Cockfight - For Those Who Missed It

Cockfight was a four-piece band in the early to late Nineties that combined acid-rock metal guitar with jazz white-noise saxophone to an industrial machine punk rock beat, all dressed up in glittery glam clothes. You got a little Cramps, a little GBH, a little Sun Ra, and even some Sunset Strip metal. Like most of my music projects it was a little too much for the average rock crowd. We always did well outside of Hollywood and our only fans in Hollywood were mostly gay music fans, adopting us to play their clubs and rock showcases at The Abbey and The Garage.

I formed Cockfight as my regular band Trash Can School began falling apart, due to widely divergent musical and personal differences. One night I swung by to Rebecca's rehearsal studio to pick her up after her band Bitchcraft's rehearsal. As I sat by the front door waiting for her to finish I was getting increasingly more and ore blown away by her effortless facility to alternate between lead and rhythm guitar and sing at the same time. Her abrasive guitar tone was so incendiary it reminded me of Jimi Hendrix playing on "Manic Depression" and "Fire". I didn't need three guitarists any more because she sounded like three guitarists playing at once.

The first Cockfight rhythm section featured Rita D'Albert from the Pandoras and pre-Lucha Va Voom on bass guitar. She was a good, solid player and totally fit in with our space invaders glam rock style. She even smoked silver cigarettes. On drums was Erick Blitz who looked like he belonged in The Makers, eschewing a garage rock meets glam style.

After playing a few amazing shows with drag queens like Vaginal Creme Davis, Jackie Beat and Glen Meadmore. Cockfight guest starred on Sofia Coppola's pop-up TV show "Hi-Octane", shown on Comedy Central. We played against a dragstrip hellfire backdrop painted by Rebecca and me, and the great TV segment was directed by punk film director David Markey.

More offers for TV and recording followed: Cockfight recorded "The Stoner and The Stripper" for the Flipside Records compilation "The Devil You Know, The Devil You Don't", and Rebecca even got an illustration on the CD sleeve, too. Her style production friend Elizabeth Tobias filmed a video of the song with us performing on a huge Ed Sullivan-show type stage with guest star Ron Jeremy doing a Chippendales male stripper routine for an unruly crowd of funny money wielding grandmas. Erick Blitz left the band by this point so our friend, film director Roman Coppola sat in on drums.

Cockfight took a short break for two years and with a new rhythm section recorded a seven-song CD. Bo Kjaer played bass and surf documentary filmmaker Fran Battaglia played drums. The CD featured songs that ranged from punk blasts like "Liquor Store" to psychedelic ballads like "Lil' Albino Boy" and even drummed up a propulsive cover of The Plasmatics' "Sometimes I".

Unfortunately, in spite of all the breaks Cockfight was a tough sell given the tempo of the music scene was largely driven by jangly guitar sounding college pop bands, mostly headed by bookish looking snobs with thick horn rimmed glasses and drab Science Fair Geek clothes. Cockfight's brand of atonal glam-o-rama was too rock & roll and out of step with Seattlemania.

Cockfight, for me, was the last hurrah in playing music. Our last show was at Headline Records on Melrose (thank you, Jean-Luc!). After playing in bands for over two decades I thought it was time to find other avenues to artistically express myself, with writing providing a lot more gratification than anything. With occasional guest shots sitting in with Pressurehead, Pygmy Love Circus and The Anubian Lights it was time to simply call it a day. Cockfight, the legend and the legacy: To keep it noisy and look amazing doing so, Glam Noise forever!

Cockfight CDs and downloads can be purchased here: https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/cockfightmusic

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

Some girls like to whine and pout and some like to scream and shout. I’ll tell you 2 or 3 things I know about her and why she makes a difference to me. There was this girl, oh, we’ll call her Rebecca, she was always a little bit different, much to everyone’s disgust, girls aren’t supposed to be, you know, different, but we can’t change how we’re made. Anyway, she lived in one of those suburban areas where nobody’s different because if you’re different that creates trouble to a lot of people. If everybody’s the same then people can go to sleep in peace, and for many life is all about eating until you burst and sleeping until you die. But the different people stop the not-different people from sleeping well and eating their daily intake of 10 tons of food, but I digress.

So in this land of not-so-different, this girl named Rebecca rode her bike home from school via a short cut of an empty grassy lot with a bush and a shrub here and there. She was riding her bike slowly through the remote path singing “la-la-la” to herself the way Little Red Riding Hood probably did. As she did some greasy maniac jumped out from behind one of the bushes and wrapped his arm around her throat, choking her. She reached back with her arm and smashed his pasty face. He grunted in his sloppy French like all Canadiens do, loosening his grip, and as he did, she kicked him several times in the shins until they were so bruised he couldn’t run after her. She pedaled away as fast as she could on her bike.

When she got home she told her parents about what happened. They reported the incident to the Canadien police, and were told to come to the station to file a report. Rebecca and her parents were informed that several girls her age had been attacked in that empty lot and a few were even killed. One had a hair brush rammed down her throat and choked to death. The police knew about this guy and needed a visual description of what he looked like. Rebecca gave them a full description of what he looked like, and within a few weeks he was picked up by the authorities and prosecuted. It turned out he was a boxboy at the supermarket a few miles away.

Even though the attacker was now in prison Rebecca’s parents were worried about her safety. The possibility of another attack was still fresh in their minds, so they enrolled her in a martial arts school. Nothing fights off rapists better than judo, the martial arts where one can deflect any powerful, detaining hold they’re placed in. Rebecca enjoyed fighting people, so much so that when she fought her opponents she always had a smile on her face. Her sensei, a kind, diminutive Japanese man would admonish her, “No, you no smile. Have to look angry! More powerful that way!” Nevertheless, Rebecca won every match. Her room was filled with medals and trophies.

Judo was fun but there was wrestling lessons at school. She enrolled in those courses and was a terror in classic wrestling, beating all her opponents, mostly fat Iroquois girls from the reservation like Suzy Three Wolves and Cathy Spotted Deer. Their brothers loved to huff spray paint cans in a paper bag in their pickup trucks and listen to Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Rebecca became the girl’s wrestling champion of her school, trophies accompanying her judo medals. Her parents wouldn’t watch her compete because they couldn’t bear seeing her get thrown around a wrestling mat and tortured. It didn’t matter, though, because she always won, anyway.

Unfortunately, once she ran out of female opponents she was now pit against male competitors. Great, back to the egg: being grabbed by men. She didn’t like it, it creeped her out. They would reach for parts she didn’t want groped and put in positions that she wasn’t cool with. She unceremoniously bowed out of the wrestling game, but the end result was a triumph: judo medals and wrestling trophies lined her room and she gained confidence that was valuable.

Years later, men would make the stupid mistake of thinking she was a pushover and hassle her. She’d throw them into the wall in her furs and high heels and they’d discover she’s a lady, but the most powerful one they would ever meet. And that’s one of the things that makes her different – she’s a beautiful girl but the deadliest tomboy alive. If that isn’t wifey material I don’t know what is.

*************

When Rebecca recorded Shonen Knife’s “Public Baths” with her band Frightwig for the “Every Band Has a Shonen Knife Who Loves Them” compilation in 1989 several months later she got a letter from the band telling her that they enjoyed her cover and thought it was the best track on the album. A year later she covered Yoko Ono’s “Sisters O Sisters” with The Tater Totz and shortly received a fan letter from Yoko Ono telling her she loved her version of the song. If the Japanese can get behind Rebecca Seven then so should you.

Welcome to San Francisco

Nobody hits the streets of San Francisco expecting to knock 'em dead. If anything, if you go there it's to run away from somewhere else, and she was taking flight from French Canada, a chilly graveyard of smug and prim "rebels". She had dark skin of indeterminate race and platinum blonde hair. It shook up hipsters who swore they couldn't be shook up.

The locals didn't know what to make of her, but the drag queens did. They took her under their wing like the Seven Dwarves of Babylon: there was Miss Glamour Thing who had Tourette's Syndrome, "c'mere nigger bitch, get your pussy over here I'll show you how to sew a dress, whore". Sister Fred, who worshipped Boy George - "ker-azy about the Boy", he whined through his nose, and Jill Hershey Bar, inheritor of millions, at 300+ pounds and lover of scat, hence the title. The Girl once gave Miss Hershey Bar some dog shit for his birthday and he was so excited he broke out in tears.

Although she never had sex at all she was constantly in the employ of various sex industries - credit card checker for a 1-800 Phone Sex line or a custodian at a North Beach strip club. It paid for guitar strings, a fuzz-wah pedal, and rehearsal studio time. It was one night she got into the Nightbreak on Haight St. to see the Four Horsemen play. Sitting on the edge of the stage as the Four Horsemen played were two sluts with fried blonde hair kicking their legs up and down to the beat. They looked really smug like they were Sex In A Can. "How much more stupid can these bitches look?" she thought.

After a few beers she went to the ladies room. A minute later one of the fried blonde strumpets came in, too. The Girl turned around and sneered at her and said, "Plan on giving any diseases to the band after the show?"
"Fuck you, bitch", Fried Blondie yelled, and threw a punch at her. She ducked and missed the punch. She dived at her and ripped out clumps of the Fried Blonde's hair.
"I'll kill you!" the ugly stripper shrieked. The Girl tore the stripper's top off, and then got her on the ground using her wrestling medal-winning skills to good use.
"Let go of me!!" the stripper whined. The Girl then tried shoving the stripper's head into the toilet bowl. The stripper's friend came in to help her.
By this point there was such a commotion coming from the Ladies Room, the Girl's friends came in with beer pitchers and beat the strippers upside their heads with them.
The bouncers raced in and broke up the fight, kicking everyone out of the bathroom.

After the band's set, the lead singer of the Four Horsemen approached the Girl at the bar.
"Hey", he said, "I'm sorry about those girls. They followed us, I don't know who they are".
"Oh, that's okay", she said. He focused on a chip she wore around her neck.
"Cool", he remarked. "I'm in the program, too. How many days do you have?" He turned the chip around to read the inscription.
The inscription said, "GOOD FOR ONE DRINK".
He disgustedly pushed it back at her. But not so disgusted that he didn't give her his phone number in Hollywood before storming off.

Months later, she had a job cleaning at The Century Theatre. Two strippers came into the dressing room and froze when they saw her. It was the girls from the Nightbreak. As she was leaving, one of the strippers stopped her.
"I know you", she said. "I know you from somewhere. You look really familiar".
"Yeah", the Girl said, "You look really familiar to me, too".
"Do I know you from Hollywood?" she smiled, getting excited. "Did you ever go to the Scream?"
"Yeah, maybe. Have you ever been to White Trash A Go-Go?"
"No, no, no. Maybe the Seventh Veil", the fried stripper pondered, jogging her imited memory banks. She honestly couldn't place her from that explosive evening at the Nightbreak.
A week went by and the two strippers did their act, never recognizing the Girl. After their "engagement" was over at the club they left the Girl a large tip, and they just couldn't remember that night.

The Girl continued making clothes with the Seven Dwarves of Babylon and it worked out fine.