Andy Seven, former rock star/male model/bon vivant, the man with the action-packed expense account, the fabulous free-lance creator of stories and images is available for your entertainment NOW! on Blogger.
Please disrobe
get on the table
the good news is your condition’s stable
Stick the flashlight in your ear
I can see the damage it’s very clear
Eardrums all scarred
shot to hell top to bottom cracked
tommy can you hear me I think your hearing’s all whacked
Scarred from all the lies I’ve heard
endless libel and slander
Exaggerations
renumerations
reprimands incomprehensible explanations
that you want me to gander
Eardrums all scarred
shot to hell top to bottom cracked
tommy can you hear me I think your hearing’s all whacked
Fake excuses verbal abuses
all the double talk you can eat
vulgar insults the sheep always bleat
Digging their graves with their tireless mouths
armed to the teeth
in their glass houses
Eardrums all scarred
shot to hell top to bottom cracked
tommy can you hear me I think your hearing’s all whacked
Poetry and music Copyright 2026, Scuzzbuster Music (BMI). All rights reserved. This work is NOT royalty-free and cannot be used for AI harvesting.
Have you ever been to The Plugged Nickel
right between Slugs and The Bitter End
and if you ever lose your way down the alley
just peel your eyes and ears for the muted trumpets, my friend
well, rainfall and thunder comp a backbeat
No, it’s not like The Screaming Bean
with its plucked dulcimers, autoharps and banjos
and they pass the straw hat around
cracked peanuts and sawdust litter the tired floor
make a detour to the shack with the abstract sounds
Well, the PA system crackles
and the lights shoot off sparks
half the customers think its entertaining
and the rest of them think it’s art
And the notes fall like raindrops
on a cobblestoned street
the notes drippety drop like hail stones
on a cobblestoned road
the bass booms like thunder
the cymbals flash like lightning
On a good night you can catch Miles
even better if you see Monk
but it’s snake eyes if you fall in
and catch a poet strung out on junk
Spring is here, and a young man’s fancy turns to poetry, whether it be in the form of a chapbook or a full-blown poetry album, like my new release Scorpio Rising. Named after the Kenneth Anger film (as well as dedicated to his memory), Scorpio Rising is my third poetry release and is out now for your listening pleasure.
The themes on the album run the gamut from inner city ghetto stories (Killed For His Clothes, Skyscraper Soul, Sidewalk Camp) to the occult (Bottle Tree Garden, Smudge, Sun In Scorpio) to my favorite standby, noir (Drugs And The Woman, High Speed Chase, Cocktails Cigarettes Birth Control). Yes, the femmes fatales get their due…and then some.
My noir poems continue the thread started from my previously published noir novels, these tracks can even be heard as tiny noir plot outlines.
The occult poetry is influenced by my long-lived fascination with Hollywood jazz age gothic dalliances in cults, rituals, and fetish items. Many remaining art deco homes in Pasadena and the Hollywood Hills still court the legend of being haunted by spirits. Even The Angelus Temple, a Christian showplace for Aimee Semple McPherson is known for harboring its share of ghosts.
What distinguishes this release from the others is the introduction of the Irish bouzouki on several tracks, it being a folk instrument normally used as backup accompaniment to guitars, but here used as a lead instrument.
It’s an instrument with four sets of double strings like a mandolin and tuned to a G-D-A-D, not the accustomed G-D-A-E setting. Because of this tuning one gets a droney, exotic Eastern sound. I call the tuning Gee, Dad…hoho.
I also went for a bit of drum and bass/jungle music rhythm on Cockfight and to a lesser degree on High Speed Chase, charging up the BPMs (Beats Per Minute) into the 275-300 setting, giving both tracks a manic, frantic pace to match my prose.
Here is the track listing:
1. Dogs Keep Barking
2. Killed For His Clothes
3. Skyscraper Soul
4. Cockfight
5. Drugs And The Woman
6. Cocktails Cigarettes Birth Control
7. Smudge
8. The Butcher’s Beautiful Daughter
9. Sidewalk Camp
10. Bottle Tree Garden
11. Angel Feathers
12. Sun In Scorpio
13. High Speed Chase
As usual there’s the dichotomy between electronic and folk music tracks, and in neofolk style they even converge more than a few times. If you like Current 93 or Death In June then this will strike a familiar vibe.
I’m very proud of my new collection of sonnets – sonic sonnets, if you will. Scorpio Rising is highly accessible in CD, download or streaming formats. If you want the CD it can be bought at CD Baby, Discogs, Amazon, or you can DM me for a personal copy.
Downloads can be bought at Apple Music or Amazon Music, where they can also be streamed. If you’d rather hear streams you can check it out at You Tube, Spotify, Pandora, or Deezer, where you can also stream my previous albums, Minstrels Anonymous and Sea Level Drive.
I have, for all intents and purposes, gone global. What does this mean? Well, I made a distribution deal where my poetry albums Minstrels Anonymous and Sea Level Drive can now be streamed all over the world on every streaming service imaginable: roll call, Spotify, Pandora, You Tube, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, and even the dreaded Tik Tok, home of the anime nymphets. Don’t see them shaking it to Halloween Birthday, but I’ve been wrong before.
In addition, both hard media CDs are now issued on my imprint Jinx Records in lavish glossy Digipak editions, which can be bought either on Amazon, CD Baby or on eBay. Copies can also be purchased at a reduced price if you DM me and pay via Paypal or Venmo funds. What this means is that neither record will be streamed on SoundCloud or available for purchase via Bandcamp.
In other news I’m hard at work on the next album, tentatively scheduled for November release. I’ve also pondered the possibility of doing a few spoken word shows. Needless to say, records will be available there. And sooner or later, probably later, I will finally complete my new novel. Dammit.
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.
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
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
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.
Thin emaciated petite
and pale blonde
she had the gift of grift
deaf mute picking pockets
Shoplift shuffles
watched by 69 eyes
circuito cerrado
like an electric fly
like a hydra
the larcenous Medusa
weaving through aisles at all the busy shop floors
drifting and floating her way out revolving doors
Hitting up subway trains
a restless madame
shifting fingers
which never linger
restless grabbing claws
without a pause
Jamming the aisles
are oceans of crowded men
she’s sacrificing herself
for a fondle or ten
as she grabs wallets and watches
and scattered foreign swatches
Handbags with trapdoors
passageways in her purse
the take on her bed
the harpy’s nest
Irish coffee and a smoke
as she kicks off
her high heels
she flies again in the urban dawn
Copyright 2020, Scuzzbuster Music (BMI). All rights reserved. From the album Minstrels Anonymous, available on Bandcamp.
Since my birthday falls this Saturday (the 31st) I decided to treat myself to a cool birthday present, namely a video of my recent poem The Scenester. Because I accoimpany myself on mandolin I used a lot of photos of myself playing the instrument at home and at play. I edited most of it on an ancient Corel movie software. I encourage all writers out there to record themselves and film themselves as often as possible. Anyway, enjoy at your own peril :)
There have been no idle hands at work during the pandemic, and I daresay this may be one of the most fertile periods of creativity I’ve ever had. I have a lot of new things to report, so much stuff I don’t even know where to begin, so let’s take it from the top:
On a non-literary note I’ve posted a few obscure Trash Can School tracks and Cockfight remixes on my Soundcloud page, and once again, it’s absolutely free! If you have a Soundcloud account, please add Andy Seven Ltd. as a favorite artist. Here’s the link:
https://soundcloud.com/andysevenltd
5.
And last, but certainly not least, I have a new novel on the pipeline titled Red Coffee, due for an early June release date. My first book in four flaming years! If the title sounds familiar it’s because it was serialized in this blog many years ago and will finally see the light of day as a full-fledged work. Here’s a sneak peek at the cover:
In closing I wanted to mention that all excerpts and chapters from my novels have been taken down from this blog and will no longer be available for reading. If you want to enjoy them from this point on, you can either take the entire book out on Hoopla.com, or better yet, buy the whole thing on Amazon Kindle, iTunes, Book Baby, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo in Canada, or Oyster (if they’re still in business).
I have some new projects planned for later this year, i.e. another book in October 2020, more poetry in a wonderful comp titled Will To Flutter, and my first new music in years for sale on Bandcamp. The future looks bright, virus be damned.
Former garbage man, male model, government drone, homeless bum, Rock star supreme, jailbird, from the gutter to the castle, I'm still standing tall and driving people crazy!
