The Antonyms and The Homonyms

I was at the pet store yesterday and I was chewing gum like Sterling Hayden, when I looked down and this fucking Pomeranian stared at me with his little button eyes and started imitating me, making chewing faces, snapping his jaws open and closed. What a clever little fucker.

Thought I was having a bad day at work until I saw Larry King walking alone down Rodeo Drive. Larry looked short and frail as if someone washed him in hot water instead of the cold. He was talking into his cell phone to Caller #000 with his shirt buttoned up to the collar in 82dgr weather. He walked as if it was a harder job than spitting into a prop microphone.

This old guy was complaining about the heat to me today.
I told him there was nothing wrong with the heat, there's too many people and too many fucking cars and if you took them all away you'd love the heat.
Well, when Pop heard this his wrinkled eyes got real big and he screamed, "YOUNG MAN YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!"

Thanks to a site called Creepypasta (creepypasta.com) I discovered the work of a great performance artist from Belgium named Olivier de Sagazan. He utilizes clay and other media to distort and modify his appearance. Here's a pretty wild sample of his work:

I like the way he mumbles to himself a lot while he works, like he's really possessed. He can also be seen in a movie called "Samsara".

Just saw Paula Abdul standing in front of Pepperdine U for the 9/11 memorial. She wore a cowboy hat, a mini-dress, with cowboy boots (matched the hat). She was alone and looked very happy. I never liked her until I saw her then. What made it so great was that the expectation is for her to be surrounded by a large, annoying entourage, but there she was, hanging out by herself and smiling, taking pictures of the breathtaking 100-flag display on the front lawn of Pepperdine University. Her cowboy outfit and the 100 flags gave me a true Myra Breckenridge poster moment.

Wow, what a find. Shortly before she passed away from cancer Sandy Dennis wrote her memoirs, and it's every bit as weird as she was. The star of such bizarre films as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Fox, and That Cold Day In The Park, Dennis was also the inseparable girlfriend to cool jazz juggernaut Gerry Mulligan. The book was written while she slowly succumbed to her disease, surrounded by her 30 cats. Yes, Ms. Dennis was a Cat Lady and goes into great detail about her cats. Highly recommended.

Getting back to Creepypasta, it's funny how the younger kids these days are creeped out by videos of clowns and weird people romping around in mannequin masks with weird, droney electronic music. None of these videos really scared me, and I wondered why. Then I remembered I grew up on a diet of Devo and Residents videos, all of which put a lot of these dumb videos to shame.

I once went shopping with this woman one afternoon in the Wilshire District. She took great pride in everyone in the store calling her on a first name basis; it was a frighteningly big deal to her. Bored with her making a big show of how popular she was in the store, I walked out to the sidewalk to check on my car.
A car loaded with black teenage boys drove slowly by me.
'YO, OZZY OSWALD!" "SUP, OZZY OSWALD?" They yelled at me from the car, laughing. I laughed right back.
Now there's a great hip-hop name, Ozzy Oswald. Make me a cross between Ozzy Osbourne, revered metal singer of Black Sabbath with Lee Harvey Oswald, notorious killer of the great President John F. Kennedy. Those kids had spunk. Those kids had genius.

I stood around five minutes more and then a car of white teenage girls pulled up asking me all kinds of questions. Talking to teenage girls is a lot like being abducted by aliens: once it's over you have no recollection of what just happened. I think they were asking me about my 7-star tattoo sleeve (by Ace Farren Ford of Purple Panther Tattoo fame), but then again I might have imagined that as the topic.

My friend came out of the store and asked me where I went.
"Oh, a couple of cars full of kids pulled up to talk to me".
"TALK TO YOU? WHY WOULD ANYBODY WANT TO TALK TO YOU? YOU'RE NOT FAMOUS!"
"I used to be famous".
'NO, I'M FAMOUS!!! I HAVE OVER 700 FOLLOWERS ON FACEBOOK!"
I smiled and said, "But this isn't Facebook, this is real life".

Did you ever see the black version of Roxy Music's Country Life album? I thought i was pretty amusing. Here it is:

The Legend of Arthur J. and The Gold Cups

Describing a punk band from the deep, dark past has always been hard work but when there's precious little documentation on the band then it's well near impossible. I played in a first wave Hollywood punk band (1977-1978) called Arthur J. and The Gold Cups and although we played with every huge band of the era (Avengers, X, Germs, etc.) we never recorded, so there's almost nothing to go by, but that's never stopped me before.

Arthur J. and The Gold Cups was named after two Hollywood coffee shops that catered to gays; Arthur J.'s was on the corner of Santa Monica and Highland - it's now a strip mall. The Gold Cup was on the corner of Hollywood and Las Palmas and it's now a trendy tourist trap tattoo parlor. Both establishments provided late night hustlers and Quaaludes.

One block away from the The Gold Cup was a tiny alley off Cherokee Avenue with a huge steel doorway that took you down to a basement that held several rehearsal rooms; a long, cavernous room with a stage; and tons more space for anyone to do whatever they liked. This was The Masque, leased and operated by Brendan Mullen, founder and drummer of Arthur J. and The Gold Cups.

In Charles Martin Sharp's brilliant book on the Los Angeles avant garde music scene, "Improvisation, Identity and Tradition: Experimental Music Communities in Los Angeles", he described The Gold Cups as "attracting and bringing together people who were already interested in experimental aesthetics by merely advertising for members at The Masque".

In Mullen's book "We Got The Neutron Bomb" I am quoted as saying, "When I saw the bulletin at The Masque for Arthur J. and The Gold Cups, everything that was listed in that ad was right up my alley. I said 'this is the band of my dreams' cause it mentioned Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, James Brown, The Soft Machine, T. Rex, The NY Dolls, and The Sex Pistols all in the same band. I couldn't believe it. This in some bombed-out punk basement? A pretty sick concept. Then I found out it was Brendan and Spazz (Attack, Gold Cups vocalist) and Geza (X, Gold Cups guitarist) and a bunch of other people who worked at The Masque who jammed there all the time for fun, so I rushed home to get my horn".

When The Gold Cups first performed it was on a Sunday night at The Masque. I passed on playing the first show because rehearsals were a shambling mess with no direction all, and I lived to regret not playing that night because the band was simply amazing. On stage there were three Deadbeats (Geza, Pat & Scott), The Moreland Brothers from The Skulls, Hal & Kelly (Weirdos roadies), and Brendan on drums.

Center stage on vocals was Spazz Attack, so named for simulating a full blown twitching and drooling seizure and performing eye-popping back flips - he always landed on his feet, brilliant. In addition to being a brilliant acrobat Spazz also designed his own punk-bondage fashions. He had a crazy habit of dyeing his hair - two, sometimes even thrice a week. Ouch! He's notorious for his strait jacket seizure in Devo's classic "Satisfaction" video. It's right after Booji Boy sticks a knife into a toaster.

The band sounded like they were combining The Standells with John Coltrane's "Ascension", furthering the punk big band sound with a dense wall of sound: two guitars, two keyboards, a horn section and drums that played whatever the fuck it wanted to. The band always returned to Earth by drifting into The Soft Machine's "We Did It Again", which sounded more like "You Really Got Me" than the hoary psych classic, but that's the point. Musical anarchy made reality, and not just sloganeering about anarchy from the musically structured punk bands.

Although they only played for half an hour it was the greatest drag noise band of all time, Brendan, Geza and Scott wearing makeup and dresses serving up some Albert Ayler realness. I couldn't kick myself hard enough for boguing out on this awesome punk display!

I finally pulled the stick out of my ass and returned to the band a week later and toughed out the rehearsals - try getting nine mentally disturbed musicians to show up to rehearsal at the same time. Mission impossible! We ended up learning a few ridiculous covers, like The Beach Boys' awful "Long Tall Texan", the Cal Worthington used car ads commercial jingle, The Challengers' surf classic "Out of Limits" and we also did "Miserlou" (aka the Pulp Fiction theme song). "We Did It Again" always got played every six minutes.

I wore a mask on stage every time in honor of the now departed Marc Moreland, who wore a mask that fateful night on stage, to maintain the tradition of masked musicians. This not only got me attention when we played but I even scored a pic in Slash Magazine when our show got reviewed. Unfortunately nobody knew it was me on stage. I was always in disguise!

Reviews for the band were always hateful - the LA Times said our "joke wore thin" and even Slash Magazine said we were "annoying". I've met both reviewers in person since those reviews and I assure you these are the two most pompous, humorless people I've ever met, so the reviews weren't terribly shocking.

Since Brendan promoted the band he'd package three-day weekend shows at The Whisky A Go Go with us playing every night and a revolving door of punk bands supporting us. We played with The Avengers, X, The Alleycats, The Dils, Negative Trend, Black Randy & The Metro Squad, The Plugz and The Germs.

The band had one particular fan at the time: running down to LA after his band's legendary show at Winterland in 1978, Malcolm Maclaren saw the band perform at The Whisky and enjoying our penchant for shambling punk covers, he returned to England to produce "The Great Rock 'N Roll Swindle" featuring, you name it, shambling punk covers of songs like "My Way" and "You Need Hands". Oh well, it was cool seeing him laugh his ass off at our show.

With the band's advancing notoriety new members joined: Paul Roessler (Screamers, Nina Hagen) on keyboards, Hector Penalosa of The Zeros on bass, Steve Berlin of The Blasters on sax, Jeff Jourard of The Motels (!) on guitar, KIra Roessler of Black Flag on bass. It was a busy rehearsal studio.

The usual humbug broke the band up: a side project called Hal Negro & The Satintones featuring half the band doing awful lounge music covers, combined with a more polished and ordinary set of covers (Love Potion Number Nine, Let's Get Together from the movie The Trouble With Angels). The drag and the noise disappeared, no fun. Plus some of the members took the band way too seriously.

Geza left to pursue his own band Geza X & The Mommy Men and became one of the foremost producers in the industry, Spazz joined Toni Basil's dance troupe, Pat Delaney became a college professor and Brendan wrote several successful rock biographies. Everyone left and did better, anyway, even me.

Slash Magazine ultimately delivered the best eulogy for The Gold Cups. It went something like this: "One of the most lunatic outfits to hit the scene, but unfortunately one of the flakiest. Made up of various outcasts from other bands, The Gold Cups also featured some inspired fringe cult figures. In limbo at the present, but if everyone involved (all 250 of them) ever learns to show up at rehearsals at the same time their long promised comeback may add a welcome touch of madness to concert nights. Probably forever unrecordable".

To read more about Spazz, Geza and Brendan pick up "We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk" by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen, available on Three Rivers Press.

"Improvisation, Identity and Tradition: Experimental Music Communities in Los Angeles" by Charles Martin Sharp can be read via Google Books.

Apartment 217

The big punk rock thing to do for the kids at the Masque was to move into a decrepit old apartment building in the center of Hollywood called the Canterbury (as in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). I really needed a place to stay because my back ached from sleeping too many nights on the floor at the Masque. The most eventful things there never happened on weekends, they would happen on Tuesday mornings. Like this one Tuesday morning, there was a knock on my door.

“Andy, I need your help”, Rick said desperately with a fix in one hand and a tourniquet in the other. Rick was a quiet punk who hardly ever talked to me, well! He hardly ever spoke to anyone. When I saw the loaded fix I practically jumped.
The door was ajar while he held the packed works.
“Close the door!” I hissed. “Jesus, get in already!”
He slammed the door. “Look, this is the plan. I’ll tie up while you plunge the fix in, okay?”
My apartment window overlooked a parking lot for Love’s Barbecue, heavily frequented by police cars, of which SEVERAL were parked by my window.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah”, I freaked, “cool, baby, let’s take this in the bathroom where the COPS, like outside the window, CAN’T SEE us”.
He doddered into the bathroom with me, careful not to upset the works. “Okay! When you see my veins swell and throb, plunge it right in. Here!”
He handed me the needled plunger and pulled on the polka-dot scarf around his arm with his teeth as tightly as humanly possible. The veins bulged out of his arm like purple snakes. I felt sick just looking at this.
“NNNNGGGG! C”mon!” He roared with the material in his maw.
I hesitated at sticking the needle in. I never did this crap in my life. How deep should I go? What if I waste the expensive junk by not getting it in completely?
“Okay, okay”, I paced a little in place. “Give me a second, I gotta think about this”.
“NNNGGGG!!!” he pulled harder on the scarf and breathed heavily.
“HEY!” I barked. “Time out! Let’s switch, yeah let’s switch, Rick. You plunge and I’ll tie, I’m a good tie guy”.
We switched. I pulled hard on the scarf as he plunged the needle in, and I saw the switch from junk to blood enter the dropper. Blood never makes me faint but I almost did this time. It creeped my ass out.
“Bitchen, Andy”, Rick grinned, “I knew I could count on you. Thanks, man, Next time I’ll save some for you, I’m a little short today”. He edged towards the door.
“Thanks”, I gagged, “I’ll remember that”.
As soon as he left I double-locked the door like an old lady biddy grandma.
***
The rent was due and a single apartment back then went for $150 a month. Since I was out of work and assisting fuckface junkies on weekdays for free $150 may as well have been $500, 000. I had two gigantic PA speakers in storage (4 feet tall each) I remembered that weren’t being used so I decided to put them up for sale. The looks I got when I wheeled them through the lobby and up to my place were priceless.
“Andy, playin’ a show at your place tonight?”
“Yeah”, I joked, “didn’t you get the flyer?”
Until I sold the speakers I may as well put them to work, so I hooked my PA speakers up to my stereo. It was like hearing intermission records at the Hollywood Bowl or the Greek Theatre, and the neighbors never complained, because they were illegals who played their cha-cha-cha ranchero shit at ear splitting volume, too.

One day I was walking by the Masque and Holly was hanging out.
“Andy!” Holly yelled. We hugged and then I said the inevitable.
“Hey, Holly”, I said quietly, “what are you doing right now?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Hang out with me for awhile. I’ve got some records I want you to hear”, I smiled and then she smiled.
We got to my place. “Cool speakers!” she laughed. The speakers were so large they went all the way up to my Murphy bed with little room to get to the kitchen and bathroom.
“Get on the bed and I’ll put something on”, I ran over to the stereo and put on Kraftwerk, not too sexy, but powerful out of those big speakers. I got back on the bed and we both lay there on our stomachs.
The music began, rhythm machines and synthesizers booming out of the 4 foot speakers in our faces, our hair bouncing on our heads from the vibrations of sound. DUT-DUT-DOOT-DUNN! BOW-BOP-A-DOOP!
“WE-ARE-THE ROBOTS! DOOT-BOP-A-DOOT! WE-ARE-THE ROBOTS! DOOT-BOP-A-DOOT!”
“Well, Andrew”, Holly purred, “That’s a quite a punchy bass frequency”.
The walls trembled from the music bouncing off the walls. We both started laughing from the vibrations tickling us from the PA. I got real quiet, tapping my foot to the music, and glanced at her. She looked at me with that “What are you waiting for, sailor?” look.
I turned closer and kissed her, she kissed me sweetly and we continued handling each other to the strains of thunderously loud Teutonic techno.
***
I was watching TV on a Sunday night and people were yelling loudly in the hall, nothing new for this place, but this time doors were getting banged on. My door got banged on quickly.
“WHAT?” I yelled. The hallway smelled badly and was bathed in smoky red light.
“FIRE!” a fat black woman yelled at me.
To the left of the hallway the sofa that had been sitting there for 3 months was on fire, and the flames spread. People were running around, screaming, the alarm bell was deafening, and I ran back in.
QUICK>QUICK>QUICK, what will I take with me? I immediately grabbed my saxophone and a painting I did of a boy pulling a spitting cobra out of his zipper. I raced out the safe side of the hallway thinking, gee, I hope my neighbor Pat’s okay. Pat played saxophone, too and lived next door and like to dress like The Invisible Man, bandages and all, when he performed. The flaming sofa was right by his front door! I ran out to the parking lot and looked up at my apartment window to see if my place caught on fire. Much to my horror Pat was hanging out his window looking down.
“Andy!” Pat yelled. “I’m fucked!”
“Shit!” I yelled back. “You might have to jump!”
“Fuck yeah!”
“Well, look, there’s two cars that’ll break your fall, you can do it, god damn it!”
“God damn it!”
There were a few cars under the window from the rather high Second Floor that would break his fall, but his ankles would take the painful shock, no shit.
The fire trucks raced right up to the building and they charged up to my floor.
“Hey, maybe you’ll have to jump into one of those trampoline things!”
“I hate those fucking things! I’m scared of heights!”
Before I could get another stupid helpful suggestion I could see firemen smashing in Pat’s door down behind him, throwing a blanket over his ass and pulling him back into his room and racing him out of the building.
Two hours later I got to go back to sleep in my smelly burned toast apartment, everything intact, paintings, saxophone, and even sexy PA speakers intact. And I sold the speakers and made the rent.