Aladdin I. Shadow

A young man stood against the wall in front of a night club. It was after eleven o’clock at night.

Aladdin I. Shadow had platinum blonde hair and a chiseled face, which made him look like a young Greek god of sorts. He wore elephant flares that would have made him trip all over himself had it not been for the three inch platforms that he wore. The platform shoes were a dark gold with brass heels and soles and went Click Clack, Click Clack. When he walked he made a sound like a broken clock.

Tonight he wore a red and silver lurex shirt which he would open as far down as his mood permitted him. If his he felt alright the shirt would be buttoned midway down his chest, if he was down it could be buttoned up to the throat, and if he was really happy it would be buttoned down to the navel. This kept the boys happy and the girls even happier.

His mood was just so-so, hence the shirt open midway down his chest. He was a funny sort, not an actor but more of a reactor. This meant that he hung out a lot but didn't really instigate anything, making him instantly likeable to everyone. He went with the flow as long as someone else started it.

Mood was a very important component in his life. When he was up he was called Lad and when he was down he was simply called Shadow. Things were complicated in his mind but to others they probably looked simple. That’s the way things always look when you’re eighteen years old.

A tall girl with brown hair cut in a shag hooked her arm around his and without slowing down her walk pulled him into the club.
“What gives?” Lad asked her.
“You looked all glum and mopey just standing outside on the sidewalk all by yourself”, she said, topping it off with a sweet kiss to his face.
“You take me too seriously, Raggedy Jane”.
“No, you do!”

Raggedy Jane dressed like a big glam doll with huge red spots on her cheeks and large distended false eyelashes sticking out of a pale baby face looking like a doll gone berserk. Her clothes were a jumble of thrift shop left-behinds with some sharp glam fashions, so she’d tie a lumberjack shirt like a halter above a pair of glittery hot pants.

“Gimme a stick of gum!” she barked, going through the pockets of Lad’s tight pants.
“Gimme a second to give you one!” he barked back. He reached into his jacket and pulled out two sticks.
“Here, take two. That ought to keep your mouth full for a change”.
“Danke schoen!” she slugged, jamming the two sticks in her heavily lipsticked maw.

The club stank heavily of stale beer with the walls wrapped in cheap pine. Posters of Mick Jagger and Marc Bolan greeted them as they walked in. There were several lipsticked kiss marks around Mick Jagger’s crotch. Marc only had one. Further down the bar was a mirrored dance floor.

The DJ in the booth was playing “Dynamite” by Mud. The Chinn-Chapman style drums beat a deep, thick tattoo that penetrated every corner of the club.

“She comes in looking like dynamite”, the band wailed over the powerful drumbeat.

“I ALWAYS COME IN LOOKING LIKE DYNAMITE!” Jane yelled in Lad’s ear as they entered the fray. Kids were dancing and showing off with glitter on their cheeks and tops of metallic colors with high-rocketed shoes and boots intended to upstage each other with height.

They went into a hip-swinging dance until Raggedy Jane leaned over and saw a girl in the crowd and began waving her arms broadly like a lunatic.

“LITTLE DOT! LITTLE DOT! OVER HERE, WHORE!” Jane yelled, making Lad’s ears ring even louder. He turned slightly and saw their friend Little Dot somehow dancing and pivoting closer and closer towards them on the dance floor.

Little Dot earned her name because like the comic character wore nothing but polka dots, the louder the better. Her dresses, shoes and handbags were always in polka dots. Once she tried to bleach her hair to have polka dots but it nearly fell out completely, so she settled for a blonde Veronica Lake waterfall instead.

“Raggedy Jane! Aladdin!” Little Dot smiled, not missing a step to the Mud song as it faded and Showaddywaddy started up with their one good tune. Aladdin smiled quietly.

“Dot, I love your Garbo look tonight, how fantabulash!” Jane screamed, hugging Little Dot as showingly as possible.
“No, bitch, I’m Dietrich tonight, not Garbo!” Little Dot yelled back as they traded invisible kisses on each other’s cheeks.

“I’ll be right back”, Aladdin said as he walked off the floor towards the bar.

A tall boy with a fuzzy Afro and bright red overalls waved Lad over. “Hey, brother, long time no see!”
“Hey, Gunk! What are you drinking?”

The kid called Gunk made a bitter face and grumbled, “Ginger beer”.
Lad laughed and Gunk then smirked, “Want a sip?”

“No, I’ll wait until I’m old enough to drink real beer”.
“Hey, is your dad home?”
“No, he’s out with some broad in Murrieta Hot Springs or some shit like that”.
“Cool, man. We can raid his liquor cabinet while he’s out screwing Anita Bryant”.

Aladdin frowned. “Nah, he’s getting wise to me. I see pencil marks on the label now, so he suspects I’m jacking his sauce”. They both laughed. He looked at a round metallic disk on Gunk’s overall.
“Hey, you didn’t say anything about my Slade pin”, Gunk said. ” I made it myself”.
“It’s okay, I guess”, Aladdin said begrudgingly. It was a homemade creation in magic marker.

“What do you mean ‘it’s okay’? What’s wrong with it?”
“Well, you spelled everything right. If it’s Slade you’re supposed to misspell everything, like you’re trying to piss off your English teacher. ‘We’re all crazy’ is supposed to be spelled ‘WEER ALL CRAZEEE’”.
“Oh shit”, Gunk frowned.

“I’m going back on the floor”, Aladdin tapped his feet loudly. “Come on and join us!”
Gunk gaped at the girls on the dance floor.
“I want to bang Little Dot so bad”, Gunk gushed. “Put in a good word for me”.

“Little Dot doesn’t like sex. She’s so loaded all the time she doesn’t even remember what fucking means”.
“Don’t tell me that!”
“Bye”, Aladdin smiled as he danced through the crowd. The DJ moved into “Personality Crisis” by the New York Dolls and the kids all screamed at the beginning like David Johansen.

He reached Raggedy Jane and Little Dot’s little circle and joined them.
“Where have you been?” Raggedy Jane wailed. “We’ve been just so severely traumatized without you!”
“I was talking to Gunk. He’s madly in love with Little Dot”.

Little Dot made a sour German face. “Nein to nerds! Nein to nerds! Ich nicht lieben du nerds!”
“Oh, she really thinks she’s Dietrich tonight!”
“That’s okay, he made a correctly spelled Slade button tonight”, Aladdin announced.
“SIE! SCHEISS DAS NERDEN!”

As Aladdin danced he scanned the room to see if he recognized his other friends, what few he had. Every once in a while he’s catch some old guy, old enough to be his father scamming up to some girl his age. It made him angry, and some even closely resembled his father in a weird way. It never was the same after his mother died three years ago.

Dancing to silly songs like Tiger Feet and My Coo-Ca-Choo was a narcotic that numbed him from the tragedy of losing his forty-year old mother to cancer. The loud colors of his clothes and the explosive music served as a benign shellshock from the grief he really felt. It didn’t hurt that he befriended his rich female classmates who accepted him like a brother, so he accepted as many female friends as he could.

With the surrogate brother role he was handed he kept his drinking at home while his surrogate sisters got as drunk and stoned as they wished. His dad had good taste in liquor so it didn’t bother him to stay sober. Besides, Hollywood cops scared him. They always seemed desperate to prove that they were tougher than the rest of the Los Angeles police force.

Cops hated the glam clubs and would occasionally raid the place with a few firemen to create the justification that attendance was unsafe, when in fact the occupancy level was not over exceeded at all. When the police and fire chiefs made their big production it always culminated at the cash register by the bar with the register ringing and some money would flash in and out of unknown hands.

Little Dot and Raggedy Jane lustfully posed with Virginia Slims hanging off their lipstick lips and air kissed to Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” and stopped everything to scream out, “BABY JANE’S IN ACAPULCO WE ARE FLYING DOWN TO RIO!!!”
Smoke drifted out their skulls when they screamed.

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

After the club closed they went down to the coffee shop down the block with the other kids. It was always a good idea for all the kids to go the same coffee shop to prevent the lowriders from picking on them. The car club kids always came in to Hollywood from their neighborhood to mess with the glam set.

The waitresses hated all the glam kids and always took their time handing out menus and taking their orders, their way of letting them now they weren’t welcome.

Jane, Dot and Aladdin took a table of their own.
“Oh look”, Jane frowned at the waitress. “We’re getting our menus fifty years later”. The waitress practically threw the garishly colored oversize plastic menus at them.

Little Dot spun every page of the menu like a speed freak. “Trash, trash, trash, trash, trashtrashtrash and more trash. Yuck!”
Aladdin smiled. “Why don’t you say it in German, Miss Dietrich?”
“It’s past midnight, sweetie I’m doing Carole Lombard now. Marlene was SO last night!”

Raggedy Jane stared at the menu with intensity. “Thousand Island or Ranch? The night has a thousand eyes!”
Little Dot lit up another Virginia Slim. “Miss Dot will have an iced tea and your salad crackers, dahlink”.
Raggedy Jane looked at Lad. “What’ll it be?”

“Grilled cheese sandwich with French fries”, Aladdin said.
Little Dot cackled. “That’s drunk food! You’re not even loaded!”
“I didn’t have dinner tonight. I’m pretty hungry”.

They waited another fifteen minutes for the waitress to make a cameo appearance. The other kids were getting pretty impatient with their service, too.

“Jesus, my stepdad comes around more often than this fucking waitress does”, Raggedy Jane grumbled. “Oh, here she comes”.

Their taciturn waitress took their order but didn’t bother to take their menus from them. The three teenagers simply took the menus and threw them into the booth next to them. The coffee shop hostess glared at them from across the lounge.

“Now, check your food before you eat it”, Jane advised her friends. “Someone may leave a special souvenir in there just to show you how pleased they are to serve us”.
“You betcha”, Little Dot puffed away.

CUT THAT’S A WRAP

EPILOGUE: The waitress took so long with their order that Little Dot got bored and sat on top of their table and sang "Falling In Love Again" looking bored and smoking languidly until the coffee shop hostess charged their booth and threw our friends out. They ended up going through a Jack In The Box, and that's the way it was.

Fifty Years in Los Angeles

This is the year and that was the year and it all comes down to half a century of living in Los Angeles, mostly Hollywood. No, it doesn't all seem like yesterday; in fact it feels like several lifetimes ago. The Twentieth Century didn't fuck around, what with every decade feeling like another life spent.

How did I even get here? I was just a European boy living the Yankee life in Rhode Island and liking it. I was living in Kennedy Country (New England) and our man John F. Kennedy was in The White House. Everything seemed cool. My father was in the electronic designing department at Brown University in 1963. A few months later Kennedy was toast and so was New England for us.

My father joined the New Frontier headed towards outer space and the psychedelic landscape of Hollywood. He got a job offer from Aerospace in Redondo Beach. Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, Long Beach and all points south turned Southern California into a veritable Boomtown for Aerospace workers. My father heard the siren call to Boomtown USA, not mere gold but better, designing spacecraft, missiles and rocket appendages. Welcome to Los Angeles.

Sixties: My first home in Los Angeles was around West Hollywood in the Fairfax District...it was insane, we were sandwiched in between CBS Studios with its ever watching eye, the Silent Theatre and the enormous Pan Pacific Auditorium...we'd have dinner at Canter's and I'd stare at the freaks with their long hair and beads...my Mom said, "Andy, don't stare"...people were getting pissed...I remember watching the Watts riots on TV and my parents said "Stay home today"...

Two years later we moved to Beverly Hills...I went to a modern Hebrew school where half the kids looked like they came from mixed marriages but I didn't care.... they were building Century City down the street and LBJ was going to speak at the Century Plaza Hotel with kids marching down Olympic Boulevard, protesting the Vietnam War...we were too broke to do anything big on Saturday night my dad took us out for a ride (families used to do that sort of thing) down Sunset Boulevard which was crowded as hell, especially since there were so many paddy wagons pulled up in front of Pandora's Box on the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights.

Seventies: My teenage years were spent in endless nights at Rodney's English Disco and watching countless glitter bands at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium...glam rock seemed like it would never die, it just got bigger and crazier and I got into the scene, platforms and velvet flares...Westside days spent going to summer school at University High and Rhino Records in Westwood...taking endless jazz music courses, harmony theory and the whole damn Big Band thing at the Dick Grove School of Music in North Hollywood...

Then driving down to gay discos like The Other Side in West Hollywood...Santa Monica Boulevard haunts like a weird old dream even to this day...and then there were punk rock memories at The Masque, playing there and even living there with Spazz Attack and Brendan Mullen, moving to punk palace The Canterbury, big mistake but so what?

Eighties: Disappointed by the decay of Hollywood punk and shitty new wave I retreated into endless movie shows at The Beverly Center, sitting in my car in the darkness of the Centinela Drive-In with the Studio Drive-in across the street, right by LAX so during the film you'd watch the jet planes swooping down for a landing...

I lived across the street from A&M Records on la Brea Avenue in a trashy courtyard next door to a massage parlor..one rainy night I found a hundred dollar bill by the parking lot...bought a leather-bound saxophone case with it...Rajis was the rockin' club by the end of the decade and I watched The Nymphs, Haunted Garage and Pygmy Love Circus, the greatest club ever...I started my own band Trash Can School and we recorded at Radio Tokyo in Venice for about three years (1988-1990)...it was epic.

Nineties: My band played with some amazing bands at The Shamrock and Jabber Jaw, I'll never forget them...I lived at The Gramercy Apartments in Koreatown, apartments that recalled every noir film you've ever seen...Elisha Cook Jr. must have drifted through the walls several times...after I broke the band up I moved to the Miracle Mile and went to every lowbrow art show at Luz De Jesus on Melrose Avenue, there was Pablo and Pizz and Robt. Williams and XNO and Billy Shire, Golden Apple Comics representing, too...

Then there was Johnny Legend and Eric Caidin putting on sleazy movie shows at the Florentine Gardens on Sundays...I married Rebecca and we created fashions for The Fetish Ball and every other kinky fetish event in town... we also had a band called Cockfight and made a funny video with Ron Jeremy, it was clean, it's cool.

Y2K: Rebecca and I worked morning, noon and night...dealing with bullshitting imagineers who knew nothing about art, smarmy stylists who knew nothing about fashion and a lot of TV people who wanted to interview us and show our clothes....then there were the Comic-Con assholes who knew nothing about anything and the money slowed down so I worked at Dodger Stadium for awhile in the executive office designing their merchandise catalog...the palm trees circled around Dodger Stadium looked like a dreadlocked tribe of dinosaurs looming over the city...bored with that I drifted into a 15-year career with Los Angeles County....played my last show ever at Headline Records on Melrose Avenue...LA, always LA.

Teens: So fifty years later I still eat at Canter's and haunt the streets of West Hollywood. Now I'm a writer, writing, always writing...tell the story even if no one wants to listen, read the words of God even if no one believes anymore...making clothes for myself and other people, hitting the Garment District in the early morning...although there were a few detours here and there in New York and Europe I always returned to Los Angeles like an old habit I couldn't shake off..I'm still in Hollywood...still making noise, still making trouble...take my advice, don't forget to go to the beach.

\

The 1974 Creem Glam Rock Issue

The groupie phenomenon was still going strong in the 1970's, still colorful because the glitter rock scene gave it a strong fashion base to work with. No offense to the girls pictured above but I only recognize the first girl (Lori Mattix) and the third girl (don't know her name) from the Rodney's English Disco days. The other two don't look familiar at all. Maybe the other two spent more time at The Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Blvd. where all the big budget hyped bands (Led Zeppelin/Roxy Music/The Kinks) stayed. The bands that didn't get a big promo push (The Stooges/Suzi Quatro) stayed at The Tropicana on Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood.

Johnny Thunders' #1 girlfriend from Hollywood was Sable Starr. She was very cool and seemed pretty loyal to him at the time (1974). They got a lot of publicity together. David Johansen's girlfriend was Cyrinda Foxe, another colorful blonde. Leee (three e's) Black Childers used to photograph them quite a bit for Rock Scene Magazine and Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine.

Here's the glam spread for Creem Magazine: click on the image to see it closer. This was a four page report, but on this page you'll see Sparks, Roxy Music, Little Richard, Michael Des Barres, Bette Midler, Gary Glitter, David Bowie, The GTO's (last month's blog!), The Wackers, The Harlots of 42nd Street, William S. Burroughs, and four guys from England who look like Ted Koppel.

I remember seeing Silverhead at The Starwood in 1974. The singer was Michael Des Barres, a very attractive Nordic looking model-type. His band got a lot of flack for their album cover, "16 and Savaged". They were okay, nothing special. Mr. Des Barres married Miss Pamela from The GTO's, later joined Power Station, and then embarked on a great acting career, starring as a villain on "Melrose Place" and appearing in cool movies like "Sugar Town" and "Mulholland Drive".

Alice Cooper did a fabulous photo spread in Creem Magazine touring all the hot spots of Hollywood. Here he is pictured in front of The Classic Cat on the Sunset Strip, which was formerly Jerry Lewis' club which he opened to compete with his former partner Dean Martin who had the more successful Dino's Lodge. The Classic Cat later became a Tower Records Video Store. Not much to say about Alice Cooper, other than his best work was about to be behind him, just like this marquee.

I remember when The Dolls played a top-secret show at Rodney's English Disco: first Jerry Nolan came in and was very down-to-earth, no rock star attitude at all. Great guy. A half-hour later Arthur "Killer" Kane came in with his people and damn, he was tall. Sylvain Sylvain (Isaac Mizrahi's cousin!) came in a little bit later and giggled a lot. BUT - BUT - When *** Johnny *** came in all the groupies standing around the club dropped everything, stopped talking among themselves and primped like crazy as soon as they saw him. You could have heard a pin drop. He was clearly the star of the band.

Rock & Roll Confidential, Part 3

Guitar Center (7425 W. Sunset Blvd.) - The last time I went to Guitar Center I saw a Japanese kid posing all slumped on an amp, playing Jimi Hendrix riffs letter perfectly on a Fender Strat, xerox riffs of "The Wind Cries Mary" and he was loud. VERY LOUD. There were twenty other guys doing almost the same thing, so the main room was almost as loud as a speedway in full tilt.

The only reason Guitar Center works for me is because it's a quick place to get guitar accessories, and they have a good selection of guitar stands, straps, strings, etc. Got a sweet Pignose amp there, plus my all-time favorite, the belt clip-on Marshall stack you plug your guitar into so you can jam dirty, distorted guitar in the kitchen, at the parking lot, in the crapper, portable boogie is all yours!

Don't waste your time and money on guitars or amplifiers here, they're overpriced at a ridiculous mark-up. Your better buy would be from an e-tailer like Music 123 (look it up, ya lazy) because they have a wider selection and sell at lower prices. You can get a cool Johnny Ramone Mosrite guitar for only $300, way cheaper than Guitar Center would ever charge.

Oh, and if you walk by Eddie Van Halen's handprints on the Rock & Roll Walk of Fame, do the right thing and spit on it. That turd took Kurt Cobain to task for having a black guitar player in Nirvana. He really ought to apologize to Pat Smear.


The Cinema Bar (3967 Sepulveda Blvd.) - Eve knew her apples. Adam knew his women (well, he only had one) and I know Culver City. Duller than dull, but here's tons of action at The Cinema Bar.

As everybody else has said the bartenders rule and last Friday my friend's band played, as opposed to the biker jug band fare they usually put on. The space was scary because the club is as small as a cat bed, add the bandstand, the bar and a few tables even! so racing off to the cool patio in the back was a good option.

The crowd was a mixture of aging chunky biker barfly, Ultramega OK metal heshers and confused creeps like me. There was a black tweaker with Afro pigtails trying to sell me crank and I said no. If he was taking what he was selling nobody wanted in. The brother was splayed.

I just wish they had the gigantor TV on with footage of the X Games with Travis Pastrana making with the freestyle MX jumps. It would have enhanced the hesher factor. But no matter. Culver City is redeemed by this cool saloon.

Carvin Amplifiers (7414 W. Sunset Blvd.) - Nice change of pace from the screaming in-your-face vibes of Guitar Center across the street. The Carvin store looks quite cave-like from the outside, craggy rock entrance and all. You step in and it's pitch black with little spotlights over the amplifiers on sale. It's like buying your gear at The Batcave.

The amplifiers sound sweet, better than Marshalls IMO, but they're damn pricey, but what the hell did you expect? You're buying your gear from The Batcave.

The Cat Club (8911 W. Sunset Blvd.) - "So, how's your love life?"
That's the greatest pick-up line I've ever heard. Not very clever, I know, but the girl that asked was wearing nothing but a baby diaper and cowgirl boots. That's the kind of memory you take to the grave. What does any of this have to do with The Cat Club? Absolutely nothing, but there's nothing terribly relevant about The Cat Club, either.

Saturday night: At the club we ordered drinks at a jaw-dropping $10 apiece. I didn't know a bottle of Bud was worth ten dollars. My Scotch and Soda was so watered down you could have poured it into Lake Arrowhead and the fish would have felt cheated. The bartenders were hard of hearing and surly because they were up past their bedtime. God, they were so old they probably pissed sawdust.

The band Goo Goo Deville acted like Eighties glam metal was still rocking like gangbusters. The singer was so ugly he looked like he fell off Ugly Mountain and didn't miss a boulder. He flipped the dirty bird at the audience every 30 seconds. What a repertoire. Look out, Tony Bennett.

While they were chugging into their most excellent power ballad my girl tried to use the ladies room, a sliding metal door with one toilet inside, but there was a line. Just to speed things up she banged on the door to wake the dead (or at least the geriatric bar staff, hyuk!) and two metal strumpets marched out with sheepish looks on their faces. They'll have to engage in their Free Clinic Frolics somewhere else.

A lot of the kids loved the band and had a great time, I must confess, sloppy butt dames shoulder shakin' and tossin' their hair like a Pat Benatar video. I drained my $6 water, ahem I mean cocktail and headed for the exit. Halfway out the door someone yelled, "ANDY FUCKEN SEVEN", and I thought I've been here for an hour plus and now somebody feels like yelling my name. WTF?

But that's The Cat Club for you. Everything about it's a day late and a dollar short.


Musician's Institute (6752 Hollywood Blvd.) - I don't know why, but there's a twisted symbolism in Musician's Institute being next door to the Church of Scientology...hmm, robotic lifestyles, robotic music, it all fits.

I don't know how these suckers cram for finals..."Dude, I got graded on a curve playing 'Crazy Train', I barely squeaked by"...do they realize the people that created these songs never took a class in music? It's weird seeing these kids from Sweden with their expensive, non-scuffed guitar cases studiously racing to class.

Musician's Institute started out as G.I.T. (Guitar Institute of Technology), then expanded to P.I.T. (Percussion Institute of Tech), and then B.I.T. (BASS! Institute of Tech), and then K.I.T. blahblahblah same S.H.I.T. different Hollywood money-making scam.

Rock & Roll Confidential, Part 1

Rainbow Bar & Grill (9015 W. Sunset Blvd) = Ah, the Rainbow Bar & Grill…the decline of rock civilization unfolding before your eyes…mp3 killed the video star, but I digress…
The “legendary” pizza everyone raves about will take about an hour plus before you even get to see it on your table. And it’s not all that, really. If you want to eat right away, I would suggest (believe it or not) the Greek salad which is surprisingly goods, seasoned well and absolutely delicious.
Celebrities spotted at the Rainbow: Lemmy of Motorhead who probably gets his mail delivered there, the Osbourne Family (pre-TV show fame), Kevin Dubrow of Quiet Riot RIP, and a heavy-metal Cecil B. DeMille cast of thousands.

Hollywood Bowl (2301 N. Highland Avenue) = Everyone has to hit the Bowl at least once in their lives. Last time I visited the Bowl was for the Motley Crue/Aerosmith show. First thing we did was park at Hollywood & Highland and hit the Bowl shuttle on Orange Drive. I was the only guy on the shuttle besides the surly bus driver; every metal tramp, stripper and strumpet was riding the hooker shuttle, whoo! Cheap blondes in buckskin bikinis were craning their necks scoping me out while my girl was laser-beaming stink eye at them. Let the rock ‘n roll begin, and begin it did. Since my girl made clothes for Mick mars (Motley Crue) we got in through the VIP entrance behind the Bowl. The reason I mention it is because it was fun watching Leif Garrett try to talk hi way in for free after the guest list staff didn’t see his famous name on the list (“Dude, don’t you remember me from Behind The Music?”)
As we walked in I noticed Slash walking by us, his bodyguards were three steps behind him and running to keep up. Some bodyguards. I hope he puts a stop payment on their pay checks.
We got a great box in the orchestra pit (seats four). The sound was decent (ah, the review begins), visibility is good no matter where you’re seated with lots of video screens in case you’re not a squinter. Motley Crue were great; wish they did “Too Fast For Love” and “Afraid”, but they did “Dr. Feelgood” so I went home happy.
As soon as Motley Crue were done and Aerosmith opened with “Toys In The Attic” (my favorite R.E.M. song) it was our cue to leave. If I want to hear Aerosmith there’s always KLOS and trailer parks.
The bimbo shuttle wasn’t happening so we walked down Highland, everyone incredulous we would bail on Steven Tyler’s mega-lips, even the rent-a-cops schitting a brick (“how could you?”)
The most outraged of all was MTV has-been Jesse Camp and his entourage walking up as we were walking down the road. “Dude are they done already?”
No, but we were. Who wants to hear the same old song and dance?

Whiskey A Go-Go (8901 W. Sunset Blvd) = The Wiggy A Goo-Goo, those were the days, and they were funny ha-ha days, too.
You’d be on stage rockin’ and shakin’ yr. ass and there’d be video monitors all over the place and while you’re singin’ up there you’re staring at yourself performing and it’s a lot like boppin’ in front of the bedroom mirror when you’re a kid only a lot of poor people paid to get in so your ego is magnified times 100 and once two girls fought over me at the bar upstairs and I ended up going home alone because it wasn’t really about me after all, was it?
The Whiskey is a funny place because The Doors played there and now a tribute band called Wild Child plays there and once Van Halen played there and now a tribute band called Atomic Punks play there and I played there a lot and how soon will my tribute band be playing there?

The Coach & Horses (7617 W. Sunset Blvd) = I was in a very-Bad-MOOD before I went to the Coach & Horses because my former band sent me a pseudo-litigious e-mail about some mySpace crap I had no involvement in. By the end of the night at the C&H I was grinning like a little chimp flinging Number 2’s at the zoo.
The door man (Paul? Too drunk to remember) was the nicest I’ve met in years. The bar is dark as hell with a jukebox that made my jaw drop. As soon as I heard “Hold Tight” by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich I knew I was home.
The drinks were stiffer than Walt Disney’s corpse: My first 2 scotch & sodas were rabbit punches but the third was the haymaker. I almost lit my nose instead of the cigarette I jammed into my gob. The bartenders here rule like a wrench. Dammit, I was so larried up I could have sung a Johnny Mathis aria at Miceli’s.
The night ended with a cab ride home from a cabbie named Hamlet, I schitt you not. Coach and Horses is chill to kill.

The Roxy Theatre (9009 W. Sunset Blvd) = When I played The Roxy Theatre the sound was very crisp and clean on stage, great monitors finally I could hear my Lizabeth Scott On White Crosses Croon and screeching saxophone over the din of feedback guitars, kick-ass monster mix, etc.
The sound man was Don Henley-style cocky and rude but the end result was brilliant, angel’s flight to the ears cheers mate, but buy yourself some manners, Don Henley clone.
The lighting guy was excellent. Never met him before in my life but he knew all the dramatic moments I our songs instinctively and lit us at all the right moments to chilling effect.
The dressing rooms are pretty small but big enough to make out in. I road tested that option myself.
If everything about the Roxy seems small it’s because the club got its start as a dilapidated striptease club bought by Lou Adler, John Phillips and some silent partners. The first show they put on there after they gussied it up was an unknown rock musical from England called “The Rocky Horror Show”. Not a bad start, eh?
In short, the Roxy isn’t the greatest club to see a show at but it’s one of the best for performing in. You will love it.

Frankie & Johnnie’s New York Pizza (8947 W. Sunset Blvd) = If the Rainbow is for rock royalty (haha) then this joint is for the dispossessed rockers, the street skanks and the merely curious. They’ve got beer and wine, if you want it harder (hey girls) go to Turner’s and flask it, baby. F&J’s isn’t like the ‘Bow but at least you get your pizza in less than an hour. And individual slices thin and thick crust can be had in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Yes, the pizza’s just OK but I like it.
The Italian sandwiches are big and happy and affordable. Their dessert selection’s not bad, either. Apple cheesecake and tiramisu are some of the specialties there. I love the Sunset Strip.