethgrinder
The Ballad of Jack Rose
All The Madwomen
In Bed With The Bomb
Oh My Love Is Like A Rose
Death
Sea Level Drive is available for download or CD format via Bandcamp.com at https://andysevenltd.bandcamp.com/album/sea-level-drive. Meet me there.
Many years ago – I won’t say how long - I went to a theater on Hollywood Boulevard that only showed vintage exploitation films, mostly from the Fifties through the Seventies. It was curated by Johnny Legend and Eric Caidin, long champions of cult, exploitation and lowbrow cinema. The films were screened in a small theatre which used to show X-rated films but eventually vacated the premises. There were two separate screening rooms, and both rooms were small with small screens, as well.
Some of the films I saw there were movies like The Gruesome Twosome, directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, the cult classic Night Tide, and the cinema of Ray Dennis Steckler. But there was this one film that got under my skin: Psychopathia Sexualis aka One Her Bed of Roses, directed by Albert Zugsmith.
Albert Zugsmith was more renowned for being a movie producer, his credits including High School Confidential and the noir classic Touch of Evil. But here he was directing a sleaze classic and a highly disturbing one, about, well let me see if I can adequately describe it:
Melissa Borden’s madly in love with her dad, but he’s so busy swinging he can’t be bothered with his daughter’s daddy complex. Meanwhile, her next-door neighbor Stephen Long has the opposite problem: his mother can’t stop climbing him and pawing him.
The only obsession Stephen has is his garden of roses by his gazebo in the back yard. Cutting to the chase, Melissa crushes on uptight Stephen, and the only way she can get him to make love to her is if she lies down in a bed of rose petals in the gazebo. What follows next is a tragedy of epic proportions, but you’ll have to see the film for yourself to find out.
The film was so nightmarish that I couldn’t get it out of my mind, so much so that I had to find out where I could find this masterpiece on VHS (DVD was not yet a thing). I went to Eric Caidin’s store Hollywood Book & Poster and saw the film sitting on the shelf, almost waiting for me like the demonic roses in the film. The tape was released by Something Weird Video, and I was about to take the ride of my life courtesy of the legendary Mike Vraney.
Mike Vraney first achieved prominence as road manager for punk bands like DOA, TSOL and The Dead Kennedys. He migrated to collecting endless reels of grindhouse and exploitation films, renting out several storage spaces to keep his enormous collection of movies – he collected comics and vintage radio shows, too, but that’s another story.
Something Weird Video became the primary home for exploitation video, even topping Rhino Video which had a hold on the scene for a while. Vraney had authorization from the filmmakers themselves to release their work – artists like Doris Wishman, David S. Friedman, and Herschell Gordon Lewis, among others.
After sending away for the Something Weird Video catalog, I found myself obsessed with everything in the catalog, films as obscure as you can imagine: films like She Man, directed by Bob Clark of Porky’s and A Christmas Story about a returning vet forced by blackmail to become a transvestite maid; Bummer, a Seventies exploitation film about a rock band with a homicidal bass player who kills groupies; and tons of Al Adamson classics like The Female Bunch about a gang of Raquel Welch-clone bisexual drug dealers, filmed near The Spahn Ranch.
I eventually met Mike and found him to be a great friend, and unfortunately part of our friendship was based on our love for smoking (I quit a little later, but sadly enough it took his life). I don’t know if this poem/song warrants this much of an introduction, but I always wanted to give props out to Mike and his wife Lisa because they brought so much entertainment to my life. I always had this title buzzing around in my mind, and here it is as a song:
On Her Bed of Roses
Her house screamed death in the night
the long grass grew oh, so wild
bones creaked right under the muddy dirt
all she did was smile and smile
On her bed of roses
On her bed of roses
On her blood red
Flaming bed of roses
She tore my face off every photograph
in her dusty, leather-bound book
the twisting, hissing snakes on her head
cried, slithered, shivered, and shook
On her bed of roses
On her bed of roses
On her blood red
Flaming bed of roses
She slayed sailors with her sad, sad songs
every lyric every line was cursed
not enough menfolk to quench
her bloodless, insatiable thirst
On her bed of roses
On her bed of roses
On her blood red
Flaming bed of roses
©2022, Scuzzbuster Music (BMI). All rights reserved.
I recently watched my DVD of the great documentary The Atomic Café, a stunning compilation of newsreels, television broadcasts and other mixed media about the birth of the atomic bomb and tests conducted in the West Coast desert for its development.
The soundtrack to the film is a fascinating combination of country swing and folk songs all concerning the threat of communism, the bomb, and the threat of an impending nuclear war. I normally sandwich this film in between viewings of Kiss Me Deadly and A Boy and His Dog, but that’s another story.
I wrote a poem about the film and while it’s not as contemplative as I’d liked it to be, it’s close to expressing the anxiety that ran through every American at the time. I call it In Bed With The Bomb.
In Bed With The Bomb
I was just a gleam in a physicist’s eye the final solution from a 12 o’clock high blowing to bits to a teeny weenie no people atoll in my radioactive bikini
I’m in bed with the bomb I’m about to kingdom come drop it now, stop it how? duck and cover, my atomic lover
Then I lost my nuclear virginity on a hot summer’s day in a place called Trinity caught the atomic dose in Los Alamos a sleepy hollow like Castle Bravo
Got the Manhattan Project in my pocket hydrogen, neutron, can you fuel this rocket? shield your eyes and drop the bomb radiation bath fries in the napalm
Waving it around like a loaded gun take a look around now everybody’s got one you think the answer to it all is a mushroom cloud I’d rather see your corpse wrapped up in a shroud
I’m in bed with the bomb I’m about to kingdom come drop it now, stop it how? duck and cover, my atomic lover
Well, it’s not Phil Ochs but it’s not The Weirdos, either (“we don’t really want it but we got it anyway”). Since there was so much bluegrass in the movie I decided to play my mandolin hardcore punk style to give it an urgent, bluegrass tempo. Here’s the link to the “chune”:
In the rubble of the brickbatted city
you will find
ghosts of hustlers
dead queerlust action
killed by cops, rich old men with silver hair, and or laboratory microbes
phantom fandom apparitions on streetcorners
waiting for the man
the man with the money, the man with the screwball eightball
the boys in their denim vines
dripping down their wiry wily bodies
dreaming of tomorrow
tomorrow that never comes
tomorrow that doesn’t belong to them
in my little white room
off the sunet strip
i can feel them drifting
spirits drifting
drfiting across my hopeless homeless apartment room
now i'm turning over in my grave
This one wants to cheat on her boyfriend
with me and I
This one wants to cheat on her husband
with myself and me
They have to tell a story
"he passes out and farts after he's done"
"he's not a real man"
"he goes to strip clubs but laughs at me in a bikini"
Shakespearean tragedies
these aren't the merry wives of windsor
I'm the cheat sheet
when they cheat
they want andy
andy andy seven drive me to heaven
Unhappy women
shower in my spiderweb sperm
spreading my juice
all over their breasts
smearing it on their thighs
using my jizz for lipstick
while screaming about
their shitty boyfriends
At the height of my band’s popularity many fanzines wanted us in their latest issue but were too lazy to interview me. They always asked me to interview myself, which was a novelty the first time around, but repeated requests for me to interview myself became very dull soon thereafter. Not only did it expose a true lack of interest in what I was doing, but it always felt as if I was simply talking to myself.
So allow me to talk to myself a little bit more, but this time the subject is yours truly. Not the band I literally built from the ground up – no help, no partners – a band I created alone and dragged all the way up from the depths to The Roxy Theater and The Hollywood Palladium. Not bad. I’ve created and reinvented myself time and time again.
Since I’ve made an art form of talking to myself in public I’ve decided to mention a few details about me. Some people will believe what I’m about to say and others (fools) will think I’m merely telling tales.
Playing in other people's bands never got me much attention, and one of the great ironies was I got a record deal simply for looking cool. The head of Sympathy For The Record Industry saw me walking down Melrose Avenue, and offered me a record deal without having heard a single note of music from me, and didn’t really want to. Talk about your Lana Turner discoveries.
Four years later my group broke up, my choice, which made me a pariah on the scene. That was fine, because playing music never made me any money. In fact, at the height of my popularity I lived out of my car because I pumped what little money I had into my band. The same people who ostracized me for breaking my band up thought it was funny I was living on the streets while I was headlining some terrible Hollywood dump. Assholes.
But the next step, and there’s always a next step, was working for local government, and I always found myself in the Executive Office of the LA County Fire Department, Department of Children & Family Services, and finally the LA County Board of Supervisors (my last hurrah). During that time I worked for a varied list of city councilmen, mayors, law enforcement officials, and prominent judges. I won several citations and awards for my service to local government.
But municipal service can be as boring as playing sax behind tuneless punk singers, so I joined forces with my ex designing wardrobe for movies, television, theatre, metal bands and even video games, like Twisted Metal (some video games take live action green screen footage and incorporate it into the game, so we'd fabricate and style the costumes worn for the footage). We’d guzzle endless pots of coffee and stay up for several nights cutting fabric, sewing outfits, distressing and dyeing, whatever the job called for. I did most of the shopping and learned who the good fabric stores were and which ones to stay away from.
In between sewing jobs I began writing serials for my blog, Out Demons Out. The serials then transmogrified into novels. All my novels, except Hot Wire My Heart started out as serials in my blog. My novels, six so far with a seventh on the way, are all available on every eBook outlet – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo Canada, and they can even be taken out like library books at hoopla.com.
But it all began to get real when I took on a weekend delivery job, when I drove around on a drizzly afternoon, listening to The Beatles’ “Got To Get You Into My Life”. The dispatcher told me to head on over to Stella MacCartney’s boutique, a lovely baroque building with vines of ivy crawling all over the entrance.
I came in for the pick-up and the salesgirl told me to take this to Olivia Harrison’s house. Holy shit. I’m going to George Harrison’s house. It was all too much, delivering to George’s widow from Paul’s daughter. All I’m going to say about George’s house is that the walls are VERY high – can you blame him? – and it’s very Spanish styled. When the housemaid came out to pick up Olivia’s dress she halted at the sight of me for a moment, smiled and then handed me a crisp twenty dollar bill. When I die that’s all I’m going to remember.
Black velvet wonderwoods of
Venice Blvd, sky darkened like
ejaculations of squid ink
there’s a bar named Saints & Sinners
just to make sure we get it
they hang a neon halo and neon
flames jumping out of the signs
Saints & Sinners slung drinks
with handles like Fallen Angel
The Devil Made Me Do It and
Heaven’s Eleven
With walls of red and black
booths of leather, satin, velveteen
it was Satan’s crib, St. Michael
hadn’t slung his sword here…obviously
The clits here had mad game
I brought my girl here once
and it didn’t stop the saloonsluts
from hitting on me in front of her
all Hell almost broke loose…almost
The drinks were tight
the drinks were stiff
Unholy Passion Sam Hain on the juke
Everclear flames from the bar
Teasin’ a Scorpio with a TV eye
Later on the girl slithered away
I slithered back to the S&S
there was this tramp with flaming red hair
tight red dress
smelled of barbecue and catnip
told the BT
she was “waiting for her boss”
leaned over and axed me for a light
I lit her up the flame shining her deep, deep eyes
plumes of smoke billowed out
A month later Saints & Sinners burned down
to a hellish crisp
was it
Archangel St. Michael
fire and brimstone
or too much BBQ and catnip
RIP Saints & Sinners
My name is Andy and I am an alcoholic. Well, I was. Let's talk about drink. After you recover you have all the time in the world to talk about the thrill of the slow kill.
When I took a drink of Irish whisky it was like drinking pure liquid gold. I could even taste the goldness of the fluid as well as savor the aroma of the aged wood from the barrel it was aged in. It would caress my throat and fill my body with a lusty warmth.
You know it's love, no addiction, when you drink not for the high but for the taste, the flavor and how it bursts all the pleasure centers of your body.
Your fingers tingle and legs relax, all your muscles untense in a comfort no one else can give you. As I drank more and more I knew how to regulate my moods according to what I drank.
Wine kept me hyper and social, scotch made me mellow, rum & coke for the obvious sugar rush, which could also be obtained from Jagermeister, Goldschlager and the other liqueurs.
Bourbon killed my fears and inhibitions. I never would have been able to front a band if not for my bourbon buddies nudging me towards the microphone. Half pints in the parking lot before the show, that's all you need. There was always something about rye that always mellowed me out.
Vodka was stealthy in the way it would go invisible after mixing with just about anything; it would hide behind any juice or sweet beverage. I'd never realized how progressively pissed I got from the way it hid behind those sweet drinks. Positively lethal.
I'm not going to tell you any funny stories about things I did when I was drunk. Things seemed funny at the time, but now they're not. I never drank during office hours but there was no shortage of tempters and temptations.
I was a good drunk, maybe too good. A friend of mine who was a recovered alcoholic saw me putting it away one night at the club and decided to drive behind me when I drove home. He said I drove as if I was stone cold sober, never weaving or running red lights.
I should have been somewhat flattered, but instead I set too good an example of what a professional drunk is capable of. It made me feel guilty a few years later when I heard he lapsed back into alcoholism and died from alcoholic poisoning.
I didn't quit cold turkey - that's for suckers. I quit drink the same way I quit smoking, tapering off day by day. A little less each day until you realize you don't really need that junk to get through the day. You do less and less until it dwindles down to almost nothing at all.
I won't lie to you. I still have a bottle of Jameson's in the pantry, but it doesn't get much play these days. If you've really conquered your poisons never let them completely disappear. Always have them on hand to let them know they're gone, but not forgotten.
Artwork by Derek Yaniger.
