On Her Bed of Roses

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.

Andy Seven Ltd. · On Her Bed Of Roses

In Bed With The Bomb

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”:

Andy Seven Ltd. · In Bed With The Bomb

Ghosts of Hustlers

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

kenneth anger dreams
of dead sex machines
BJs for a tenner
as soon as my crazy friend began collecting SSI
blew it all on hustlers
blondes built like Frankenstein
The Incredible Hulk
and the ever popular Creature From The Back Hankie Lagoon
the ghosts of hustlers came to say hello last night
slamming doors
knocking over picture frames
throwing my beach towels on the floor
the only way I quieted them down
was by lighting a cigarette
and blowing
the smoke
in their pretty little ghost faces

Andy Seven Ltd. · Ghosts Of Hustlers

Story Telling Time

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

Andy Seven Ltd. · Velvet Candybar

Talking To Myself In Public

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.