* WHAT THE REVIEWERS ARE SAYING ABOUT COME DOWN FROM THE HILLS & MAKE MY BABY:

“Loosely factual, this novel follows the indifferent musical career of the experimental-punk-noise outfit Braindead Soundmachine, the drunken exploits of the band members in East Hollywood when it was actually seedy, and the narrator’s post-modern love for Los Angeles as he watches it burn on TV during the L.A. riots from a sports bar in Oregon. This book is worth picking up for its sexy, nihilistic description of transvestite strippers alone. But as a historical document, it’s priceless.” – Evan George, LA ALTERNATIVE PRESS

“This angst-filled tale is like a beat novel for today’s disgruntled youth.” –Jonathan Williams, Prick Magazine.

“This is more a cautionary tale about the record industry and the damage done than a self-serving ‘music’ book about some band’s career — and i suppose that’s what is MOST compelling about it; the author’s slow realizations about the nature of his dreams and aspirations (however subversive they are) can’t survive in the even more hostile environment of the idiocy of the music biz. Any musician, and anyone that likes music, should read this book.” – Vaughn DuPont, amazon.com

“Once again Cole Coonce pulls it out of the bag and drops a load of intrigue and twisted mundanity with brilliant style. Culminating in the illusion of nothing happening… but somehow in retrospect you know something big went down. This is certainly a book to curl up on someone’s sofa with a warm crack pipe and enjoy.” – Come Down from the Hills & Make My Baby liner notes.

CHECK OUT MORE TITLES AT KEROSENEBOMB.COM!

BRAINDEAD SOUNDMACHINE (1990-1993) have ripcorded on the music business and now live in a dormant wind tunnel on the Morgan Salt Flats, east of China Lake Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. The facility also features a natural hot spring, a small cafeteria, and a sculpture garden consisting of welded early 70s muscle cars. The wind tunnels themselves are modified Navy diving bells powered by gas generators and automobile batteries. With mixed results, the former musicians promote their “Nitronic Research Wind Tunnels” as a point of interest for travelers on the way to nearby Death Valley.

BRAINDEAD’s lineage can be traced back to the late 60s, when former Strawberry Alarm Clock keyboardist Ikky Shivers performed his rock opera “BRIAN WILSON” in the abandoned warehouse district of downtown Los Angeles. In 1985, after having disappeared for some years into the not entirely unconnected worlds of Japanese pornography and top fuel drag racing, Ikky turned his head in a Hollywood Denny’s restaurant and saw that the man next to him was also reading a copy of NO TIME FOR RIMJOBS, the autobiography of Kenji Yoshi, a Japanese crossdresser who holds the unofficial speed record for unlimited top fuel funny cars after hitting 331 mph at Badwater, Utah in front of approximately 34 Jehovah’s witnesses, none of whom were accepted as recognized corroboration by the proper sanctioning bodies.

PART ONE: WE BELIEVED IT THEN AND I BELIEVE IT NOW

“We believed it then

And I believe it now…

This music is a manifestation

Of the rising tide of awareness on the planet.

“This music contributes to a positive environment,

It feels good and it casts a comforting spell

Over everyone who hears it.“

“Come Down from the Hill and Make My Baby.”— Dogvillasan, Coyote God from Vietnam

PAT BOONE’S DREAM DEBASED

Reality and I pick up Yoshi in the alley behind Club Mugi — the Japanese transvestite bar at the intersection of Hollywood and Harvard — at 3:30 on a Wednesday afternoon. We are late for a live music television appearance and are totally geezed on cheap marijuana, a thermos of espresso and the fumes blubbering out of my 1961 Oldsmobile Cutlass.

And we are a fashion statement, decked out in borrowed polyester “Nitro Inc.” pit crew uniforms, leather jackets and cowboy hats.

The uniforms are a temporary gift from a Top Fuel team whose p.r. man had seen us — Reality, Ikky and I (aka the Braindead Soundmachine) — around, first while interviewed on a public access show and then as guests in the Top Eliminator Club at the professional drag races. The flak thinks we are rich rock stars. We are neither.

“Hey, aren’t you guys Braindead?”

“Why, yes. We are.”

“Hey! Great to make your acquaintance! I’m Benny Mayer and I do marketing and public relations for Nitro Inc. and seeing as how you guys are famous and drag racing fans and everything, we would love to do some photo opportunities with you guys. Maybe we can get you to endorse us in interviews … and maybe buy a 55 gallon drum of nitromethane for us, as a little quid pro quo.”

“Umm, we can’t help you with your fuel costs, but we can promote your race team. As a matter of fact, we’re going to be on a music video show this Wednesday. Give us some spare uniforms and we’ll wear them during the interview. Perhaps a proper sponsor will see your logo and want to give involved with Nitro, Inc. and start cutting you checks for your operating expenses.”

We didn’t tell him about Yoshi.

*****

Like a cross dressing Norma Desmond. Yoshi is also attired for performance — “ready for (his) close-up” and television debut — with enough pancake and rouge on his cheeks to start an IHOP franchise.

The broadcast is happening in a little over an hour at a small Orange County studio owned by Pat Boone, located across the street from Disneyland. From Hollywood, we will have to cut some serious drive time in order to make the opening credits, and the freeways are fucked.

The moment should be bottled. Here we are at the Dawn of the Infotainment Age and all of this makes perfect sense: we pick up a Japanese cross dresser at a back alley behind Club Mugi, a transvestite bar whose squalid coordinates are where any manner of debauched and debased degradation and sexual congress transpire every night, and haul the proprietor, enabler and instigator of such degeneration to a humble local cable television studio owned by ‘50s pop-star-cum-religious-nut Pat Boone. All while pretending to sponsor Nitro Inc., a Top Fuel dragster team. Tutti Frutti, Aw-Rootie, indeed.

I drive, Reality takes shotgun and Yoshi rides in the back seat: Two nitro cowboys and their aging geisha quarry of indiscriminate gender. We are late, amped and stuck in traffic, somewhere between the Pai Gow Poker clubs in the Asian parts of East Los Angeles and the Matterhorn at Disneyland and we are laughing. Brake lights glow and glow like a kaleidoscope of bug’s eyes, but we are floating above the bottleneck, imitating angels and on some sort of collective out of body experience.

Reality asks Yoshi if he knows who Little Richard is.

“Oh yes. Very famous in Japan.”

“And Pat Boone?”

“Oh yes. ‘A-Wop-bop-a-roo-rop a-rop-bam-boo’.”

“Exactly. Pat Boone owns the studio we are going to.”

“Oh. I see.”

We continue floating and grinding south, with the demographic and quality of automobiles changing commensurately: There are now fewer Mexican low riders and blacks in hoopties but nearly as many Asians in Honda coupes. More and more upper middle class commuters in bucks up sedans are stuck within a quarter car length of the Cutlass, and are trying to come to terms with its peeling paint, billowing black exhaust and its strange cargo, a couple of grease monkeys and what appears to be an Asian meter maid, taking pulls from a thermos and then laughing maniacally in sync.

“So Yoshi, the interviewers are going to ask you some questions that you may not be able to understand.”

“I see.”

“So if you don’t understand the question, just answer them this way; say, ‘The Salamanders are coming.’”

“‘The Saramanders?’”

“‘Are coming.’”

“‘All com-ing.’”

“Perfect.”

Finally we get to Orange County.

“Aww, the Mattelholn,” Yoshi points to the Happiest Place on Earth.

Walt Disney. Pat Boone. Yoshi. The Braindead Soundmachine is really beginning to hit its stride, I think to myself.

LET THE MOTHERFUCKER BURN

I am in a bar in Hollywood, wearing a t-shirt with a dead rock star’s mug silk-screened on the front. The joint is crowded and incredibly dark, except when the owners sporadically pour Bacardi 151 around the perimeter of the bar and light it on fire. The flames provide enough foot-candles so that I can almost see what I am drinking. The other salient feature of the establishment is that you can buy cocaine from the bartenders. With a credit card.

Some guy in a plain yet stained white t-shirt and leather jacket picks a fight with me because of the iconography on my t-shirt. “What a selfish, self- indulgent prick.”

“Excuse me?”

“That foppish, narcissistic excuse of a human being on your t-shirt.”

“Man, you are an unfeeling asshole. And buy a clean shirt.”

We argue about the artistic and existential merits of the singer’s suicide. I say the timing of his death, on the eve of the band’s premier in America, ratcheted up the band’s cachet and somehow made them eternal. His death was poignant, I say. Like James Dean or something.

The leather jacket is having nothing of it.

“Rock and roll is over. It is cooked. Put a bullet in its doddering corpse — but spare yourself. To snuff yourself under the delusion that you will somehow create this timeless legacy with your music is beyond megalomaniacal.”

He then proceeds to tell me that film and the written word are what are still relevant. It turns out he is a screenwriter, natch. He tells me the only place for music is as a score for film. I yell back, but my voice and whatever point I am making is drowned out by exhortations from the besotted bar patrons. The bartenders have lit the bar on fire.

The flame dies down.

“So what great cinematic masterpiece are you working on, Mr. Screenwriter?”

“Call me ‘BZ.’ And it is still embryonic. The working title is ‘Zombie Cop.’”

It will take years for either BZ or I to pick up on the irony of a screenwriter trying to inject life into the medium of cinema with a script based on the undead. But for now, we shake hands, BZ nods, gives me a business card and tells me to bring some samples of my music to the Avton Films offices on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

The bartender douses the bar with rum again and drops a match. I stare into the flame. It is a bluish, fecund green and rather transparent.

“Los Angeles is on fire,” I say. I am drunk on bourbon, rum fumes and cocaine.

A couple of jailbait white girls are giggling. “We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn,” they bleat.

Soon enough, there will come a time when Los Angeles really is on fire. But then the teenyboppers will not sing.

THE MISSING EYEBROW

1988. A white passenger van travels west across Highway 1 in Canada, between Edmonton and Vancouver. In addition to its cargo of musical instruments, the freight consists of Mr. Odd, an Underground Pop Icon from England, his back up musicians and a technical crew of one, an Irish Hippie Soundman with One Eyebrow.

(It is not like the Soundman has a Slavic unibrow or anything like that. He is actually missing one eyebrow, which has been shaved off by the musicians in Mr. Odd’s band.)

The Missing Eyebrow is reading James Joyce and drinking vodka cut with Orange Crush, mixed directly into the aluminum soda pop can he snagged out of a vending machine.

Mr. Odd notices that Ulysses is actually upside down.

“Oi! You’re reading Joyce ass over tea kettle, you daft cunt.”

“Emmm. I know. It’s fucking brilliant, isn’t it?”

Mr. Odd rears back like a pile driver and TTHWAACCKKKSS Joyce out of the Soundman’s hand, spilling the vodka and Orange Crush over the van’s interior and fellow passengers.

“Hey! For fuck’s sake,” yell the other musicians as the sickly orange fluid sprays and gushes.

“Fuck off, you fucking Irish Hippie,” Mr. Odd exclamates.

Nonplussed, the Missing Eyebrow picks up the empty Orange Crush can and examines it, holding it upside down and staring at the remaining drops of fluid dribbling out and then gathers up the Joyce, which he pinwheels 180 degrees, so that it reads right side up this time. “Emmm. Got any vodka?” he asks.

No one answers. Jonathan Richman is on the stereo, singing a folk song about double chocolate malteds.

DR. RHYTHM

The first drum machine imported into the United States in any mass quantities is the Dr. Rhythm, an analog device built in the early 1980s. Made in Japan and shipped across the Pacific on a cargo freighter, typically this primitive rhythm box came in on the docks where the barrio town of Wilmington meets Long Beach Harbor.

Wilmington. Or “Wee-mas,” in the pidgin patois of the local gang members and the semi-employed longshoremen. An industrial complex defying the economic recession threatening the very existence of the local shipyards, if it were not for the prodigious dumping of Japanese electronics — such as drum machines — at the docks.

Wilmington is where the future wafts through a choked skyline, and it smells of burning rubber from chemical plants that buttress the coastline. It is all angel dust and tacos. It is a monochromatic tableau of smoke and hard, strident graffiti burning into stucco walls and the bleached out sidewalks that buttress both asphalt and a smog so thick that the harbor winds refuse to blow.

From there, boxes and boxes of Dr. Rhythms are fork lifted onto a tractor trailer, trucked inland up the Alameda Corridor of South Los Angeles, unloaded at a music store in Hollywood and then safely installed behind a glass case. Among its first purchasers is one Ichabod J. Shivers (“Ikky” to his friends), a drummer from Long Beach. Ikky is a tall, lean fellow, whose height, build and rusty skin tone belie his art faggish aesthetics. For a drummer — notoriously the most primeval of musicians —Ikky has an open and progressive mind and sees the beauty in electronics doing the work of a musician. None of this “technology is taking our jobs away” Luddite claptrap from Ikky. A study in duality and harsh contrasts, Ikky is the kind of working man who embraces technology, and purchases a Dr. Rhythm as soon as they come off of the docks; he does so with no trepidation whatsoever, loading ‘er into his Japanese pickup trucks and carting the device back to Wilmington, where his band rehearses.

FUNNY CARS ON FIRE

Reality and I are mixing a record in an expensive studio. When making a record, Reality is fanatical about creating the proper work surroundings. Without the proper environmental stimulation, the work will suffer, he says. Ergo, the control room is decorated with various talismans and gris gris which Reality reckons will somehow mystically soothe, appease and charm the electrons in the signal path that flows between the performer, his or her instrument, the recording console and the tape machine.

This evening’s mise-en-scène: Centerfold pinups of porn models rubbing their private parts, which drape the front of speaker enclosures. Every time a bass drum hits (POOOMM… POOOMM… POOOMM… POOOMM…) and expands the loudspeaker’s woofer, the bottom half of the photograph moves and gyrates back and forth, giving the illusion that the model is masturbating.

The sexual imagery is not enough for Reality. Beyond appealing to the debased ghost of Venus and maybe Apollo, Reality has arranged for other totems to summon Pan or some other gods I am not familiar with.

Shades of a keg boogie at Aleister Crowley’s pad in some gothic mansion; crosses are mounted upside down throughout the control room. Candles are burning, and wax is dripping. Pictures of funny cars on fire complete the tableau.

Reality feels the funny cars melting are a perfect metaphor for his approach to the recording process, as there is a danger when you drive or redline a machine too far or too hard. The machine will blow up in your face.

Num-E-Num, the second engineer, who is really working as an apprentice and is responsible for gathering the porn mags and hanging most of the artifacts, brings Reality and me some deli sandwiches and asks about the pictures of the race cars.

“Hey, do you guys like Funny Cars and Top Fuel dragsters?”

Reality and I answer in the affirmative. When we aren’t making music together, we often go to the drag races to get dosed with more noise.

“My dad helps sponsor a couple of Top Fuel dragsters.”

“Really.”

A few weeks later, Num-E-Num takes Reality, Ikky and I to the drag races. We get preferred parking, and access to the corporate suites where deals are struck while drag racers blow up their equipment in the background, on the other side of some tinted glass.

In the suites, everything is first class, including the hospitality. Num-E- Num’s dad is mixing a Bloody Mary and using his pinkie as a swizzle stick. He makes sure everyone has drinks and then takes us outside to meet the dragster drivers he sponsors and some of the crewmembers. We are in the pits and they warm up the engine. It is deafening. Ikky comments that it is a series of perfect square waves, uniformly spread over every cycle in the broadcast spectrum. The pressure waves are pummeling our chest cavities. Num-E-Num’s dad is stirring another Bloody Mary with his pinkie. “YOU FEEL THAT BOY?” he bellows in my ear. I nod in the affirmative. “AT MY AGE, THAT IS THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES MY DICK HARD.”

JENJEN (LOUISE BROOKS’ BANGS)

1983. She is a dough-eyed post punkette with Louise Brooks’ bangs, Joan Crawford’s eyebrows and an air of no expectations. Every afternoon during the fall of her junior year at Cal State University, JenJen goes to the campus deli and orders an avocado sandwich with alfalfa sprouts on wheat bread.

I make sandwiches behind the counter. The two of us have similar haircuts.

When ordering, she speaks to me in obtuse, diffident riddles sans question marks. Her eyes are Zen koans without the Buddhist subtext of suffering. And, despite my vomit and piss colored food service uniform, she develops a schoolgirl’s crush on me, the Guy in the Smock. I may be one of the few people on campus who understands what she is saying when she bats her eyes. And, likewise, I am intrigued by her rather aphilosophical philosophical bent — not to mention the Louise Brooks’ bangs, but a potential fling goes unrequited, as I am smitten with another piece of eye candy, a Math Major with Purple Hair who orders only coffee from me.

This — ignoring the charms of one for another — is a mistake; I will later come to understand. In this matter of the heart, I had been backing the wrong horse.

THE COYOTE GOD (Myth and Mythology)

1975. Saigon falls and a wave of Vietnamese seek sanctuary from the encroachment of Ho Chi Minh and his Red Chinese Horde; but not just the peasants fleeing from imminent genocide hop on American helicopters and boats.

Joining the exodus is a Man-Dog-Deity even more baffling and perhaps even more brutal than Ho Chi Minh hisself: Dogvillasan, the Coyote God.

Like the South Vietnamese peasants, Dogvillasan bails out of his homeland before dealing with the wrath of some mighty pissed off Maoists.

Dogvillasan, the chameleon Coyote God from Vietnam, born in a land torn by tyranny, and despotic, genocidal turf wars, catches a boat and a helicopter and stowaways to the New Mecca: The City of Garden Grove in Orange County, California. Later, he will start a religion based upon the acquisitioning of distressed real estate and 1-800 numbers.

Dogvillasan. Fable? Allegory? Fascist Oppressor? Master Capitalist? Or some meta-being tapped into the foibles and neuroses of the popular consciousness? Siddhartha for the Infotainment Age? Or an immigrant cum real estate magnate in Orange County?

Yes. He is the x and the y. The yin and the yang.

He is the Son of the Nixon Doctrine, Henry Kissinger and Allan Dulles, with a stated goal for rebuilding America — and, in the 1990s, on Sunday nights he takes human form at a Japanese cross-dresser bar in East Hollywood: Club Mugi.

“Where do you go? When Santa Ana winds blow?” Shadows of Compton, Ikky Shivers.

THE SECOND COMING OF DOGVILLASAN

We — Reality, Yoshi and I — arrive at Pat Boone’s television studio minutes before the show starts. The producer, director and presenter are all disturbed and anxious at not only our tardiness, but at our very existence.

Each of them has a clipboard with a pen tethered to it. The writing utensils and the clipboards appear to have the delirium tremens. The producer pulls me aside and half-whispers, “What is that?” and points at Yoshi.

Yoshi is in fishnets and more. In addition to the multiple layers of pancake makeup and the rouge that are making his cheek implants burst like a glowing diseased chancre at the core of the Rising Sun, Yoshi is wearing a leather miniskirt, a sort of meter maid’s vest, and a pair of patent leather shoes that would make Dorothy click three times.

“That is our guru and mentor.”

“Your what?”

“That is Yoshi, the Voice and Living Embodiment of Dogvillasan, Coyote God from Vietnam.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means that the true Wisdom of the Braindead Soundmachine is channeled through Yoshi’s Earthly Carbon Capsule. The Braindead Soundmachine is merely a vessel for Dogvillasan’s message.”

“Okay. Does it even speak English?”

“‘It’ speaks a Universal Language of Enlightenment. Just stick a microphone on Yoshi and prepare to be brightened with light and awareness.”

“What about him?” The producer points to Reality, who has been mute ever since we were rushed through the Studio’s security gates and hot lapped it out of the parking lot and into the sound stage.

Reality is fiddling with some gizmos — a series of knobs, switches and speakers — all of which are attached to his leather jacket and Nitro, Inc. uniform, as an extension of his flesh and clothing. The device is a World War I field surgeon’s telephone that mounts to the medic’s chest. Ikky, our synthesizer player, picked it out of a dumpster behind a movie studio and has wired the telephone into a series of fuzz boxes and a small, portable Pignose guitar amplifier, which Reality has carried onto his hip, not unlike a transistorized colostomy bag. He is nothing, if not biomechanoidal.

“He has throat cancer,” I say. At that utterance, the rest of the production staff gather around me, tethered pens dangling. I inform them that he has had a recent operation that has rendered him mute, except when he speaks into this special voice transducer that allows his speech patterns to be electronically encoded, then decoded and then broadcast.

“What? Like Stephen Hawkings?”

“Hawking. But yes, something like that.”

“So the cancer victim has to talk too?”

“Occasionally, there is a language barrier with Yoshi and Reality is the only person who can translate his message. They are… simpatico.”

The show starts.

THE CLASSIFIED AD

After an aborted attempt at college in Jackson, Mississippi, I left home and moved to Los Angeles. My possessions are a guitar, an amp, a vibrato pedal, a suitcase stuffed with clothes and a milk crate full of punk rock records. In Jackson, I had managed to get my hands on punk rock records produced in Los Angeles. These records make me actively despise the music I had been exposed to in high school. I drive across the country in a green Ford Pinto and my grandmother puts me up because she figures I am going to further my education in California. And I do, just not in a formal environment. The school I enroll in is Hard Knocks U., and the campus is in Wilmington. The first course is how to survive as an art fag in the barrio.

*****

Once in LA County, I answer a classified ad placed by the drummer of Outer Circle, a self-described “art fag” band who is seeking “a guitar player who makes up his own chords.” No rules about chord structure. This is as punk rock as it gets. This definitely sounds like something I can sink my teeth into.

I am late for the audition. Outer Circle’s rehearsal studio is a transformed storefront in the warehouse district of Wilmington. Outer Circle itself are not punks as much as deconstructionists. They are a motley ensemble of art fags completely incongruous to everything, including each other. Phlegm, the singer, wears a foosball man around his neck and has a permanent stalactite of hair that points towards magnetic north regardless of where he faces. He oozes sticky, sweet booze and nondiscriminatory sexuality. The Synthesizer Guy is a Huntington Beach surfer and sports a beard — the nadir of couture — and never uses more than one finger at a time on his “instrument”; with his other hand, he either fingers a pitch wheel or stifles a yawn. A guy with a Hawaiian shirt sits on a black stool and runs a lap steel guitar through a battery of foot pedals and creates a sonic roar that shakes the plaster off the walls. It is as if Don Ho has been cornholed by Beelzebub as they share a hit of butyl nitrate together during a moment of mutual orgasm. Ikky, the drummer, doesn’t want to drum. He uses his kit only half the time, preferring to program a primitive analog drum machine, Dr. Rhythm; when not programming and pushing buttons, he smokes cigarettes and observes and analyzes the cacophony. The Bass Player is completely normal.

Somehow these disparate individuals manage to coexist and share rehearsal space with the militant hardcore punk rockers (Black Flag, Secret Hate, the Nip Drivers, and the Minutemen) that also rehearse in this industrial city block of converted storefronts. It is the end of an age where anything is possible, I suppose.

I set up my gear — a guitar, an amp and a vibrato pedal — and am delivered to this bizarre anti-Xanadu, or Camelot or Shangri-La or Oz or something, where all these strands of cables are hooked up to a battery of weird devices, with these art-damaged humanoids controlling them. This whole scene really speaks to me; it’s like you know there is something happening on parts of the planet that you are only vaguely aware of, and it finally lands in your lap. It is yours to tap into. It is like you did something right, and this is your reward. You are not in Jackson, Mississippi.

I cast my eyes upon many things for the first time, not the least of which is this mystical drum machine, this magic box that, heretofore, I had only read about in music magazines. It should be noted that the editorial commentary regarding drum machines was rather disparaging. The general consensus is that drum machines are ruining music. I disagree.

THE DAY OF THE HOUSE OF PIES

I meet BZ the Screenwriter for a cup of jake and some lemon meringue at a place called the House of Pies on Franklin and Vermont in East Hollywood. The HOP’s habitués are old folks, the last vestiges of another Los Angeles, another Hollywood. Or maybe another lifetime on another planet. They are from an era when folks dressed in suits and put on a hat just in anticipation of a trip out of the house to get a piece of banana crème pie. In those days, pie was an occasion.

The House of Pies. Its architectural design is a weird, flattened variation on the Googi architecture that dominated the landscape in Southern California back when the car culture really took root in the 1950s and 60s. Sharp, salient and pointy, Googi would puncture the sky and catch the attention of passing motorists by its very shape.

*****

Except for the House of Pies and some forgotten car washes in the ghetto, Googi has all but disappeared. Los Angeles has always possessed a real hankering to obliterate its past. It has no sense of history, and doesn’t want one. What earthquakes and fires fail to accomplish, the limited intellect and attention span of Los Angeles does. Most examples of Googi architecture were razed and bulldozed long ago, but somehow — perhaps because it was a muted variation on the style — the House of Pies survived the purge. In that tradition, the House of Pies angles are smashed two-dimensional and obtuse. It is one of the few buildings left that survived LA’s architectural purge of the 1980s, when boxy mini-malls, industrial complexes and 99¢ stores infiltrated the landscape like a virus.

BZ fits right in at the House of Pies. There is something about the old gomers there that makes him feel right at home. BZ is also not of this time. He considers this modern era — the Infotainment Age — a mistake.

*****

I am late and when I get there he is already working on his pie as well as a weathered copy of the Nathanael West novel, The Day of the Locust. I order a cup of jake and a piece of pie. I ask about the plot and the theme of the book, which BZ tells me debuted in 1939 and scandalized Hollywood as an expose´ on the damaging effects of the motion picture industry.

“West not only tapped into the hubris of this town, but how the Dream Factory creates not just illusion, but its logical byproduct, disillusionment.” BZ stabs the air with a forkful of gooey pie foodstuff. “It’s not that different from the people who make this pie filling.”

Jump-started by gobs of processed sugar and caffeine, BZ is off to the races, kicking into high gear on a soliloquy on the Entertainment Industry as the New Military Industrial Complex.

“Hollywood is a self-perpetuating cottage industry,” he continues, “that must churn out more and more entertainment in order to survive. To grow. To flourish. Its insidious nature is such that it has to convince the Locusts, the consumers that they need to purchase and absorb this stuff in order to make their lives meaningful. Which was a lie worthy of Goebbels, who was just beginning to reach his stride in the Third Reich when The Day of the Locust was written. West was prescient in that he knew that entertainment is merely cultural fascism.”

“Are you telling me that there was little difference between, say, Irving Thalberg, Paramount Picture, pie filling and the Third Reich?”

My coffee and rhubarb arrive.

“The manufacture and distribution of pie filling is the least problematic. There is very little difference between what product is coming out of the studios and what propaganda was issued from the Politburo or the Reichstag after the fire.”

“But isn’t a screenwriter such as yourself equally complicit? Aren’t you as evil as, say, some Kraut in a guard tower at Dachau?”

“That is where you are wrong, sir. It all boils down to self-awareness. Read this book. No one in it is exempt from West’s wrath. But the protagonist-slash-anti-hero, Tod Hackett, shows uncanny and astute self-awareness that makes him the least dubious character in the entire manuscript.”

“Self-awareness?”

“Yes, self-awareness. It makes all the difference. Tod Hackett shows such traits in a painting he calls ‘The Burning of Los Angeles.’ Hackett finishes this painting just as Locust reaches it dénouement in the form of a holocaust of fire on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“So this book is about the Apocalypse?”

“Yes. Rapture. The Judgment.”

“So you’re saying Hackett’s self-awareness spares him somehow? Umm, I still don’t see how self-awareness gives any of us an exemption.”

“Of course you don’t. You do not possess any. You are lost in East Hollywood and you happen to play guitar, the most reductive form of expression since the Sex Pistols immolated in San Francisco in 1978. You have this delusional idea that music is somehow different from the other forms of electronic media that corrupt the sanctity of the human spirit.”

“I am trying to reconcile this with your script, Zombie Cop.”

“You are missing the point then. As an artist, you are fucked but you do not know that you are fucked. Therefore, you are truly fucked. On the other hand, I am fucked, but I know that I am fucked. Therefore, I am not truly fucked.

“Do you see the difference? Of course not, because you are truly fucked.”

JOHN FANTE’S WORST HALLUCINATION

Wilmington. Wee-mas. Or “Another Green World,” as the song goes. Something else I had only read about. Rock and roll magazines were rife with features about the weird punk rock movement sprouting like a poisonous, defiant algae in various pockets of Los Angeles, a city already more toxic than John Fante’s worst hallucination.

Mutant organisms and great art thrive in mephitic environments. This much I knew. And, in 1983, Los Angeles is where it is happening NOW. The South Bay of Los Angeles, in specific, from Redondo Beach, down to Long Beach, and as far south as Huntington Beach, all places where the hippies cut off their hair, put down the granola and the cannebinol and picked up skateboards and began spitting on the sidewalks. Those who made the transition began threatening the hippies who haven’t made the metamorphosis to a lifestyle of nihilism, discord and smoking elephant tranquilizers spritzed on mint leaves.

THE BLACK BOX WITH RED BLINKING LIGHTS

Apparently, Outer Circle likes the chords I make up. I’m in the band.

Getting the gig is an exalted feeling. Aye, somehow I belong in these dank surroundings, with its smell of power lines arcing, of chemicals balling up like snakes with the sweet and wet ocean breeze; and my fellow art fags with their bizarre and Bosch-like couture. And the weird, ultramodern, clunky technology — the synthesizers, the heavily processed lap steel guitar, the rhythm box — that helps shape this strange sound emanating inside a parallelogram in a neighborhood of cholos and vatos.

And the totem that encapsulates this strange and beautiful parallel universe is Ikky’s drum machine, the Dr. Rhythm. It is black and red and shaped like a box of candy. Its suggestive shape and its promise of a plethora of taste treats is duplicitous, as this beatbox only has four sounds: a bass drum that goes “phhuuttt”; a snare drum that sounds like “tick”; and a hi-hat that makes like “pffftt” and a crash cymbal what sounds like “ttsssh.” It is a very narrow palette.

“Simplicity is my essence,” says Dr. Rhythm. It has only a couple of knobs, including one for tempo and another for volume. A flickering red light emitting diode announces the beats per minute. Other potentiometers are for shaping the artificial drums waveform — and this in where the art comes in.

Ikky twists the knobs and gives the machine soul. Or maybe the machine already has soul; he is just channeling its spirituality. Regardless, the black box with the blinking red lights emits a detached, yet funky and syncopated rhythm.

It takes a true artist to make the Dr. Rhythm sound like something.

*****

That night, having passed the second audition, I spend the night at Phlegm’s house in Long Beach. It is an under-lit and gaudy two-bedroom cottage, hidden behind a white picket fence stitched with clumpy sheets of ivy.

It smells of warm beer, candles and Top Ramen. It smells of blue and purple. No light escapes nor enters the cottage, even when the door is open and the shades are raised.

There is a small party raging. Many hours and many empty bottles later, every one has left a rather raucous, debauched party except for Phlegm and the Bass Player’s vaguely vampiric bleached blonde girlfriend. Knocking over a lamp with a shade spray painted purple, Phlegm bails in an alcoholic haze to his bedroom and I try to call it a night, angling to carve out a spot on the couch amongst the objects’ de clutter.

The vampiric vixen is wide-awake and is not done partying. She puts on a David Bowie record and begins slithering in time to its guitar melody. I feign sleep, but open one eye. This is her moment to strike. “Phlegm is in there all alone,” she coos in my ear. “I think we should go join him.”

“No. I think YOU should go join him,” I tell her. And I roll over. She sticks her tongue in my ear. It is like trying to reason with a German Shepherd…

OUTER CIRCLE

Outer Circle is named after a traffic circle in Long Beach. It is this velodrome for automobiles that is designed to keep traffic flowing at all times, obviating the need for something as quaint as stoplights and left turns.

During rehearsal, the lap steel player tells me that the civil engineer who designed the traffic circle was killed in the very loop that he created.

Apocryphal or no, there is some meta-irony attached to this fable. Outer Circle, the band, exists to debunk the hubris of this society and to point out its foibles and pretenses. While smoking cigarettes on an under-lit stage, of course.

THE GREEN HAIRED ART CHICK

Having ingratiated myself into roommate status, I am fucking around in Phlegm’s apartment, reading mimeographed punk rock fanzines, eating Top Ramen, listening to records and drinking wine that should only be used in cooking.

It seems like a great time to be alive. It is about to get even better. A girl with green hair knocks on the door. She used to live here, but has just moved out and Phlegm owes her part of the deposit. Or something. I am mesmerized. They talk about aesthetics. She is an art major at Cal State and crafts art out of donut boxes found on the street. She makes fun of me because I own cassette tapes of poofter new wave bands. Aesthetically, I am still finding my way. Artistically, she has found her way. But I don’t understand the donut boxes. I am in no position to argue, however, because we are fucking. A phenomenon I don’t want to jeopardize over arguments about art.

Intellectually, she has all the leverage. But so what? I am pleasuring a Green Haired Art Chick who doesn’t care if I can afford guitar strings or not. California is truly the land of opportunity.

One complication: I come to find out The Green Haired Art Chick is Ikky’s girl. Ex-girl, but girl. They have just broken up. My first night with Outer Circle I had been invited into the sack with the bass player’s bipolar girl friend and Phlegm.

Two nights later, and I am fucking the drum machine programmer’s arty-ex-girlfriend. This is going to require some finesse. We go to rehearse and set up our gear. Ikky turns on Dr. Rhythm.

I greet Ikky. “How’s it going’?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

He smells it on me. Our friendship will survive it.

DREAMBOAT ANNIE (SANTA MONICA AND LA BREA)

I have just dropped a guitar amp at a repair shop in West Hollywood. The repair shop’s diminutive parking lot is full, and street parking is a clusterfuck with cars being towed and ticketed with the splatter logic of the city, so I have to carry the amp for blocks, grunting and sweating and cursing the population and the half-baked civil engineering of Los Angeles. Having deposited the amp at the shop, I have to walk back to my car, a few blocks north of the intersection of Santa Monica and La Brea.

Under the shadow of a massive billboard plugging the unspecified services of an apparent supermodel with a 1-800 phone number, I carry a guitar –– which was just repaired –– in a battered case. A beater Volkswagen Bug pulls up next to me. I walk at an approximate speed of 4 miles per hour. The Bug is traveling at the same speed. Besides the percolating putt-putt-putting of the air cooled engine, the other sonic distraction is an old Heart record playing off of what sounds like an 8 track tape player.

“Annie, Dreamboat Annie…” It is some song that I remembered lovesick white girls listened to in High School. I heard it too many times then and am in no mood to hear it now, nor ever again. I keep walking, trying to ignore whatever it is that is happening to my left.

“Hey! Are you an artist?”

It is a young woman’s voice. I try to keep my gaze focused forward.

“Hey! Are you an artist?”

This is unbelievable. Nobody in this town can leave anybody else alone. Against my better judgment, I turn my head counterclockwise.

“No. I am not an artist.”

There are two of them. Both women: a cute one in the passenger seat, sandy blonde hair and a most reasonable upper torso. She is doing the talking. The driver is sandier and chunkier and is sporting a smile only “Dreamboat Annie” over a Volkswagen tape deck can inspire.

“Well… you look like an artist.”

I am being worked and I know it. I just can’t figure out the angle.

“No, I am not an artist. There is a guitar in this case, not a paintbrush.”

“Awww, you know what we mean. You look artistic. We both really dig people who are creative.”

“Well, I am not an artist.”

“Do you like poetry?”

“No.” What is it with these chicks? Why am I being hit on? Do they want to take me to a motel and fuck me? Is this fodder for the letters section of Penthouse magazine? What?

“Well, we host celebrity poetry readings every Sunday night and we thought it would be fabulous to see you at one.”

“The only thing I loathe more than poetry is celebrities.”

“You should lighten up. There are plenty of attractive women at these readings.” They both smile.

“Okay. Where are these poetry meetings?” I’m thawing.

“Franklin and Bronson, across the street from the Mayfair market.”

“Wow, I live just a few blocks from Franklin and Bronson, up on Beachwood.”

“Great! Well you should come by Sunday night, listen to some poetry, hang out with us and maybe get a free personality test at our Celebrity Center.”

Free Personality Tests. Celebrity Center. It all coalesces. I have an immediate, involuntary recollection of young Scientologists dressed in black shorts, shirts, socks and shoes, running in formation down Bronson as some sort of punishment for failing to recruit enough new disciples.

“You guys are Scientologists. Aren’t you?”

“Why? What have you heard?”

Their collective smiles freeze. It then collapses on the chunky one. It becomes more acute on the cute one.

“Look, if you two teenyboppers want to worship a prophet who started his so-called religion on a bet with science fiction writers and based the theology on a comic book, that’s great with me. I mean, bully for you. But I have no desire to get sucked into that con game just to endure brain-damaged so-called celebrities read endorsements of your religion masquerading as poetry, all under the vague subtext that the three of us are going to a motel.”

They puttered off, in search of another “artist,” who had just gotten the bus from, say, Iowa or Nebraska or somewhere, and is out here to ply his trade in the city of dreams. “Annie, Dreamboat Annie” Doppler’s into the distant parallax of the city.

AIRPLAY

In order to keep sleeping on Phlegm’s couch, I have to start contributing for the Top Ramen.

I get the aforementioned gig at the cafeteria at Cal State Long Beach. The green haired artist and I are still fucking, but I also meet the Math Major with Purple Hair and JenJen, the Post Punkette Louise Brooks.

The Math Major, I fall in love with immediately. It takes a decade or so for JenJen.

*****

Outer Circle has this weird sound. We are signed to a label out of Torrance, CA. Rather than be weird and interesting, the record label’s Artist and Repertoire men mix the record to death, suck the life and inspiration out of it, eviscerate whatever is interesting about the sound, and play up the drum beat.

The record gets some airplay, but whatever it is that is on the radio, it isn’t six weird guys with drum machines and synthesizers. Both Ikky and the Bearded Synth Player quit in frustration.

Ikky moves to Hollywood. I move to Hollywood. Our paths cross intermittently for the next decade. Eventually we collaborate on an ambitious musical endeavor, hell-bent on dropping the drawers on 20th century culture and its dehumanizing ethos. We will fail, but we’ll attempt to console each other by embracing the Japanese concept of the nobility of failure while eeking out livings as production mixers on game shows and porn films.

PURPLE HAIRED GIRL

Initially, it was the Purple Hair, I guess. The hair changed constantly, even as she graduated, and then settled down as a teacher in the ghetto. The kids there called her “Olive Oyl.”

For eight years, I fought to untangle the two of us from a love triangle, with her granting parlor privileges to some motorcycle-riding post-beat poet.

Ultimately, I win this battle of attrition. At least provisionally, anyway. She leaves me, however, for a country music songwriter when I focus more on making the Braindead Soundmachine record, Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby, and very little on maintaining a relationship. After eight years of an emotional roller coaster, we would only schtupp when I come home drunk from a Japanese cross dresser bar.

THE SALAMANDERS ARE COMING

The host of the television show is trying to come to terms with the little Japanese cross dresser, who is not even in the rock and roll band, but has been brought onto the sound stage at the band’s behest as their guru and spokesperson.

Beyond the language barrier with Yoshi, communication is strained during the entire interview.

Every time Reality (the “throat cancer patient”) keys his mic, a squall of distortion and feedback wipes out all other conversation and pegs every decibel meter in the sound booth.

*****

The television presenter is asking Yoshi questions, but the verbiage is beyond Yoshi’s comprehension. “See Spot run,” is beyond Yoshi’s comprehension.

Yoshi stares at the camera’s red eye as it glows like a demon.

A camera trucks across the sound stage as if it is a hawk diving for dinner. But there is confusion in the camera operator’s movements — it is unclear who is the hunter and who is the hunted. The cameraman is attempting to focus on a fun house mirror and everything in his viewfinder is coming up as twisted reflections.

Reality fields the question instead. He speaks into his field surgeon’s telephones, twists a couple of knobs on his micro-amplifier and begins reciting a soliloquy from BZ’s un-produced play, “The Sands Will Come Again,” on 200 mph winds blowing out of the Pacific Ocean and obliterating the city of Los Angeles — followed by the rest of Western Civilization — and leaving nothing but the parking lots, whereupon Yoshi will be forced to mate and breed with coyotes, creating the next mutation in humanity, a development that is perhaps the most profound advancement since Homo Erectus developed opposable thumbs.

Unfortunately, the waves of feedback emanating from Reality’s micro-amplifier obliterate any articulation of his impromptu message-cum-manifesto. He is completely unintelligible, yet as loud as a fighter plane in a gymnasium. It is utter performance art. The hostess has a frozen-but-wilted half smile, which showcases only half of her dental work, but her countenance is sagging in a rather unbecoming fashion. There is more silence, as nobody is sure if Reality is finished or not. The hush is a damp fart.

Finally, Yoshi is asked something else by the presenter. His non sequitur of a reply is, “The Saramanders all Coming.” Just like we rehearsed on the freeway.

The presenter asks me to translate. “The salamanders are coming,” I say.

“What does that mean?” she asks.

“It means that Siddhartha is wrong: life is not a river; life is being stuck in traffic on the I-5. And the other travelers are salamanders — primordial pond life, with no consciousness other than survival.”

“Oh yes,’ Yoshi confirms. Reality keys his mic again. More squalls of feedback. They cut to a commercial break.

THE SOFT SPOT ON A BABY’S HEAD

Outer Circle implodes — a victim of its own pronounced lack of success. The attempt at a hit record ruined whatever was neat about the band. The Hawaiian Shirt bailed. The band goes through more drummers than drumsticks. Towards the end, I am fired from the food service gig at the University Delicatessen. One of the many upsides is that I no longer have to wear a hair net.

Phlegm and I start a new band, the Baby Skulls. The inspiration is Phlegm’s fascination with population control, particularly as practiced by the Romans, who were known to plunge their thumbs through the soft spot on a baby’s head.

We make a pact: No synthesizers. No drum machines. Of course, a few years later a similarly contrary pact will be made with a different set of musicians: No drummers.

DRUM MACHINE

Years later, I am thrown out of the Baby Skulls by Phlegm, a band we started together. After getting fired, I asked, nay demanded, that the remaining Baby Skulls stop playing those tunes I wrote the music for. A week later, I read a review of a Baby Skulls’ show and notice that they kept playing those tunes anyway. As a matter of pride, I want to break their fingers.

In a bar in an alley off of Hollywood Boulevard, I am stuffing cocaine into cigarettes and lighting ‘em up. I take a hit and pass the smokeable cocktail to a soul brother I play basketball with. We have a strange bond; I remember going over to his house to give him a lift to the b-ball court and seeing this massive painting in the living room depicting this muscular, buffed black hand and forearm coming out these white clouds and pulling apart a set of white shackles.

“Do you think I did that to your people?” I asked him.

“No man, it wasn’t you.”

Everything is jake between the brother and I, on and off the court. In the car on the way to the game, and in bars after the game, we have patched up centuries of forced servitude, forty acres and a mule and Jim Crow Laws, and for reasons that sum up the bleak states of our lives, smoking cocaine in the patio of a Hollywood bar that has been open for business since Al Jolson put on blackface at the dawn of the talking pictures.

One of the bouncers, who doubles as the handyman apparently, keeps coming out to the patio because there are complaints of the smell on the patio, which reeks of an electrical fire. The owner is afraid the bar is going to burn down due to a short in the wiring.

Smoking powdered cocaine amongst other bar patrons is no mean feat. It took awareness and the ability to stay one step ahead of whomever could ruin the experience.

So the drummer of the Baby Skulls, the band who had thrown me out — and who had fired Reality as the mixer — wanders in, replete with a punkette girlie on his arm. They have matching teased hair and mascara.

He walks up and says hello and asks what I am up to. I was too torn to say anything. What had I been up to? Fucking hell. Smoking chemicals to mitigate the anger from being thrown out of a creative endeavor I started? I couldn’t articulate this, so I let actions speak for me. I take the German beer in my hand and turn it upside down. Ass over teakettle. Time collapses and eternity passes while the entire contents of the beer bottle escapes the narrow confines of the bottleneck and plop onto the drummer’s precious punk rock hairdo.

One Mississippi… glug glug glug… two Mississippi…. glug glug glug…

His spiky punk rock hair mats and flattens like a poodle in a car wash.

Finally I string a sentence together. “I just bought a drum machine,” I tell him.

ROLAND TR-505

The TR-505, an early digital machine, lacked the insouciance and naiveté of Ikky’s old analog Dr. Rhythm. The TR-505’s sounds are more realistic. It actually sounds more like a real drum kit. It is less electronic sounding and therefore more duplicitous. More cynical. It is pretending it is not a machine, and anytime a machine pretends it is not a machine, trouble looms.

In Outer Circle, the whole idea of a drum machine, as espoused and embodied by Ikky’s silence as he smoked cigarettes onstage with this existential pose, is to not only let the machine do the work, but to embrace the SOUND of the machine doing the work.

Ikky’s countenance suggested that we are using machines because humans have failed us. You could watch the lines of introspection burrow and imprint on his forehead, which seemed to be spelling out some vaguely Nietzschean signifier in his furrowed brow.

But the TR-505 is a philosophical failure also. If the old analog Dr. Rhythm is true dharma, then the TR-505 is a mail order self-actuation videotape. A fraud.

Still, at least it obviated the need for some porcine drummer to grunt and sweat in one’s general direction when not complaining about the cost of replacing broken drum sticks and hair gel. Whatever a drum machine consumes in voltage, it spares the population of the planet more consumption of its precious oxygen by a drummer.

Anything that meant one less drummer on the planet was a positive thing, at least in the egalitarian sense.

GLENDALE

While I am coming to terms with the forced expulsion from the Baby Skulls, Reality, meanwhile, is engineering and producing records, mostly speed metal stuff whose target audience is a bunch of disaffected adolescent drug addicts and Satan-worshippers in Europe and South America.

He lives where apartments and mini-malls are all concrete, asphalt and stucco, separated by rebar. This is the southern point of Glendale; the part of the San Fernando Valley that thinks it ain’t in the Valley. Denial and delusional thinking are not endemic to the Locusts of Hollywood.

There are enclaves of such thinking everywhere.

A HO’ BITCH ON MTV

At Echo Sound in Glendale, Reality is engineering some tracks for Haircut Society, a group of English pop stars who have previously enjoyed massive commercial success despite the controversy of having Girl Jane — an unabashed cross dresser for a lead singer.

A few years before, at the peak of their success, the gender-bending lead singer and other members of his/her pop group had succumbed to the temptations of smoking nasty white chemicals and promptly lost their ambition, desire and ability to continue cranking out pop hits.

Beyond their narcotic addiction issues, which — it goes with saying — can hinder one’s judgment re career moves, the band makes a decision with dire consequences. They decide to jettison life in London, for a renewed start in Los Angeles.

That seals it. They have entered the milieu of the doomed. Los Angeles is a cipher. It is always the last refuge of British pop stars that have run out of ideas. (cf. John Lennon, David Bowie, Elton John, Johnny Rotten, et. al.) The flaw in their reasoning is that they think the warmth of Los Angeles will somehow stimulate their muse, and recharge their creative juices. Instead they just find every base temptation known to man, usually in the form of sexual debasement and/or pharmaceuticals, all vices easily attainable and readily available when one’s worst impulses reach full song. They have mistaken comfort and decadence for inspiration.

Which is the state where Reality finds these fallen pop stars: writing and recording songs between drug runs, feebly trying to resuscitate that old pop music magic with a monkey the size of Mighty Joe Young pounding on their collective backs and dribbling a basketball.

Across the street from the Echo Sound is the Chaco Room, a Vietnamese-owned Gentlemen’s Club. In addition to featuring Vietnamese refugees performing strip teases for an unkempt clientele of blue-collar mechanics and clerks from the local junkyards, the Chaco Room also features a full service sushi bar.

Sometimes, when artistic inspiration began to implode and contract, Haircut Society would merely abandon the studio work altogether and cross the street to the Chaco Room, and there they would vaporize royalty checks and inhale drinks while the daughters of Ho Chi Minh proffered promises of “loving (one) long time,” and tried to coax and arouse the pop stars’ flaccid members into a state of turgidity that would momentarily rewire the circuit between their cocaine-addled brains and their wallets.

Vietnamese strippers and lap dances: The daughters of boat people who survived not only Ho Chi Minh and his machetes, but also a harrowing exodus across the Pacific, in search of a better tomorrow. Now, installed in a ghetto adjacent to Glendale, the point of singularity for master meta- capitalism, the next generation of Siamese queens is dancing for round eye. It is a conceptional calculus debased enough even for the famous cross dresser to get behind, conceptually if not erotically. But ultimately the nerve ending damage from repeated copious doses of the karma deadening white shit the Girl Jane had been constantly snorting and smoking would preclude any after hours back room fuckee/suckee, so the entourage — including Reality — would motor off in a rented Lexus sedan in search of a chemical orgasm — i.e., something/anything to put up their noses or in a glass pipe.

Off they go with Reality behind the wheel, to the Little Armenia section of Hollywood (somewhere between Hollywood and Franklin, perpendicular to both Club Mugi and Jumbo’s Clown Room), where the dope trade thrives and where negroes have commandeered a couple of choice intersections by the strip clubs there.

It is hard to say what is the darker scenario for Reality and his cadre of dilettante druggies: Down on their luck rock stars buying crack from soul brothers in Little Armenia section of Hollywood, or limp lickey-mao skull fucks in Glendale from a second generation stripper from Vietnam.

Reality pulls onto a side street, and then hangs a right into an alleyway. Who knows? This could be the same alley where the singer for a project Reality and I record is later murdered, but tonight — as of two in the morning — there is no yellow police tape.

Reality and a brother barter over cocaine and money. The dealer is nervous, his eyes darting like a searchlight in a storm. Then his eyes stop as he concentrates on the cross dresser in the back seat of the luxury sedan.

“Hey man, who’s that in your car? Is that Girl Jane? The cat that dresses like a ho’ bitch on MTV?”

“No brother, this ho’ bitch is not that ho’ bitch. That is some other ho’ bitch on MTV.” They do the deal and drive back to the studio. Six months later, Haircut Society’s “comeback” record stiffs.

FELA KUTI

Fela Kuti is performing in a concert at the Olympic Auditorium, a moldy concrete shit-hole of an arena in a neglected section of downtown LA. It is a long time coming. Every time Fela tries to leave his native Nigeria, the authorities that consider him a threat that might increase awareness of the tyranny in his homeland arrest him. His last scheduled tour of US is canceled before Fela could even get out of the airport. Fela was busted on currency violations and sent to prison.

So he is out of jail again and he is performing in an old boxing arena, spreading his message with his music, a style he calls “juju.”

I go with a couple of friends. We are the only white people at the gig.

It is an utter spectacle. Five guitar players, all playing inversions of one chord, jingling, jangling and dancing around a looping, jungle funky bass line repeated ad infinitum. Fela Kuti’s twenty-eight wives, all shaking their earthy African butts in a syncopated choreography, sway across the stage.

De-duh-ding duh-de-duh-ding duh-ding-ding…

It is utterly captivating.

“Just like that,” Fela Kuti chants about the elapsed time it takes a righteous enemy of the state to get thrown behind bars on currency charges.

One chord, one riff. It works. De-duh-ding duh-de-duh-ding duh-ding-ding… That night, I have an epiphany to use that same basic compositional approach with what will become the Braindead Soundmachine. I just have to figure out what tyranny and social injustice the Soundmachine are exposing and decrying. In Los Angeles, a land of opulence and placid, pacific weather, oppression is harder to pin down than, say, the bloodshed that is a constant in, say, Fela Kuti’s Africa. But it is there and it has a name: BZ calls it “cultural fascism,” which is a pithy way of tagging the ubiquitous soul-sucking spiritual corruption that is foisted on the average LA citizen as they walk down the street and try to come to terms with daily life and the human experience.

IF I STOP NOW I AM FUCKED

I show up at noon for a recording session. I am playing guitar, Reality is producing and Num-E-Num is engineering. Reality is nowhere to be found.

Num-E-Num and I shoot the shit and twiddle our thumbs for a while, until we decide to start rolling tape without the producer. I begin to make the guitar caterwaul and screech and scream in a most recalcitrant feedback.

A couple of hours later, Reality comes swinging through the studio doors with his back to me. He has a quart of fresh squeezed orange juice in his right hand.

Admiring the choice of beverage as a holistically correct one — all antioxidants and Vitamin C — I think to myself, “We are going to get a lot of work done in a healthy environment.” As Reality continues his pirouette through the door. 180 degrees later I see his other hand grips the handle on a quart of Jose Cuervo tequila.

It is obvious he hasn’t slept in the last 36 hours.

“If I stop now I am fucked,” Reality blurts.

We make three gold and o.j.s and start work in earnest. Obviously today’s session is not about making music. We roll tape anyway. The entire day’s session is comprised of inexorable blasts of feedback, the pitch of which I manipulate with the guitar’s wiggle stick.

When we finish, Reality tells me why he was three hours late for our session. He was up until after sunrise with Girl Jane, the famous cross dresser.

“He and I went to the Chaco Room after we got done recording last night. We closed the joint. The next thing I know, we are back at my house and he has convinced every dancer from the Chaco Room into doing a series of bump and grinds for us while we huff drugs and listen to the first Black Sabbath record. Over and over. They want to perform oral sex on Jane and he tells them to just keep dancing and to leave us alone. He said to them, ‘Fuck off. This is important. We are analyzing and listening to Black Sabbath’s guitar tone.’”

DOGVILLASAN, THE META-DINK

Reality and I see him late at night on the boob tube. We are slowly and methodically getting torn with music on in the background, and the sole source of light emanates from a television set. The tube’s cathode rays bathe the entire living room in a sickly pale blue.

My eyes are pulled away from Reality and focus on the form of Toby Hobbins, this 6 foot 7 inch giant of a snake oil salesman, who is pitching whomever is up at 3 in the morning some self-help videotape. Apparently, Hobbins considers it his destiny, his raison d’etre to empower life’s losers to overcome their personal limitations and GROW AS HUMAN BEINGS — to explode through the restrictions inherent in a post-industrial, Infotainment Age. Seminars, videocassettes, audiotapes for the commute into work in the morning. Personal Growth is a mother of a cottage industry.

With the sound muted, Hobbins’ stage presence is very hypnotic and strangely compelling.

Reality and I continue getting torn. Similarly, the broadcasts get stranger. The next one features a squat Asian man, Tom Fu, blurbing the dates of his next real estate seminar, occurring at a hotel ballroom near Los Angeles Airport.

Arguably, this pitch is even closer to a Hyper-Capitalists’ Nirvana than that of Hobbins. It turns out that Vu is a real estate magnate from Vietnam. (“Who’d a ever thought that Vietnam would be the alma matter and training ground of the new Infotainment Capitalists,” Reality whistles.) Vu’s path to the road to Financial and Spiritual Nirvana is that of what the real estate wonks called “distressed properties.” These are houses, estates, and farms whose previous owners couldn’t make the nut and lost their property to the bank. Maybe the breadwinner worked himself or herself too hard and, when money was its tightest, was stricken with a stroke or an aneurysm at the crucial point when money needed to keep pouring in.

“Distressed Property.” Vu is a bottom feeder who excels at his sharking when the bottom falls out. Order your tapes and find out how! Vu’s pitch is particularly brilliant. It features himself, this 4 foot 10 inch Asian dwarf with teeth as white as Toby Hobbins, on a yacht cruising the marinas of So Cal with a bevy of buxom blondes in bikinis, all of whose mammary glands come eye to eye with Vu’s forehead. Tom Fu: The Meta-Dink.

The broadcasts continue. Not nearly as interesting (although almost as perverse and surreal), but by far the most banal is an infomercial for something called the “Thigh Mistress” with Suzy Winters, an unemployed sitcom star, as its designer and shill. Apparently, as demonstrated by Winters, one would squat and contract one’s chapped and flabby gams around this cold alloy metal contraption shaped like an old man’s perambulator folded into itself, and squeeze, contract, exhale, expand, retract, as if one were either birthing babies or aborting them without anesthesia.

“It’s like she is sticking an obelisk between her legs,” I say.

Indeed, the exercise apparatus — the bent and folded monkey bars — transform into some totem of Infotainment Age Self-Actualization, tapping into the weird, atavistic need to grope the Silver Shiny Thing.

“Yeah. And once you’ve touched it, it is tainted, spoiled and no longer desirable,” Reality adds. “More fucking Infotainment detritus.”

“Hobbins. Tom Fu. Suzy Winters. These people are the Holy Trinity of Self-Absorption.”

As the sun begins to tickle the living room windows, we talk about how Dogvillasan, the Coyote God from Vietnam and the deified embodiment of duality, has bought hisself some airtime and has assumed the faces of self-help gurus, real estate vampires and half-witted sitcom starlets. An infomercial about Scientology and its best selling self-help manual, Dianetics, plays into the void. Edited into the pitch are various character actors and musicians who are giving testimonials on how Scientology allowed them to get “clear,” and remove the obstacles to achieving the success to which they had always been entitled.

“This is beyond fucked up,” I say.

“Scientology is boring. It lacks sex appeal. Tom Fu is really Dogvillasan’s darkest side,” Reality calculates.

Then he says, “Obviously this stuff is aimed at folks who never had a handle on things. But… what if you know what they are on about? The corruption, the debasement, the exploitation of other’s misery and complete lack of self-esteem? What if you embrace that? How fucking Zen is that?”

FOLLOW YOUR HEAD

To generate money to buy studio gear, I take a job as a technician working on a television talk show that considers itself cutting edge. To my way of thinking it is just more infotainment bullshit — a 90 minute infomercial with slightly better lighting and graphics than, say the Thigh Mistress adverts, but somehow more dishonest than the Toby Hobbins’s broadcasts, which are absolutely brazen about their bullshit quotient. This talk show gig is strictly mercenary for me, not unlike Reality’s gig making speed metal records for adenoidal teenaged mutants, or BZ’s job writing horror movies for Avton Pictures. We all break bread with the devil in this town, but it is unclear what the psychic cost is from such a transaction. Is it more damaging if one is aware of the malevolence and nefarious nature of the partner? Or is there a more draconian price to be exacted if one is absolutely ignorant about the creepiness of the deal?

The show’s producers are particularly proud of the talent it books: musicians, politicians, filmmakers and other arbiters of culture. And occasionally they do get it right. I come to work one afternoon and find out that King Sunny Ade, the other leading practitioner of juju music out of Nigeria besides Fela Kuti, is performing as musical guest.

When the ensemble arrives outside the sound stage, the elephant doors open and King Sunny Ade and his massive entourage enter.

Immediately, the stench is overpowering. Crewmembers, writers and producer-types are trying to hold back their lunch. It seems that hygiene has a different flavor in Nigeria.

*****

Like Fela, King Sunny has five guitar players who jam on one chord for twenty minutes, in a funky, lilting manner. They ching-ching-a-ching over and over and over. Likewise the percussion percolates and lilts. King Sunny Ade is dressed like Vegas Hilton-era Elvis Presley, and smiles and smiles and smiles. He never breaks this countenance, as he chants, “Ja, Ja Fumi.”

This spectacle is more empirical confirmation of what direction the Braindead Soundmachine should take. But since there will only be one guitarist, me, I figure if I process the guitar through a bunch of echo-y sound effects, I can mimic the five guitars.

When the broadcast is done, the entire crew is confused and bewildered about my enthusiasm for this strange, repetitive music from the Dark Continent.

I am nonplussed. I catch King Sunny Ade in the green room and ask him what “Ja Fumi,” the title of the song they performed means in English.

He points to his noggin and taps on the front of his skull. “Follow your head,” he nods.

REALITY AND YOSHI ARE PLAYING FOOTSIE

“This is the Braindead Soundmachine,” the television presenter says, coming out of a commercial break, as a song from Come Down from the Hills And Make My Baby plays accompanying a video of dragster crashes and explosions. Reality and Yoshi are playing footsie. Cameramen and the stage manager look genuinely disturbed at their playfulness. I sip espresso from a thermos.

Dead air fills the studio, except for Yoshi’s giggling.

“Can we get a close-up of Yoshi’s shoes?” I ask. Obsequiously, the camera zooms in. Reality begins a garbled and distorted dissertation on how Yoshi cribbed his/her footwear from the Wizard of Oz. He’s right: Yoshi has carved out a certain fantastic parallel existence for him/herself. Yoshi — disinherited and shunned from his family in Japan — has recreated a life on the other side of the Pacific, where Asian cross-dressers are just another vignette in the Dream Machine. And so if Yoshi imagines him/herself as an Asian re-invention of Dorothy or Judy Garland, fuck that is as valid as anything else, yeah?

THE WIND TUNNEL

Ikky, Reality and I jam to a drum machine in what we call the “Wind Tunnel,” which is in an apartment building in a lower-rent section of Beachwood Canyon in Hollywood.

Trying to park on Beachwood Drive is to defy the law of ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. Further north, Beachwood is a boulevard of beautiful people and sit-com stars, but the south end is its barrio. Not even relatively speaking, it is utter and genuine squalor, a ghetto amongst the palm trees that form a parabolic, a parallax pointing towards the Hollywood Sign.

It is the housing for the low-lifes who are barely making it. The ones who bought the Dream Factory’s pitch hook, line and sinker.

Technicians, actors, musicians, screenwriters. They don’t stand a chance against the sharpened teeth and tentacles of a machine that is brutal in its indifference to human suffering. They are cannon fodder for the modern entertainment industrial complex.

So, because the supply of dime-a-dozen wannabes overwhelms the availability of low-rent housing, these folks huddle in crumbling apartments like a nest of dirt daubers drunk on the promise of a nectar that dried up a long time ago.

Ergo, there is no parking. City enforce “Street cleaning” days make it worse as one half of the street is off limits to automobiles, so tenants double up and park on each other’s lawns, creating a mise-en-scène of disheveled rapture, general antagonism and literal turf wars.

Scientologists, panhandlers, strippers, heavily-opiated guitar players, aging queen barflies and actors who can only get a gig as telemarketers, all trying to find a place to park, and all pissed because the laws of supply and demand do not exist below the poverty line. Particularly on Street Cleaning Days.

*****

Both my upstairs and next door neighbors come from foreign countries, both play guitar and both smoke heroin. The French guy (upstairs) wants to write the next “Sweet Jane” and hammers out variations of that chord progression for hours on end, only stopping, it seems, when it is time to score more scag. The Canuck (next door) is nice enough guy for a heroin addict and is in more existential pain than he can articulate, even though he is a bright guy and can actually string a sentence together. So the walls moan as he spends all night manipulating his guitar’s wiggle stick and his echo machines. Then the moans stop at 3 AM and he raps on my door, with his hair out of his eyes and asks to borrow some aluminum foil. He would hit up the frog Lou Reed, but then Frenchie would know that the Canuck had some dope and the price of aluminum foil would get prohibitively expensive.

Still, when the echo-y moans stop, so does “Sweet Jane,” as the Frog knows something is up with the Canuck.

The constant tension of trying to stay alive in the bowels of Beachwood Canyon is underscored by the guitar wars that seep through the Wind Tunnel’s walls from perpendicular axes. Life’s losers cusping millennium — an update of Nathanael West’s bit players from The Day of the Locust, only this time they got no place to park.

It is under this setting that the Soundmachine thrives. Or at least practices and records.

WE REHEARSE ONCE

The Braindead Soundmachine started with a drum machine. A Roland TR-505. It is pretty simple to program.

After I figure it out how it works, Reality and Ikky come over to record some stuff at my black hole of an apartment.

It is decided we will be a trio. We call ourselves the Braindead Soundmachine because we figure the only way to connect with the culture is to, as Ikky puts it, “get as braindead as possible.”

We get a gig in Hollywood. The venue is a punk rock dive with a completely incongruous Middle Eastern name. We rehearse once.

Ikky has some old synthesizers that are twenty years obsolete. Approximately.

He can’t read music, which is okay, because we are in mute agreement that we are doing isn’t about music.

Ikky understands. He contorts and pulverizes electrons through filters, oscillators and envelope generators. He is the right man for the job. What he is creating is not music.

Reality has borrowed my Japanese bass. Except in matters relating to the consumption of chemical effluence, he is a fiscal conservative, and an out-and-out tightwad when it comes to giving any facet of the music business any money whatsoever. Ergo, the borrowed gear. He runs the Japanese bass through a series of Ikky’s transistors, nanotubes and micro-signal processors, a functionality ultimately turning every thing Reality does into one big square wave. He only hits two notes per song, but he makes it sound like one.

Reality has a binary approach to playing the bass. Square wave on = one; square wave off = zero.

I start the drum machine and then chink-a-chink ala Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade on three guitar strings, as trebly as possible.

Nobody wants to sing with us, so we figure that for the gig we’ll have the Missing Eyebrow, our hippie soundman, run cassette loops of Tammy Wynette through an answering machine for us. He will raise the Tammy Wynette phone machine fader whenever he feels the tune could use a vocalist. (“When is the right time to raise the fader?” he asks. “There are no mistakes,” Ikky tells him.)

During the rehearsal, Ikky makes meticulous notes and precise markings about the filters, oscillator and envelope settings.

After he leaves, as a prank, Reality and I dumpster his notes and replace them with pieces of paper that read, “skronk, screek, woop! boop boop boop! sshrree-AAAHHH! gack gack bleep”… This is what his music sounds like.

The next night, we set up onstage. No sound check. Ikky notices the onomatopoetic scrawl from Reality and I have replaced his crib sheets. Ikky will have to improvise. He shrugs.

I start the drum machine. We play for twenty minutes. We stop playing. I turn off the drum machine.

There is an awkward silence in the darkness, then some righteous applause. Ikky shrugs.

In our collective history of notes and dots and chords, this is our finest moment.

After the gig, Reality and I walk down Hollywood Boulevard to a liquor store. People pass by, roll down car windows and yell things — positive things. “That was cool.” Sundry encouragement. Apparently they saw the performance and then left, ignoring the bands they actually paid to see. On a night when Ikky, Reality and I tried to do nothing right, we could do nothing wrong.

Reality and I laugh.

THE JESUITS

In the 1920s, Jesuits bought up small parcels of Hollywood, Echo Park and Silver Lake, lined the streets with stone, and built quasi-craftsman style dormitories for the devoted practitioners of their fringe branch of Catholicism. (A couple of decades later, famous writers of meaningful and internationally renowned works of literature — Faulkner, Anais Nin, Huxley and others — would swallow their pride, take a sabbatical from writing important books and write treatments and screenplays for the film studios instead. It would be a hike in pay and a cut in dignity. Their home offices were some of the same dorms built and then sold by the Jesuits.)

The Jesuits are ascetic in discipline, and ergo their ceremonies and rituals are not nearly as hellzapoppin’ as the plethora of cults and wham-bam faith healers that would take Hollywood by storm. With no sense of spectacle, the Jesuits were doomed to implosion once real estate values ballooned and shadowed the means and wherewithal of such a simple sect.

If the Jesuits’ lack of pizzazz and melodramatic flair meant small box office dollars, such production values which could be found in spades down the street at the Angelus Temple in Echo Park. There, faith healer extraordinaire Amy Semple McPherson had the Jesuits’ and the people’s number, with a glitzy, gallant approach to faith healing punctuated by live radio broadcasts and crisscrossing klieg lights lighting up the skies like the Second Coming of the Messiah was in the can already.

This too was fleeting… After years of top billing, McPherson was bumped off the marquee when she was busted en flagrante, after eloping with her Latin cabana boy in the Great Southwestern Desert. She claimed she was abducted and held for ransom, and for a while her flock and the newspapers believed her. But law enforcement reckoned that when she was found in the desert, she just wasn’t dirty enough to be a kidnap victim.

It was a ruse. Amy just wanted to get her freak on and avoid scandal. It backfired.

Again, all of this theater — salvation, greed, sex and the Inevitable Fall — took stage in the Silver Lake/Echo Park area of Los Angeles, halfway between downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood.

Around the same time McPherson’s lust and wanderlust became her undoing, Raymond Chandler wrote that Los Angeles considered Hollywood a sort of bastard or redheaded stepchild. Moreover, he maintained that dynamic was 180 degrees bass-ackwards. Los Angeles should be grateful Hollywood was around to give LA some kind of identity, because other than that of being a satellite of Hollywood, it has none. Los Angeles is a black hole of a city, persona non grata in a world highlighted by real metropolitan centers such as New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris or Milan. In Chandler’s day, Los Angeles was more like Bakersfield with bigger buildings.

So there was Silver Lake/Echo Park, caught in the crossfire of a sibling rivalry of Hollywood and LA, two towns suffering from dueling identity crises. Adding to the schizophrenia? The post Jesuit-meltdown and McPherson’s career immolation, which created a pop theology vacuum ultimately satisfied by Scientology, a “religion” started on a wager among a social club of science fiction writers.

*****

Yeah so, Echo Park is where the real writers gathered: Faulkner, Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley, Bukowski and Nathanael West. Before getting killed in a car crash on his birthday in the 1940s, while living and writing in Echo Park West penned the pivotal, definitive tome that dropped the pretense out of Los Angeles/Hollywood: The Day of the Locust.

Its message? Los Angeles is not about art. Anybody attempting to create such is merely grist for the mill in a booshwah, company town. Another lesson of West is thus: entertainment is illusory. Illusion begets disillusionment begets violence. Once the moviegoers populating the darkened theaters see through the smoke and mirrors and the silver emulsion, they begin to feel cheated. They not only want their money back, they want a karmic eye for a karmic eye, and a karmic tooth for a karmic tooth.

This is the energy the Braindead Soundmachine is trying to explore, come to terms with and possibly exploit. The Soundmachine is an Infotainment Age exercise: A pop music combo with a pedantic running commentary on a culture of saturation as its ethos. An update of The Day of the Locust, with the uroboros of modern culture as its motif. “The culture is going down on itself,” BZ said to me one night in a Hollywood watering hole where Raymond Chandler used to order vodka gimlets.

And here we go, in the Pacific Rim on the Cusp of what BZ would call “the Zulu Dawn,” as Garden Grove becomes Little Saigon and dreamers fail to make ends meet and property repossession merely means opportunity for those who have attended Tom Fu’s seminars and the Church of Scientology updates McPherson’s psychic snake handling with the banality of Self-Actualization and Free Personality Tests.

CHAIN CONVENIENCE STORE

Reality is between vehicles, due to discrepancies between his checkbook, parking enforcement and the Department of Motor Vehicles. But another man’s misfortunes are Reality’s providence…

Reality and I are motoring through Hollywood in Num-E-Num’s brother’s Ford Ranger. It’s a Four Wheel Drive number, a cartoon of a monster truck and barely street legal, pearl white. The truck’s stylistic coup de gras is its brown mud flaps with silver silhouettes of Vargas-type girls sewn on. The flaps are of mixed efficacy, if the splatters of the mud lining the wheel wells are any indication. Reality tells me that Num-E-Num’s brother is in jail for outstanding warrants related to a battery of moving violations, not to mention DUIs and possession raps. Num-E-Num’s brother lent the truck to Num-E-Num who, seeking to curry favor, lent it to Reality, all while Num-E-Num’s brother stewed in the hoosegow.

Reality is grinding through the gears, a process that seems to be inspired by the shrunken skull four-on-the-floor shifter. Pedestrians are genuinely frightened. Reality is genuinely oblivious to their fear. To Reality, the 4WD is a Panzer tank, he is Rommel and the entire city is now the North African Desert.

“So when is he not in jail, do you think he eats a lot of sticky bush in this thing?” I ask.

“Between Coors Party Balls,” Reality says.

And with that he manhandles the steering wheel to the right, climbs over the curb and power drifts into a Chain Convenience Store parking lot.

As we slinky into the parking lot of a 7-11, a street person is pacing to and fro in front of the store, waving at us and shouting, “HEEYYY!!!”

We wave back and return his greeting.

“HEEYYY!!!”

“HEEYYY!!!”

More waves and smiles from all parties. There is a man wearing a turban on the other side of the glass, behind the counter, and he is shaking his head and scowling.

The street person gives us one last wave and “HEEYYYY!” and then changes gesticulation and points.

“Yawl’s musicians!” he froths.

“YESSS!” I say. “YESSS!” Reality says. We both point. To ourselves. To each other.

The street person continues to bond. “I’m a musician too!” He sticks a finger in his chest and then does some impromptu air guitar gesticulation.

“YESSS!” I say. “YESSS!” Reality says. We both point. To ourselves. To each other. Any combination thereof.

“I play the bass.”

“ME TOO!” Reality says. More pointing. More brotherly congeniality.

“Right o-n-n-n-n! Hey man! How’s about helping a fellow musician and bass player out with some ch-ay-nge-uhhh for some new strings.”

“Fuck no.”

“Forget it. Fuck off.”

Reality and I enter the Chain Convenience Store and the Turban behind the counter continues shaking his head.

*****

Street people, music biz types, Scientologists. One cannot even drive to the nearest Chain Convenience Store for a twelve pack of watery beer without getting hustled for something by some pod of a human being, looking to scam enough spare change to buy crack.

No wonder Reality relishes and thrives upon every opportunity to run over the sidewalks.

PINK TITS AMONG THE PALM TREES

Jutting through a caustic gray sky choking on its own smog and dirty hydrocarbon vomit is a billboard pink as Pepto Bismol and red as a junkyard dog’s dipstick. The billboard is an advertisement for Amberlyne, a sort of fashion model or actress or singer, a hyper-blonde caricature of a human being with breasts whose enormous girth threatens to alter the pull and tug of the entire cosmos. These milky pink orbs are massive, and their dimensions are hyper-accentuated by the glossing techniques used on her original photograph, before it was blown up, color corrected pixel-by-pixel and expanded to the size of a flat pink planet.

Amberlyne’s patron leases this billboard. He owns the billboard company. This billboard could only be suspended in the space-time of Los Angeles. There is a hideous quality to the image. Everything about it accentuates the bimbo’s plastic surgery. Everything about this billboard is an airbrushed lie. It is brutally honest in its own fraudulence.

It is a two-story totem to the shrill, neurotic cry for attention as pandemic. It represents entire generations failing to come to terms with the passing of adolescence, and failing to acknowledge that youth, beauty and perfection are fleeting, and that first gravity and then the carbon cycle will squash terrestrial vanities and precocity into moot, inconsequential pancakes of dirt.

Los Angeles. Where the precious gather and converge, summoning a mass hallucination where they delude themselves into believing that the sun shines out of their behinds.

The smog and toxic gas is a compendium of what comes out of this collection of humanoids’ various orifices. Every self-important fart and belch is so much pollution.

This foul miasma is from the exhaust of the unchecked ego. And this billboard is a monument, a totem, a shrine to the unchecked ego and what happens when vanity meets too much money and free billboard space.

Drive down LaBrea Boulevard and look at the pink tits and the palm trees. And realize that the grotesque self-parody of the Uber-bimbo would end up singing for the Braindead Soundmachine. And later still, would run for governor of the state of California.

RAPPER’S HALL OF FAME/WOODSTOCK BAD

1988. The Indie Rock Manager and I go to a loft to visit some friends, King Hang and his roommate, Tex. I have just gotten a bootleg rap cassette tape called Rapper’s Hall of Fame, from a soul brother who is employed as a grip on the same television talk show we work on together.

The grooves on the tape are indisputable. The four of us hang our legs over the ledge of a five-story building and listen to the “dope jams,” as it known in the idiom of Compton, where these records were recorded.

“Rap is cool because drum machines are not utilized they are embraced,” I say, as we continue to dangle our legs. “Embracing the machine is crucial. It is Zen.”

“It is also postmodern,” Tex says.

Tex once threw a television set off of the fourth story of his building, because King Hang was watching too many daytime talk shows and the constant bombardment of marketing and entertainment drove him to distraction.

“I have to have that drum sound,” I tell Tex, King Hang and the Indie Rock Manager. “The sound” is a TR-808, a machine discontinued by the manufacturer because its drum sounds are not “realistic” enough.

****

As I explore the drum sounds off of rap records, a few blocks away from King Hang and Tex’s loft, Reality is in jail for traffic warrants. He had been pulled over for driving on the sidewalk in Num-E-Num’s brother’s monster truck. He is down in LA County, wearing an orange trustee jumpsuit and trying to not get killed or molested by the Crips and the Bloods.

Like sharks, the gang members smell blood on a white boy with hair down to his waist. Because of his hair length, the brothers call Reality “Woodstock.”

They want “Woodstock’s” white tennis shoes, but Reality uses his wit to keep his possessions. He encourages the gang members to play a game of name that tune.

“Hey Woodstock, what song is this? OOHHHH-WWHHEE-OOHHH”

“That’s the harmonica part for “The Wizard” by Black Sabbath.”

“That’s RIGHT. That’s Black Sabbaths! Homey, Woodstock bad.”

So that is how Reality and the other jailbirds passed the time: By playing stump the band and humming and whistling heavy metal riffs to each other.

In a strange symmetry in downtown Los Angeles, the black man is mimicking heavy metal guitar sounds. The white man is listening to rap records — and trying to nick the drum programming.

BAD VISHNU AT JUMBO’S CLOWN ROOM

Reality’s day job is making speed metal records for music fans that don’t speak English so good.

It is a caterwaul of white noize, and a squall he is not particularly proud of. He equates what he does with the making of cheese logs.

He has other sources of income that are rather clandestine, but seem to involve junk bonds in Japan.

Whatever the pitch, there seem to be no shortage of venture capitalists willing to cut him a check.

He wants to expand his professional and artistic palette, and he has been approached by Flame Starr, a stripper who dances with a boa constrictor at Jumbo’s Clown Room in East Hollywood. She has some “backing” (whatever that means to a lap dancer) from some industry types whom she has convinced that she can sing and so now she wants to make a disco record. She says she has a record deal in Australia.

Reality wants me to write some chords changes, play guitar and program the drum machine. It is agreed that we use the one and a half chord dirges we had foisted upon one hundred people in Hollywood. The difference being that we add another chord or two, and instead of the Tammy Wynette loops recorded on phone machine tapes, the stripper will warble about whatever it is she finds necessary to share with the world. It is my understanding that the lyrics are all vaguely about various New Age themes.

“So this has to have a didgeridoo,” Flame Starr the Lap Dancer says. “At it has to be tuned so that it resonated with my shakra. My third eye.”

Reality takes the money, books the studio time and tells her she’ll singing to a new beat. “It’s metaldisco,” he sniffs pedantically.

“With a didgeridoo?”

“Yes. With a didgeridoo.”

“Oh goody. But the waveforms must be tuned so that they resonate with my shakra.”

“Your what?”

“My shakra. My third eye.”

We lay down a rap beat. Fuzz bass. Funkafied guitar chords. Simulated didgeridoo on a Casio micro-synthesizer.

Over the basic tracks, the Lap Dancer begins caterwauling about various Vishnu platitudes, while writhing suggestively and simulating intercourse with the snake.

“What’s up with the didgeridoo?” I ask Reality. “It’s not like aborigines are going to be buying this record.”

She can’t sing. Reality is attempting to assemble a useable vocal syllable-by-syllable. It doesn’t work.

The whole process is excruciating and time consuming. On one song, she has nailed the phrase “You and Me-e-e-e…” On just those three words, it’s like she has perfect pitch. I ask her to sing “you and me-e-e-e…” on a spare track throughout the entire song. “It’s like a mantra,’ Reality tells her. “Just sing it over and over and over.” “It’s for the re-mix,” I lie.

So she does it. “You and me-e-e-e…” (beat) “You and me-e-e-e…” (beat) “You and me-e-e-e…” etc., for three minutes.

We begin mixing and editing. In every instance of her singing flat or sharp, we just insert “… you and me-e-e-e…” in lieu of her half-baked Vishnu drivel. “It makes as much sense as the rest of her lyrics,” I say.

The record tanks. Even in Australia.

About a year later, I read in the paper about a lap dancer-hyphenate-aspiring pop music singer killed in the alley behind Jumbo’s. A lot of good the third eye and that snake did her, I say to myself.

I make another pot of coffee.

We are coming back from yet another commercial break and the entire production staff at Pat Boone’s studio has just had it. Cameramen are sitting down on the camera’s pedestals, with their heads buried in their hands. Speaking through his throat cancer patient “voice transducer,” Reality has gone off on a jag about the futility of spending four or more years at film school if the end result is just working at a public access station owned by Pat Boone. His ontological blasts are wreaking havoc on both eardrums and spirits. At every commercial break the director and the producer have come running out of the booth, telling us that Reality’s “transducer devices” for his throat cancer are overloading all the microphones and they nor the television audience can hear a word anybody else is saying: not the host, not Yoshi, and not even me, a point they make by pointing to me. They feel that my ego is somehow being stepped on by my sentiment, that I am aghast my voice somehow being muted, but they are barking up the wrong tree, as I don’t care if I am not heard, just as long as the host is not heard. It is a small and perhaps Pyrrhic victory, but that doesn’t matter to me, or Reality. The point is that just once the inexorable ticker and blather of infotainment must be drowned out, and if nobody else is up to the task, then this is a job for the fearless Braindead Soundmachine and their faithful mascot cum Maharishi, Yoshi. But of course, we are playing coy and are holding our deck of cards very close to the vest. We are supposedly here to promote our record, but instead have chosen to attack the beast.

“Can you turn that thing down?” The director points to Reality’s micro-amp.

“Unfortunately no,” I lie. “There is no volume control, only an on/off switch and it is imperative that it remain in the ‘on’ mode.”

“Why?”

“Who else is going to interpret and translate Yoshi? I certainly don’t understand what Yoshi is saying.”

We all look at Yoshi and Reality, who have resumed playing footsie and giggling.

“Can you at least allow us to move his speaker away from the overhead microphones?”

“Certainly. I don’t want you to get the impression that we are unreasonable or anything.”

A stagehand runs and procures more cables, allowing the speaker to move from Reality’s lap and away from the overhead mics.

Reality surreptitiously cranks up the volume control on his battery of fuzz boxes.

So yeah, we come back from commercial and Reality’s riff about “a career in quantum physics (is) far more noble and soul satisfying than the jail sentence of videotaping cross dresser for a UHF station” is in full song.

Only certain keywords make it through the din, therefore working on a rather Jungian level of post-hypnotic suggestion, but the entire studio is left with a growing awareness of the futility of existence and I could swear that in the darkness of the studio, a cameraman’s eyes were welling up.

REALITY UNDERSTANDS

After the vaguely Flame Starr/Vishnu stripper/singer debacle, Reality and I decide to get serious.

“It’s time to get serious,” I tell him. “No more getting jacked around by music industry-types who fancy themselves as taste makers or Svengali-figures, but who, in all actuality, just want to poke some stripper after promising her a record contract.”

Reality used to engineer the Baby Skulls, the band that I was thrown out of. One thing him and me have in common is that the same band had fired us both. They had fired him first. I had to deliver the news, even though I told the Baby Skulls that we have hired a guy with an astute set of ears who was willing to work for next to nothing, and that firing somebody with that kind of enthusiasm was a mistake.

Reality and I both knew we were right and they were wrong. This helped us form our bond.

*****

After the Soundmachine’s debut, I was convinced we should make a record. Even though we don’t have a vocalist. Or even lyrics. Just a loop tape of Tammy Wynette. So Reality and I take a production meeting. We drive to his house, listen to “Surfer Rosa” by the Pixies over and over and over and whiff dope.

We discuss song structure. The Soundmachine already has the chord change(s) for four songs. A lot of it is the material we had recorded with the Vishnu stripper. We would just expand on the stuff we did with her, get rid of the half-baked Hindu lyrics and pretend that wrong turn had never happened. All we are lacking is proper lyrics, words that define and comment upon the existential plight of living in Los Angeles.

“And a vocalist,” he says.

This isn’t a problem, I tell Reality. “Singers are like spark plugs,” I say. “You screw ‘em in and you screw ‘em out.”

Reality understands.

He puts on the Pixies record again.

*****

That night Reality puts on the Pixies at least twenty times. Every time it spins, one or both of us has an epiphany, but we both fight for the floor and an opportunity to begin yet another cocaine filibuster.

Generally, epiphanies and brainstorms fueled by cocaine are doomed to be forgotten as soon as the drugs are passed one more time. But I have an idea — a crystallization of musical concepts that have been incubating in my brain for a while — and I spit it out. And it sticks.

“Okay, this is what the Braindead Soundmachine has to be. Two notes on the bass, and maybe a third note during the chorus. One chord on the guitar, only on the high strings, with a bunch of weird inversions of that one chord. Ikky making all kinds of bleeps, bloops and skronks. We’ll get some chick to sing dreamy existential elegies about the apocalypse over the backing track.”

It takes a year.

DOGVILLASAN AND FAYE GREENER

The Purple Haired Girl had come back into my life at the proper time. After her failed experiment living with a pseudo-beat poet in a squalid apartment in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, she bails and I pick her up at LAX and we resume a love affair. A couple of days later, she suggests we live together. Obviously, my apartment on Beachwood would never cut it.

It was time to move out anyway. I had had enough. I could no longer sanction life in the City of Dreams. The Scientologists, the model-actresses-whatevers, the Lou Reed and Axl Rose-wannabees, the parking nightmares. I knew of this house in Silver Lake that Bukowski was rumored to have lived in that was being vacated by a couple of harmless cokeheads.

It is a split-level built by Jesuits, and has three bedrooms, one of which will be converted to the new Wind Tunnel. Upstairs, the landlord is a Brit expatriate and survivor of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg aerial attacks on London, and therefore, I reason, can handle any aural bombast emanating from a downstairs bedroom turned into a recording studio.

It is there that Ikky, Reality and I record an album’s worth of instrumental backing tracks. We still need the proper voice and some lyrics.

I tell Reality and Ikky that I know a failed screenwriter who was now driving a forklift at a Pick Your Part in Pacoima. He writes poetry and plays on his lunch breaks.

“He has already has words,” I tell Ikky and Reality. “He has written this play, Mister Coyote, about a coyote that comes down from the hills of Beverly Hills and mounts a Beverly Hills housewife. We can just adapt his dialogue to song lyrics.”

*****

BZ tells us to meet him and we’ll discuss his lyrical contributions to the Soundmachine. I suggest either the House of Pies or the Ski Room, a bar where the ghosts of Hollywood still smoke and share libations and the music is soft enough for us to talk over. He suggests Jumbo’s Clown Room.

The Clown Room reeks of popcorn and Lysol. The only thing it doesn’t smell like is beer or sex. A phalanx of men attempt to hide their hard-ons, while down on their luck models/actresses/whatevers slither and grind up and down the de rigueur silver pole that resembles a 9 foot marital aid.

The volume of some heavy metal power ballad fights for sensory dominance over the smell of the disinfectant. The beer is tepid, watery and sets us back five bucks per round.

“Gentlemen, I’m having trouble getting funding for my latest theatrical endeavor.”

“Okay,” I tell him. “We want to take your play ideas and turn them into a concept album, a sort of nonlinear, anti-rock opera.”

He seems reluctant and unimpressed.

He proffers: “I see your voice as equal parts Faye Greener — the anti-heroine from The Day of the Locust — and any gold-digging femme fatale hussy from a Raymond Chandler novel.”

BZ says he wants to keep the title Mister Coyote for his play, and suggest we should call our record It Came Down from the Hills and Took A Baby. Over the din of yet another heavy metal power ballad, I make one editorial revision.

“Look, the Coyote mounts the housewife, yeah? There we should call it “Come Down from the Hills and MAKE My Baby.’”

Ikky interpolates. “In other words, you can’t blame Mr. Coyote for being a coyote. The human being is at fault, as we as a species should know better.”

BZ is beyond it. “You see that woman mounting that pole?” he says. “She is a modern corollary of Faye Greener.”

The dancer writhing around in front of us has nasty scratches across her back. I figure they are from either her lover or her cat. I am having a problem understanding the attraction to this place.

A beer spills on the manila envelope containing the lyrics. This accident makes sense, conceptually.

PUSHING AIR

After we recorded the basics for the first album, we decide we want a hit record. The easiest method seems to be to appropriate something that was already a hit record once, deconstruct it (keeping only the melody intact); rebuild it and Bob’s Yer Uncle.

We settle on “Walkin’ After Midnight,” the old Patsy Cline gem, an up-tempo ballad that tore up both the Country Music and American Top 40 charts in the early 1960s. This song is also suitably macabre for the Soundmachine’s decidedly fatalistic ethos: It was Patsy’s last hit as — concurrent to its chart success — her manager managed to crash an airplane into a mountainside, killing Patsy and a small entourage.

“If it was successful in two demographics already, what’s to stop it from charting on a third?” I reason.

“On one hand, this is almost better than plagiarism,” Ikky responds. “On the other, at what point is this ‘merely hipster revisionism,’ as BZ would say.”

“Look. We don’t have time to crunch the philosophical data on the whether or not this is a good idea,” I tell him. “We need a record that music industry types already understand.”

“Seeking the approval of the record industry: you are really on a dangerous terrain.”

He’s right. We are. But we do it anyway. I have laid down a drumbeat and fuzz bass line already. Eventually, the tune’s dreamy refrain of “searching for you” will be particularly haunting once we get a singer to wrap her diaphragm around it.

Ikky agrees to contribute, but only on his terms.

“I have not been happy with the way we have been recording my parts,” he says. “I really want to PUSH SOME AIR with this one.”

So I start the tape machine, engage the record buttons and Ikky turns some knobs and opens up some filters on his synthesizer and begins making noize before the song even reaches it cue mark on the tape. The synths cough and gurgle like the failing propellers on the small chartered aircraft that crashed into some mountain in the Appalachians and killed Ms. Cline at the zenith of her popularity. Thirteen bars later a weirdly arrhythmic syncopation kicks in and a Black Sabbath bass line tries to make sense of the entire arrangement.

Ikky is really sinking his teeth into this performance. This is perhaps his most inspired moment since Braindead’s debut, the night Reality and I shit-canned his crib sheets for all of his filter and oscillator settings and replaced them with nonsensical, onomatopoetic gibberish that we felt was somehow representative of the noizes he made.

We have run Ikky’s sound generators through a diminutive Japanese amplifier, with all the knobs turned fully clockwise. Everything is wide open. The amp has one speaker about ten inches in diameter, and the cone is really “pumping like a Vietnamese whore,” as Ikky put it.

As we record, the fucking walls are shaking like Krakatoa, all from the pressure waves coming out of a ten-inch speaker, and the Wind Tunnels are in full effect. Ikky is really leaning into it and really PUSHING SOME AIR.

It’s all, “WWWHHOOOKAHHH-BBLLAAAHHH – GAWWKKK-GAWWKKK – WWWHHOOOKAHHH-BBLLAAAHHH – GAWWKKK -GAWWKKK…” only louder than an aerial attack. When the song ends, we notice a banging on the front door of a ferocity that rivals Ikky’s work in decibel levels.

It is the landlord, an elderly British expatriate who lives upstairs and has never complained about the various noises and waveforms that seep through the floorboards of this modified dormitory for Jesuits, and we have finally hurled something at him that triggered a flashback of a childhood terrorized by the omnipresent Luftwaffe aerial Blitz.

He is twitching as if from shell shock and the veins in his face and neck are close to rupturing.

“What exactly are you doing in there?”

“Ummm, experiments in pushing air.”

He splutters something about experiments in eviction and, while closing the door, I assure him we are done gathering data.

We resume work as I back off the Japanese amplifiers down two notches to “9.” We get back to work.

Since real songwriters in the Nashville tradition penned “Walkin’ After Midnight”, the tune utilizes a few song-writing tricks (“devices,” in the idiom) that Ikky is not used to.

After he makes a pass all the way through, I then tell him we are going to punch in a couple of overdubs.

This is an anathema, and Ikky is not happy. To him, overdubs are correcting a moment; they are akin to historical revisionism.

“What I just did was fine,” he decides. “If you try to improve on it, not only will you make it worse, you will further compromise our purity of tone.”

“No, it was great, but there is a modulation in the song that we have to acknowledge.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ummm, after the second chorus, going into the third verse, the song modulates. It moves up a half step.”

“Okay.” He is humoring me. He does not care what “modulation” means. I tell him anyway.

“All right. The song is in the key of C. After the second chorus, it moves into C#.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. C is the white keys. C# is a bunch of black ones. When I punch you in after second chorus, go to a bunch of black ones.”

“I’m already on the black ones.”

“Go to the white ones then.”

And he does. “WWWHHOOOKAHHH-BBLLAAAHHH – GAWWKKK-GAWWKKK – WWWHHOOOKAHHH-BBLLAAAHHH – GAWWKKK -GAWWKKK…”

THAT’S FILM… THAT’S MUSIC

We go to another drinking establishment. Over the noise of the jukebox, I hear glimpses of an argument that is developing between Reality and BZ. BZ has trotted out his “music is dead” rhubarb and has directed it towards Reality’s profession, the production of speed metal records. The argument continues and Ikky and I stare at our Mexican beers. Reality is having none of BZ’s rhetoric and tells him that if he is so full of caca that his “eyes are turning brown.” BZ excuses himself to use the bathroom… or… to give himself a break from Reality.

After giving it a beat of silence, Reality gives pursuit, following BZ into a narrow hallway where lavatories for both sexes reside. They are gone for a long while. I get up and tell Ikky I have to relieve myself and I am concerned about BZ and Reality — for fear that this could be ugly.

The hallway is bottlenecked with drinkers hoping to relieve their bladders, and the line continues almost into the main lounge. The walls and floor of the hallway reek of dank moisture. The boisterous walla-walla of the drinkers almost cuts through the smell.

To add to the septic entropy, one or more of the toilets have backed up and a thin flow of urine-diluted water and wadded up towels and toilet paper snakes its way down the hallway’s linoleum floor.

In the middle of the twin parallel lines of people waiting to go pee-pee is a minor commotion. My fears are realized.

“Look, you see that….” Reality points to a puddle of piss and dross. “Put your foot in that.” BZ is startled and uncomprehending. Reality grabs BZ’s left pant leg above the kneecap and physically drops his foot into the puddle. “That is film. Now put your other foot in this.” BZ is still too startled to move voluntarily. Reality grabs the other leg and sticks into the other puddle. “That is music.”

Silence.

“This is ‘Film.’ That is ‘Music.’ Got it?”

*****

The next morning the phone rings. It is BZ. He tells me, “That Reality fellow is an epic figure of our time.”

NO MORE LOOP TAPES

Sometime during college, JenJen and a couple of friends, an art major and a business major, started Broomtree Disease, an experimental folk music group. Due to inexperience, ineptitude and their penchant for experimentation, their sound is rather unique. The business major, the bass player, is a novice and hits only upstrokes; the art major, the guitar player, is a painter who sometimes swats his strings with a brush. The drummer thumps the skins while standing up and lives in a campground. A few years later, I became their soundman.

During this phase, JenJen was somewhat earthgirl-ish, but had developed a floating and ethereal voice, constantly searching for the right pitch. Her vacillations in tone I interpret as searching for the secrets of the Universe. Her voice belied her somewhat fusty appearance and was an extension of her eyes, which I remembered all these years later from her patronage at the Cal State Long Beach delicatessen.

As it was my job to make sure she was heard over the band’s dreamy painter-rock. And to drench her voice in reverb.

We developed a rapport, not unlike a cinematographer and an actress, or a painter and a model. In the tour van one afternoon, I confide in JenJen that I am making a record in my spare bedroom, based on some instrumental tracks I had been tracking with Ikky and Reality. Hers is a voice that should grace the Braindead record, I tell her. She agrees to sing on some of the stuff, but cannot commit to live appearances because of prior comittments with her act, Broomtree Disease.

In the Soundmachine, she would know longer be frumpy. She would be reinvented as the sultry spawn of, say, Patsy Cline and a fallen Hollywood starlet.

She is the primary singer for the Braindead Soundmachine, replacing the phone machine loop tapes of Tammy Wynette.

PAI GOW POKER AND GINGER ALE

“Write your life upon a Denny’s napkin

Lay your head upon the warm-blooded highway

Take my hand and don’t be sorry

Training bras and pony tails, pai gow poker and ginger ale

“The Zulu dawn is in my hand

We’re going home… somewhere…”– Pai Gow Poker and Ginger Ale

BZ shows me these lyrics and explains that this song is about our heroine/anti-heroine giving an entertainment industry-type a blowjob on the steps of the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda.

In this narrative, after the deed is consummated, she gets contemplative and existential at a Denny’s on Sunset Boulevard as she gets mentally prepared for her shift working the floor at a Pai Gow poker parlor in Bellflower.

“This is sheer fucking poetry,” I tell him.

THE CHACO ROOM, PT. II

After a falling out with Mr. Odd, the Missing Eyebrow leaves London and moves to California to start a family and enjoy a nice suburban lifestyle with a chickee bass player from Broomtree Disease. He is hired by the Braindead Soundmachine to mix sound.

With the Missing Eyebrow getting married, the Soundmachine takes it upon ourselves to throw him a proper Bachelor Party. Reality suggests the Chaco Room.

Reality and I kidnap BZ from his apartment catty-corner from the Scientology Celebrity Center on Franklin and Bronson. He answers the door more or less nude, although wrapped in a mattress. “To what do I owe this surprise, gentlemen?”

We tell him we are going to the Chaco Room. He demurs. Reality and I each grab an arm and he feebly tries to defend himself as we drag him into the hallway. He begs off, insists he will accompany us if he can only put on a shirt and some pants. We grant him that reprieve.

Once, at the Chaco Room, the dancer’s shifts have not started yet. In the interim, a television is blasting a documentary on the making of some sci-fi motion picture epic. Alien creatures heads explode repeatedly, nay ad blah blah blahseum and BZ tells Reality and I that the secret to success in this town is to look inside “the head of the chicken,” which he equates with the prosthetic devices detonating across the screen.

“Have you ever looked at a chicken that has had its head cut off? We are living in an age where you stick your head into the disembodied head of the chicken.”

We think we know what he means.

Later, the bachelor party has degenerated into an utter debacle. The Missing Eyebrow demurs at every advance from the Vietnamese strippers. A stripper with a pasty complexion slips BZ her phone number. Another Vietnamese girl is rubbing her pubis against a greased pole while the song “Baby’s On Fire” is piped through the strip-cum-sushi bar’s sound system.

Hieronymus Bosch would dismiss this scene as too pushed — too over the top.

LEBANESE KARAOKE MACHINE

JenJen lays down some vocal performances at the Wind Tunnels and the record is really coming together, but we still need somebody to sing on some of the other tunes, as JenJen is only partially committed to the Soundmachine and leaving to go on tour with her real band, Broomtree Disease.

Ikky, the Missing Eyebrow and I go to the One Eyed Jack, a piano bar in Koreatown to brainstorm on the Braindead vocalist situation. On the second floor, behind a bamboo garden replete with water mills and the coy pond, a jazzy piano duo is performing pop standards. It is a typical LA tableau: some Lebanese chick singer crooning for Japanese businessmen toeing the line between kimono-hugging drunk and possible hari-kari.

The Missing Eyebrow points to an olive-complexioned brunette, as she glisses through some Cole Porter song.

“Get her to sing on the record.”

“No. She sings standards. She has no clue what we are singing about.”

“This could be genius. Utterly Machiavellian. Get a lounge singer who has no concept about what we are about to be our meta-Faye Greener and have her unwittingly sing about the Apocalypse,” Ikky concludes.

“Get BZ to write a song for her, then,” the Missing Eyebrow suggests.

“I think he already has,” I say.

During a break, I approach the Lebanese Lounge Singer — who answers to Khalsoum — and ask her if she is interested in singing on a heavy metal disco record. She is flattered. I tell her she will be paid a flat fee per song, but that the publishing rights are to be split between the musicians and the lyricist, a screenwriter I met in a bar.

“Why me?” she asks.

“Because if I worked for Central Casting, and I was looking for a Geisha for the Apocalypse to sing on a Braindead Soundmachine record, her name would be Khalsoum and your picture is the one I would keep. The fact that you can sing is a bonus.”

She bites. She tells me that the opportunity to sing for cash is coming at a good time as her gig at the One Eyed Jack is coming to an end. On the horizon is the phenomenon known as karaoke — where drunkards in the audience sing to canned instrumental tracks. It is sweeping Tokyo, then Little Tokyo, then Koreatown and eventually virtually every drinking establishment across the globe. Khalsoum The Lebanese Lounge Singer is to be replaced by laser discs and canned karaoke music. She is to be replaced by a fucking electronic bouncing ball.

I tell Ikky and the Missing Eyebrow what is up. “Technology is taking our jobs away,” I say.

Ikky is having none of that. He insists his job as synthesizer man is safe. He says, “No machine can replace me until it can learn how to drink.”

ANTIMATTER

The Soundmachine is like antimatter. The rest of the Culture is matter. When matter and antimatter connect POOFFF, utter obliteration. And creation.

That is the philosophy behind the Soundmachine. The entire culture is so bloated, turgid and corrupt that the only logical coda to this phantasm is to start over. Completely. Pretend that this debased and dehumanizing Age never happened.

Reality says we are not art. At best, we are anti-infotainment. Art is not possible anymore. The only art forms — where the individual is allowed to shape and form his or her creation to its apotheosis of grace, beauty and elegance exists in the fields of advanced mathematics, theoretical physics and drag racing.

It does not transpire in the galleries or the bijous or the concert halls. Literature ended with the Beats. Art ended with Abstract Expressionism. Music ended with the Sex Pistols. Film ended with Citizen Kane.

It’s all over. So over. The Soundmachine exists only to shout that one thought ad infinitum over a drum machine, a bloated bass riff and one guitar chord. We figure the only way this will get heard is if it chanted by a chanteuse cum geisha of the Apocalypse.

It is doomed to failure. Reality, Ikky and I are well aware of the futility of it all. Still, we endeavor to endeavor.

THE PRESS RELEASE

BRAINDEAD SOUNDMACHINE originated in the late 60s when members of the Strawberry Alarm Clock and Alan Ginsberg released a German EP under the band name Brian Wilson. The name has gone through as many mutations as the band members themselves. Former monikers include No Time for Rimjobs, General Schwarzkopf, The Newts and T.P.F.M.H.O. (Tear Perry Farrell’s Motherfucking Head Off). The only remaining original member is keyboardist Ikky. Ikky’s notoriety stems from his East Village classic, “Kiefer Sutherland,” a 90-minute organ solo featuring an electronically altered video of various brat packers going down on each other and being pissed on by small Pekinese dogs with moussed hair wearing miniature Melrose bomber jackets.

BRAINDEAD SOUNDMACHINE is more of a flophouse than a band. Their “revolving door’ policy includes the willing and unwilling contributions of anyone committed to creating an entity capable of consuming and shitting the incessant bombardment of pop culture and then electronically distorting the results. The only rules, per se, are no chord changes.

BRAINDEAD SOUNDMACHINE operates the Nitronic Wind Tunnels and Research Facility, and is responsible for a 1985 patent on the Voorhees micro-bass, which would have been the first fully computerized bass synthesizer had it not caused disorientation and vomiting with test audiences. Some of their other productions include “Tony Danza: A Rock Opera” based on the banalization of Italian-American culture set against a blow-up of Madonna’s armpit from her Playboy spread and “Mr. Coyote,” an unfinished movie about a coyote who sneaks down and mounts a Beverly Hills housewife. The latter remains banned due to a lawsuit filed by a public figure. Its sequel is “The Sands Will Come Again,” a tale that considers the demise of Los Angeles during a week of 200 mph desert winds.

THE GUY FROM STAR TREK

Reality is making a record with The Guy From Star Trek. They are sitting next to each other, sharing space behind a console.

They agree that the vocal is not loud enough. Simultaneously, they reach for the same fader. Their hands glance across each other, the knuckle hairs intertwining. The Guy from Star Trek smiles. It is a prolonged smile. It goes from nervous to un-nervous.

Reality doesn’t smile.

AVTON FILMS IMPLODES

Avton Films implodes. BZ is fired in a wave of layoffs and an impending bankruptcy. Independent film has been co-opted lickety-split like, in a manner that took rock and roll decades.

BZ gets a job as a forklift driver at a junkyard in Pacoima. In order to keep one foot in the film industry, he begins rewriting “erotic thrillers” scripts at Paramount Studios on Melrose.

BZ IS DISTURBED

BZ leaves a message on my phone machine. He is disturbed, as he has heard some of the Braindead tracks and is appalled at our insistence of using a drum machine to lay down a 4/4 disco beat. “Do you think that is relevant?” he asks. “Aping the black man with your drum machine?”

LOOK AT THE PALM TREES

JenJen and Khalsoum, the two chickee vocalists are disturbed. Bemused, but disturbed. The Soundmachine’s ethos is about degeneration and complicity in the dehumanization that is a coefficient in an infotainment culture. The chickee vocalists are at odds and distant from the Soundmachine’s message and are ambivalent about being the conduit for that message. They like the attention, but don’t REALLY want to be complicit in pointing out that the “culture is going down on itself,” as BZ coined it. Ergo, JenJen and Khalsoum are symbols of compromised ideals — and they are beginning to figure this out.

Both are temporarily busy with their “real projects,” so the Soundmachine has to find yet another singer. Just before Reality, Ikky and I formed the Soundmachine; I had done a Halloween show with the Baby Skulls, the band that fired me. The act that went on before the Baby Skulls had this stacked brunette singer with a spiky, lopsided new wave-y haircut. The band was awful. Absolutely namby pamby. But the singer had nearly perfect pitch. And a nice set of pipes.

I engaged her in a conversation, enjoining her for her phone number. My interests were carnal, not professional.

Later, we meet for coffee at the House of Pies. Franklin and Vermont in East Hollywood. I barely recognize her. She is blonde. Shoulder length hair. Over blintzes, I find out the dark hair was a wig and was part of her costume. She was supposed to be a “punk rocker” for Halloween.

“Punk rock changed my life,” I tell her, with a hint of umbrage at the notion that someone would make a mockery of what I considered to be the only relevant art movement since the Beat Generation. She nods and says, “of course,” like she understands, but she does not. In a town swimming with bullshit, she had been conditioned to respond to any statement with a politically expedient answer. The correct answer is always the answer that is the most inoffensive, and tells the other party it needs to hear. She’s one of them, I think to myself.

So when it comes to time to find yet another singer to croon about being Faye Greener, I figure who better than Faye Greener herself. We meet again at the House of Pies and I tell her that since we last met I was fired from the Baby Skulls, but have started a new act and need a vocalist. She asks me to describe “the project” and I do. We go outside and climb into the ‘61 Cutlass and I play her some mixes of the Braindead stuff on a boombox. She shows some enthusiasm and deems the “project” “kooky.” “Kooky” and “Project” are two words I truly hate. There is an undercurrent of contempt by any Hollywood type who chooses to use these words. I say nothing. She agrees to do it, “as long as it doesn’t interfere with her other projects,” which, of course, are more important. Uh huh.

A WASTE OF FUEL AND RUBBER

We hire the Indie Rock Manager to manage us. She arranges a meeting with an upstart indie record label. The label was somewhat piqued, but the do-gooder Green politics of its president ultimately queered the deal.

To wit: During our lunch on La Brea, the Indie Label President asks Reality and I what Braindead sees as its goals.

“To create the perfect square wave,” I tell him.

“Like a Top Fuel dragster,” Reality clarifies.

“What? You mean like drag racing?”

“Exactly.”

“What a waste of fuel and rubber,” he sniffs.

“That’s what life is: Waste, entropy, chaos,” Reality retorts.

He doesn’t get it. He gets the check, however. Reality and I feel like less human beings after the exchange.

THE HEISENBERG PRINCIPLE (NOBODY CARES)

The Indie Rock Manager sends out cassette tapes of Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby to various record labels. Nobody cares. But somehow Maximum! Records, a record label out of Chicago, bites. They are intrigued by the cover of the tape, which is a picture of a rather catastrophic explosion in a Top Fuel dragster, which Ikky jacked the contrast on so’s to highlight the mascara worn by the female driver.

The mascara and the explosion was metaphor, and Ikky really cranks on symbolism.

Maximum! Records does not know exactly whom they were signing, so they send us a letter of inquiry. “Mr. Reality.” “Ikky Shivers.” “JenJen.” “The Lebanese Lounge Singer.” Who are these people exactly? Could we send a picture of the band? Certainly.

But sending a picture wasn’t that simple. Ikky objects. He says that pop music is subject to the Laws of the Heisenberg Principle. “To observe something is to change it,” he says. “Besides, there is a meritorious beauty to generic anonymity.”

“Well, then we must not be observed,” I tell him.

“We must not change,” Reality agrees.

Reality and I drive down to the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles and peruse the magazine racks, in search of the most outrageous pictures of Japanese pop groups we could find.

We find an act with pinnacles of massive, teased and dyed hair. Kabuki makeup. “THAT is Braindead,” Reality gushes. “Let Ikky jack up the contrast on that.”

So Ikky does, and this generic Japanese glitter rock band is now truly representational of the Soundmachine.

Maximum! signs us anyway.

THE OIWAKE PUB

Los Angeles is Ground Zero for everything that is wrong with Western Civilization. Greed. Materialism. Degradation.

The Japanese want all of these things, of course. They just haven’t gotten it down yet. Yet… Little Tokyo in Los Angeles is Western and Eastern civilization at a crossroads.

It is strange: The Japanese want nothing more than to shit-can the values that make them noble and unique, and supplant this rarefied cosmic piety with the base inhumanity of the West, of which its quintessence manifests itself in Los Angeles, the home of show business.

Which is why we have to have pictures of Japanese musicians in pancake makeup feebly trying to emulate an American glam rock band. THAT is the Braindead Soundmachine, Reality says.

Reality and I know the layout of Little Tokyo pretty well. It is the one area of Los Angeles where we can feel comfortable, both aesthetically and philosophically. Ironically, in the non-Japanese sections of Los Angeles, we feel like gaijin. Uncomfortable. Later, we go to have Japanese beers at this karaoke joint for Oriental businessmen. The patrons are plastered on sake and caroling to various oldies. On a silver screen, there is a visual accompaniment to the music, which is generally teenage Japanese girls in various states of undress on an overcast beach.

The bar patrons are completely banzai. So are Reality and I. We are the only round-eyes in the joint. Reality signs up to sing “Heartbreak Hotel.”

The MC announces over the p.a. system to welcome “Mistel Learity.”

The teletype reads out “Well since my baby left me, I’ve found a new place to dwell…” but Reality ignores it completely.

Instead, he begins chanting, “SATAN! … SATAN! … SATAN!”

The Japanese businessmen are with him. The entire crowd is standing up, flicking their lighters, chanting “SAYLL-TAN! … SAYLL-TAN! … SAYLL-TAN!”

I am in the only person in the joint, not chanting, but I could not be happier.

As we leave, we walk out over a wooden footbridge flanked by ivy and waterworks. I can’t contain my glee any longer. “I really love this place,” I say to Reality.

“What place?”

“Los Angeles. Little Tokyo. All of it.”

A couple of months later the Oiwake Pub is bulldozed and replaced by a chain office supply store.

CONCEIVE, BELIEVE, ACHIEVE

In the hill behind my house is a transmitting antenna for a radio station that just changed formats from rap to Korean talk radio.

The radio broadcasts blast into my neighborhood like a shotgun and permeates every piece of metal. People are picking up Korean talk shows on their chain link fences. Old men pick it up in the silver fillings in their teeth.

The new format is perhaps more takeable for these geezers, as opposed to booming bass and a torrent of expletives in one’s mouth. Yes, rap music physically implanted in one’s head. Unfuckingbelieveable…

The Korean talk radio station is an invasion and an epidemic. It has infiltrated every electrical connection in my house. This makes recording a difficult proposition, fraught with Asian gobbledygook and mumbo jumbo insinuating itself onto every guitar, track and vocal performance we are recording.

We — me, Ikky and Reality — are kind of okay with the Korean broadcasts every once in a while. There was a sort of Zen serendipity to the whole process, and although none of us believe in predestination as a cosmological concept, if something wants to make its way onto our vocal tracks, who were we to argue? “There are no mistakes,” Ikky says.

Still, it is in everything else in my house: the television, the phones, and the radio. I call the radio station and file a complaint. They know just the phenomenon I am pissed about. They send an engineer down to troubleshoot and correct the frequency jamming that is enveloping the ether at the Wind Tunnels.

The engineer is a brother from South Central, probably hired during the station’s last format and by its prior owners. He has a toolkit with him and is sporting a baseball cap embossed with the initials, “CBA.” He says his name is “Sporty D.”

The guy does some electronic hoodoo voodoo, using variations of the divining rod approach with a sort of Geiger counter and then declares (after a series of beeps and boinks) that I am, in fact, under magnetic siege from his employer. His solution? He has these small donuts of some preternatural kryptonite-like material, and he commences to wrapping and insulating every piece of wire in my house with the stuff. Power cables, speaker cables, and any connector he can find.

“We’re not done,” I tell him. I open the door to the Wind Tunnels, where we are making the Braindead record, and expose the galaxy of blinking lights, cable runs, tape machines and sundry exploding electronic spiders. The engineer is like a child at Shangri-la.

“Man, this is the bomb,” he whistles. “When I first looked at you, I could tell you were the kind of guy that had a song in his heart and could lay down some jams.”

“What kind of jams you got?”

“All kinds of jams. Mostly with hip hop drums and fuzz bass. Funk guitar.”

“Man, if you got some jams, I gots some rhymes.”

“What are your rhymes like?”

“DMC. The o-l-d DMC, not the new DMC. Do you like the old DMC?”

“You mean ‘Kings of Rock,’ that kind of thing.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I like the old DMC.”

“You got some extra jams?”

“Yeah, I got some jams.”

We make a date to record some of his rhymes at the Wind Tunnels, he proceeded to wrap every cable in the studio in his Korean radio-repelling quasi-kryptonite and then I ask him if he ever played semipro basketball.

“Naaoooww, why?”

“Because of your brim. It says, ‘CBA.’ Isn’t that for the Continental Basketball Association?”

“Nnnaaaooo, man. That means, ‘Conceive, Believe, Achieve.’ I’m a positive rapper.”

I did not want to tell him one thing I enjoyed about rap was its utter nihilism.

THE MOTIVATOR (THE M, THE O, THE T)

Sporty D comes over with his rhymes.

We set up, I roll the track and he begins rapping.

It is this inscrutable, inexorable screed of platitudes.

“Drugs are bad on any levels/Hand in hand, remote control

with the Devils,” as a for instance.

It goes on forever.

I stop the track. “Sporty, you need a hook. A chorus.”

“What’s that?”

“The part that people keep singing after they’ve turned the radio off.”

Sporty D is entered in a rapper’s competition in South Central. I tell him the judge’s and his “peep’s” eyes are gonna glaze over if he keeps jabbering away without a break and without a hook.

“Yo. What do you want me to do, man?”

“You’re Sporty D, ‘the Motivator,’ right?”

“Yea-uhh.”

“Well start there. After the ‘drugs are bad’ bit take a breath and wait for the downbeat. Then come in with something like, ‘I’m Sporty D, the M-O-T-ivator, the M, The O, the T-ivator.’”

“Yo, that is dope, blood.”

“Okay, you try it with me.”

We start rapping together.

“All right, all right. Let’s roll tape.”

After the “drugs are bad” bit, I punch in his vocal and point.

“Yo, I’m Sporty D, the M-O-T-ivator, the M, The T, the O-ivator.”

I kill it. “Sporty, we gotta’ stop dude.”

“What’s wrong, man?”

“It’s ‘the M, the O, the T-ivator.”

“Damn! I got it.”

We start again.

“Yo, I’m Sporty D, the M-O-T-ivator, the M, The T, the O-ivator.”

“Sporty, stop man, stop.”

“What’s wrong?”

I tell him.

“Damn. I got it. I got it.”

We roll again.

“The M, the T, the O…”

I let it slide. We play it back.

“Man, that… that… what did you call it?”

“The chorus.”

“Man that chorus is BAD!”

I knew he meant good.

I change the order of the syllables with a razor blade. After he leaves.

YOSHI

Yoshi and Club Mugi could only exist in Los Angeles.

BZ discovered Mugi. He and a struggling actor friend had been tipping strippers at Jumbo’s Clown Room. The beer wasn’t cheap and it was watered down. Equally diluted and tepid was the response the women were giving BZ’s actor pal as he stuffed paper currency into their g-strings. It was all a flash and a promise. Feeling cheated and existentially numb, BZ and the actor leave, and en route to their car parked on Hollywood Boulevard, they hear music wafting out of the back entrance of an establishment named “Mugi: A Club.” It is a siren’s song…

*****

Mugi is a dive bar out of a particularly homoerotic rendering of From Here to Eternity cum Apocalypse Now.

The back entrance from Hollywood Boulevard is siamesed and labyrinthian, and its convoluted layout seems to indicate that the proprietors do not want to encourage any walk-in foot traffic. It is like entering a cavern, catacombs or an opium den.

Once inside, the mouth of the entrance opens parabolically and blossoms like a lotus flower, but the ambient light contracts rather than expands. A right angle of a bar is anchored to a concrete floor. A multicultural smattering of lounge lizards and gender-non-specific geishas plant their anatomical private parts on a haphazard arrangement of bar stools. There are Asians and Caucasians, maneuvering and pairing off non-linearly. Some of the white guys have the look of Vietnam Vets who got their libidos rearranged on weekend furloughs in Saigon and they now patronize Mugi in hopes of rekindling a love lost ten or twenty years earlier in, say, Okinawa or somewhere in Southeast China. They have a far away and forlorn look of wistful nostalgia for a Police Action that, on the one hand, decimated tens of thousands of young American boys, but on the other, provided a playground for kinky Caucasians to satisfy their depravity and fetishes uhh, unmolested, and away from prying, puritanical eyes and Cold War busybodies.

“He-rro goh-jus,” says this four-foot something gender bender with Hiroshima Mon Amour eyes and pink cheeks so bulbous that it is entirely possible a canister of CO2 is going to detonate at any moment.

It is the voice of Yoshi, the four-foot something transvestite expatriate from Tokyo, who sought refuge in Los Angeles twenty years ago after being disowned from his family in Nippon because of his sexual orientation. Once in the states, Yoshi allowed his fruitiness to blossom and ripen like so many tangerines, and he becomes a sort of underground icon amongst the Japanese homosexual community. He reaches critical mass with his sexuality and his sense of community when he became the floor manager of Mugi: A Club.

That night, Valentines Day, Mugi is in full effect, with a floorshow. BZ, who had been objectifying women at Jumbo’s Clown Room, is now the one being objectified, as Yoshi plies him with repeated rounds of Cuervo shots.

I get a message on my machine. It is BZ. “You’re not going to believe this one,” he says. He leaves directions to Club Mugi on my machine, which he insists we are to patronize on Valentine’s Day, and then says, “prepare to be objectified.”

SOMETIMES VALENTINE, SOMETIMES HALLOWEEN

BZ is late and I am there by myself. I order a Golden Oj and Yoshi bats his eyelashes and demurs.

As alluded to, Mugi is a most debased scene. It reeks of beer, perfume, dank septic concrete and hormones. There is one restroom and it is flooded, which enhances the bouquet. At the bar and on the dance floor, a smattering of sundry third world drag queens intermingle with straight looking American men, many of whom are veterans.

There is a rectangular concrete stage raised half a foot above the muck. A costume ball cum floorshow is in effect, and a parade of faux Brazilian ladies high step and pussyfoot across the stage, to the delight and glee of the assembled smocklers. The choreography is loose as prison flatulence, but the lack of discipline and rehearsal cuts no truck with this crowd.

BZ is still late. The Golden Oj has been drained, and supplanted by a series of shots of Cuervo.

“No Chal-ge.” Yoshi says, and matches me shot for shot. As soon as his shot glass is drained, Yoshi yelps like Carmen Miranda hit with a horse syringe full of ketamine. More shots appear. Yoshi is working me for my phone number, and yes, I see what BZ is talking about. For once, I am the one who is objectified.

Another shot, another show tune, another attempt at my personal digits. I tell Yoshi I am a “one man woman,” in hopes that he will take a hint and throttle back and he laughs and says, Okay, I see” and cackles again like Ms. Miranda.

BZ comes in, sits down next to me and Yoshi rouuoarrrs like a caged cat. “Herro go-jhus. You no say you have speci-arr fliend.”

BZ orders a drink and then makes his way to the unisex bathroom. Yoshi swoops in for my phone number one last time.

I relent and write 818-554-6729 on a napkin. Yoshi hurriedly stuffs this into his blouse. It is Reality’s phone number.

PURPLE HAIRED GIRL REVISITED

She is a schoolteacher who once had purple hair. At first, I would see her studying advanced mathematics in the dining area of the university cafeteria where I worked. I left her a note saying I would like to tickle her with a Twinkie or any other crème-filled dessert while we calculate its shelf life.

Which we did. Intermittently. For eight years. During which the Purple Haired Girl matured from a post-punker into a schoolteacher. But whenever a schoolteacher is living with somebody who thinks the spare bedroom is a wind tunnel to test the pressure waves of a drum machine… well, nerves fray.

So one day I come home and there is half as much furniture as there was that morning.

I couldn’t blame her for leaving. Part of the tension was living in a house that had been converted into a Wind Tunnel, with the same bass riffs and synthesizer noizes squeaking through the air gap in closed doors. Over and over. Ad fucking nauseum.

ALESIS HR-16 PT. 1

I replace the Roland TR-505 with an Alesis HR-16. Out of the box, it sounds less like the drum sounds on the rap records we are attempting to emulate, but with some tweaking and manipulation, the Alesis yields some bizarre and unexpected results. For a bass drum, we de-tune the HR-16’s tom tom sample down one octave. Again, the idea is to make something beyond drum sounds, but still punctuate the beat.

Like being in a relationship, reliance on other human beings is kind of a problem. The fewer you have to rely upon, the better off you are. That’s where we are as a society: emotional and intellectual syllogism is easier achieved with an electronic device than it is with another human being. McLuhan was wrong: People are a far cooler medium than machines.

*****

It is a simple flat gray box, with a wedge shape and a slight rake to its topside. Opening the lid reveals a simple matrix of square plastic buttons, each designed to trigger one of sixteen different drum sounds, be it tom toms, or a bass drum, or sundry cymbals or a snare.

A liquid crystal screen displays jagged, bit-mappy black text against a backdrop of a yellowish mutant orange — a shade only otherwise used as a dye in food coloring. A couple of sliders lets the “drum” programmer access a variety of menus, adjusting such parameters as volume, pitch and some basic routing or circuiting.

As an object de anything, the HR-16 is excruciatingly prosaic. Indeed, there is nothing about this drum machines’ styling that inspires any particular technological fetishism or enthusiasm. Any desire to actually touch the machine really stems from the user’s dissatisfaction with its analogue, the real deal. i.e., a human being. Or at least a drummer.

The drum machine is a surrogate, and there are reasons why people resort to surrogates. The drum machine means you do not have to rely on other people. Humans are more flawed than their electronic replicas. A drum machine means you do not have to rely on human beings.

Drummers are the most heinous derivatives of human beings to ever de-evolve. They are subhuman cavemen who lack the intellectual prowess to rub their two sticks together and create something useful like heat; instead out of frustration from their inability to either a) make fire and b) express themselves beyond grunts, they must resort to banging on a drum, a primal chest-beating and cock walking designed to make the opposite sex look at them. Which doesn’t really work of course, because once they do have a boy or girls’ attention it only reveals the drummer’s lack of articulation and the futility of these primitive gestures only cranks up their angst and neurosis.

Conversely, like a dog — an animal more evolved than a drummer — drum machines are receptive to input. They do what you tell it to do. They will not argue with you about the syncopation of the hi-hats and they will not mack on your girlfriend.

That night at Tex and King Hang’s loft, as we were listening to “Rapper’s Hall of Fame” and marveling at the first wave of hip hop out of Compton and how fucking funky the drum machined programming was on those records, Tex told me the best way to make a drum machine have more of a “human feel” was to pour a six pack on it.

*****

Ikky Shivers is the best drummer in Los Angeles, precisely because he is too smart to be a drummer. He programs with a human feel, alright.

“When a butterfly flaps its wings in Australia,” he tells me one day while we are programming music, “it changes the weather patterns and cloud formations in Manhattan.” Meaning what, I ask him. “Meaning in nature, small changes in input equal large changes in output.” Okay then. “That is a basic tenet of the Chaos Theory. Our programming and our machines must be analogous to what happens in nature. When we push a button, or adjust an algorithm, chaos must ensue.”

Ikky stopped drumming — and began programming — for hyper-intellectual reasons. That, and because he didn’t want to schlep a drum kit around anymore. Ikky is a rare human being, in that his input yields large changes in output. Actually, with him (and with BZ and Reality), the output surpasses the input logarithmically, just like in nature.

But in relationships — and with drummers — the calculus is reversed and far screwier and far more unnatural. The output is less than the input; any attempt in communication or conveying information or emotions is an exercise in diminishing returns.

You push a button and you get the desired result.

Yes, machines will fail you, but only when bits of plastic break or when solder joints turn cold. One expects that obsolescence as part of the deal. There are no emotional attachments to a drum machine. And ultimately, the input equals the output.

There is emotional attachment to other human beings, though. And the input is never equal to the output.

After years and years of chasing and wooing the Purple Haired Girl, including a sordid history of her having affairs with an ersatz beat poet in San Francisco, she came back to me and we moved in together.

AIRPLANE LIGHTS LIKE A STRING OF DIAMONDS

The Indie Rock Manager and I fly to Chicago. Maximum! Records has sorted out that the Soundmachine is not, in fact, comprised of Japanese kabuki glam-anarchists, but will not offer a contract unless they are able to put a face to somebody or something associated with the act they are about to throw a bunch of money at.

Maximum! is owned and operated by two gay men — “life partners,” who used to run a very popular underground record store and whose cachet and equity has been transformed into a very successful independent record label. One of the men takes cares of the artistic and business decisions, while the other takes care of the office maintenance and struts around sporting a tool belt and fixing light fixtures. Maximum! employs a baker’s dozen or so workers, busybee-ing out of a modified warehouse on Division Street.

The employees all have either lopsided, multicolored hair or shaved heads. Other touches of couture include goatees and a ridiculous amount of piercings and tattoos. Drugs float through the office and into employee’s orifices like a drunken midget emptying his bladder.

We are having a listening party for what will become Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby.

“I really like that one,” the Tool belt says. It is an instrumental track that Reality and I recorded while we were drunk. He played some wobbly country chords, I imitated Zamfir on a battery-powered Radio Shack synthesizer and a cheap drum machine chicka-chicka’d in the background.

Label representatives take us to a nightclub for drinks. As we walk in, “Dogvillasan” by the Braindead Soundmachine blares over the club’s sound system. Joan E. Jones croons BZ’s lyrics over a heavy metal bass line:

Airplane lights like a string of diamonds

Frozen in the sky, cast a shadow on Compton

Kick it on the porch and fire up a camel

I’m blowing smoke rings just to dry the enamel on my nails…

Synchronicity or not, We are golden.

*****

Coming back from LAX, the Indie Rock Manager and I are in the diamond lane, heading east on the Century Freeway, an elevated thoroughfare of concrete, asphalt and composite sound barriers, whose function is not to keep the rumble and whine of automobiles out of the homes below as much as it is designed to keep the motorists from noticing that as we are like hovercrafts above the dire ghettos of Los Angeles, the southern tip of South Central. The car pool lane rises up on a trestle whose pitch and trajectory acts as a stairway to the stars. It separates from the rest of the matrix that is the Los Angeles freeway system. As the ramp curves and bends en route to merging with the Harbor Freeway North, I see a queued phalanx of aircraft waiting to make their approach onto LAX. They are, in fact, like a string of diamonds.

“The record contract is as good as signed,” the Indie Rock Manager says to me as we drive over Watts.

“Come down from the hills and make my baby,” I say.

And then I begin day dreaming behind the wheel, entering a sort of omniscient meta-awareness, careful not to crash the car into the roof of a household of third world immigrants, but still visualizing the ghosts of writers both living and dead who wrote about Los Angeles before BZ did. BZ is right: Nathanael West was dead on about so many things, and had the prescience to see where this town was going. I mean, they all nailed that Los Angeles would be the epicenter to a sort of apocalypse, but did not fully tap into the banality of such a cataclysm. We cross over the Santa Monica Freeway. East LA is to our right, Koreatown to our left. From our perch, I can see it bubbling like a cauldron.

LOLITA’S MOM’S ATTORNEY

Maximum! sends us a record contract. I play basketball with an entertainment attorney who is in a People magazine story about the guy who represents a show biz mom who is trying to reclaim parental custody over her famous adolescent pop singer daughter, Lolita, who has been advised by her manager that Mom is a piece of sharking, opportunistic trailer trash, who is salivating to get the little Lolita’s righteous record company money.

Lolita’s Mom’s Attorney looks at the Maximum! document, skims the pages and says, “Sign it.”

So we do. Maybe Lolita’s Mom’s Attorney thinks the contract sucks, and that the Soundmachine will never get another offer.

Maybe he’s right.

THE HOUSE OF PIES

After the contracts are signed, the Maximum! Label Types fly out to L.A. to meet the rest of the Braindead Soundmachine. They are very curious to meet BZ, the lyrical visionary.

We arrange a meeting at the House of Pies, Franklin and Vermont in East Hollywood.

BZ is quiet and in a black mood. Since the implosion of Avton Films and the mothballing of his “Zombie Cop” screenplay, he gets surly around entertainment industry types — even ones cutting him a check.

After they ask him to explain his concept of the Coyote God from Vietnam, he gets supercilious and leaves.

In passing, he calls the Label Types, “bald, goateed, booted testicles.”

They laugh nervously.

“I am not being ironic,” he spits. “I don’t ‘do’ irony.”

CLUB FUCK

It is a sort of dark Quonset hut of a discotheque, stuffed and folded ninety degrees behind a lavanderia.

The building puffs and expands with every four-on-the-floor thump of a hyper-amplified bass drum.

PHHHUUMMMMPPPHHH … PHHHUUMMMMPPPHHH … PHHHUUMMMMPPPHHH … PHHHUUMMMMPPPHHH … Quadruple time over the inexorable bass drum wafts shards of staccato sawtooth waves, looping in a minor key riff… every couple of measures some ersatz soulful wail from what could be either a black chick or a computer generated simulation of a black chick cries and “whoa whoas…” and so it goes, ad infinitum…

Meanwhile, there are a handful of humanoids strung upside down and swathed in gauze and white cloth. They are mummified and hanging by their ankles for the night, and won’t be released until after the deejay packs up his gear. This is their punishment and penance for what I cannot decipher. But they feel the need to be punished. The music seems punishment enough.

Representatives of our label have taken us here, because all of their other acts are in heavy rotation on Club Fuck’s deejay’s playlist. I am not sure what we have done to be swept up in this milieu.

By comparison, our record is not aggressive like this stuff. It is just a weird pop record. Perhaps this is all a mistake.

Meanwhile, in the center of the dance floor a queue of people clad only in leather thongs and handcuffs are having their lips sewn together and then hot waxed.

“Man, that looks uncomfortable,” Ikky says from beneath his cowboy hat.

It is all beyond unpleasant. Suddenly, the deejay drops the needle on a song by the Soundmachine.

“This is not what I had in mind at all,” I say.

LOS GLOBOS

It is a Mexican disco on the corner of a tertiary intersection where Vermont, Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards collide. The proprietor of Los Globos is a grotesque homunculus Chihuahua of a drag queen — a green, hideous replica of a woman. His/her physique is that of Quasimodo, although only more lopsided. A macabre shade of pancake makeup is swathed across the creature’s face. A green gown hangs down to the Adam’s apples of its ankles. The drag queen holds a microphone attached to a real cable running to the deejay booth. The microphone is not switched on.

The performance begins. The deejay drops the needle on the vinyl. The transvestite is mimicking to a record of ANOTHER Mexican drag queen that performs comedy. The cracks and pops are louder than the canned laughter and the punch lines.

There is no equilibrium, no symmetry to any of this. It is beyond absurd. Again, like all things in Los Angeles and beyond, it is a simulation of a simulation. It is a drag queen miming a man miming a woman. The only step further would be a WOMAN impersonating a man impersonating a man impersonating a woman. Doing comedy.

Reality is not only suspended, it is bent and paralyzed, like light from the stars as it hits the carbon dioxide in the ether. Everything is a house of mirrors on peyote.

Nobody in the smattering of gay gauchos and caballeros is laughing. The only laughter is off of the comedy record.

The lip sync is off, like a Japanese horror film. The homunculus is oblivious and continues to mime.

The act tanks. The only applause is off of the comedy record.

Next, Yoshi is on. A Japanese cross dresser in a Mexican bar — the mind boggles. Yoshi is, in fact, the star attraction. There are nine people in this puke-colored abortion of a nightclub. But when Yoshi is announced with a fanfare along the lines of “Viva Par Masturbar, con Yoshi!” (at least that is what it sounds like), the nine homosexuals erupt, only their applause and whistles are enhanced by a canned audience reaction cued up from the last act’s Mexican comedy record.

Yoshi waltzes into the spotlight sporting a red dress splattered with white polka dots. She (?) also has a lollipop and her hair is done up in blonde pigtails. Yoshi is doing 5-year old Shirley Temple drag.

The music starts and it is some manner of 1960s Japanese bubble gum pop song, with the verses in Japanese and the chorus in English.

“Itty Bitty Baby, Hi Hi.

come-a come-a Baby, Hi Hi.”

As the song reaches its bridge, Yoshi choreographs a series of curtsies, which segues into a lot of licentious licking of the lollipop. The pedophiliac implications are staggering. The song goes into its last chorus of “Itty Bitty Baby, Hi Hi,” but Yoshi breaks sync and begins downing shots of Jose Cuervo Gold proffered by the drunken and appreciative caballeros.

Instead of taking the audience out of the moment, the breaking of sync takes the audience further into … into what? Further into the disembodied head of the coyote. Or something.

CROP DUSTERS COLLIDE (THE TOUR IS ON)

The tour is booked. For the next three months we are to crisscross America as the opening act for something called DMFDM, a Frankfurt, Germany-based “industrial rock” act who also record for Maximum! Records.

Ikky has a day job repairing phone lines for the government. They will not grant him a leave of absence, so we have to find another synthesizer player.

Not to worry. I put in a call to a pal from high school, Bo Fingers, a synthesizer prodigy who now lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

While we both are in high school, Fingers worked in a pharmacy after school. This was the proverbial fox guarding the hen house. The drug store’s inventory had to be all over the map, as every night after the drug store closed, Fingers and I would cross-reference the pills he lifted with the Physician’s Desk Reference. As often as not, these narcotics would leave us completely rubber-legged and unable to function in a world that adhered to four dimensions.

Finger’s stint at the drug store was brief, but his tenure’s brevity was more than compensated for in his pillaging of booty.

Despite our hormone and ennui-fueled appetite for sampling chemicals of any atomic number, Fingers was able to stash away a reasonable cache of pills that he hid from his parents in his rather primitive and soon to be obsolete collection of synthesizers.

When the synthesizers were mothballed in his bedroom closet, so were the narcotics. We wouldn’t discover them again until our paths crossed again, over a decade later, when he joined the Braindead Soundmachine as the pinch-hit synthesizer man…

*****

Once I have Fingers on the phone, I tell him of our dilemma. He’s with me. Sort of. He tells me about this great new gear he has. I explain the Soundmachine’s ethos to him — “Look, the Soundmachine is a postmodern attack on the Age we live in and we cannot use contemporary electronics in that assault; we are a postcard from the past and a Polaroid of the future — either the past or the future is far more takeable than what is happening now” — and patiently tell him that his new expensive electronic keyboards are of no interest to us.

I remind him of the synthesizer he owned when we were in high school, the one that served double duty as a repository for hiding pharmaceuticals from his parents. These are the keyboards that are perfect for the Soundmachine.

Fingers arranges to patch and circuit the aforementioned electronic relic and then he calls me back.

“Okay, let’s start the audition,” I say.

“Audition? You mean over the phone?”

“Sure, the phone is the perfect setting for this.” I then tell him about the gig whereupon Reality and I stole and destroyed Ikky’s notations for his synthesizers. I tell him there are no mistakes.

I play him “Dogvillasan,” which is in G major with a minor 7th, but then advise not to worry about that too much. His contribution doesn’t have to be musical, per se. It can be shards of noize.

“Hey, I got this one sound that reminds me of four crop dusters colliding in midair. Maybe that’ll work for the verse.”

“Play it for me.”

He does. It’s perfect. He has the job.

THE MOTOR HOME

Reality, the Missing Eyebrow, Khalsoum and I drive down to Yorba Linda to pick up the motor home.

She’s a beauty. A Lindy. Over thirty feet long. Sleeps six. A built-in shower and commode. We’’ be touring America in style.

The proprietor is some Orange County hillbilly named Glen. He and his wife are both wary about sending us out with this new vehicle, particularly as the Maximum! Records has not dispensed with the deposit.

Frantic phone calls and faxes ping and pong across half of the continent. I sign a rental agreement; Glen hands me the keys. Three months later is the return date.

To make our first date in St. Louis, we embark upon a banzai burn across California, Arizona and into New Mexico. We make it to Albuquerque as the sun is coming up. It is forty degrees colder than our point of departure, eighteen hours earlier.

Reality climbs on top of the motor home and stretches, his torso expanding. It is like he is trying to climb out of his skin.

DIE MOTHERFUCKING DEPECHE MODE

DMFDM insists their name is a loosely translated German acronym for “Die Mother Fucking Depeche Mode.” They all wear leather and are all German, except for their tour manager-slash-back up singer, who is a farm girl from Kansas. One Kraut plays guitar, another punches buttons on machines and yet another bangs on tuned and amplified metallic pipes and household appliances with a crowbar and a sledgehammer. The leader of the group wears dark glasses indoor and says very little. His sidekick and co-lead singer is a 6 foot 7 inch skinhead who wears a trench coat over a leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings. The guitar player wears long hair and has a sense of couture generic enough to be in any rock band on the planet.

DMFDM came to prominence after wiring a bunch of vari-speed vacuum cleaners for sound, and circuiting this through some fuzz boxes and amplifiers.

They called it art and then put a dance beat underneath it; they got a record deal. As their art grew, they chucked the vacuum cleaners for guitars and samplers and got pretty famous. Postscript: their last record, No Time For Dachau, was released the day of the Columbine massacre; some teenagers maintain that it was this act’s lyrical content that inspired a pair of loser goth rockers to unleash all of their pent up anger in the form of brutal, wanton bloodshed at a high school in Colorado.

REVENGE OF THE MTV BABIES

They are children born after Video Killed the Radio Star. They have been nursed on a constant diet of licentious imagery, cut only with the violence of major motion pictures and video games. It got them fat.

Post-Vietnam. Post-Watergate. Post-MTV. Post-PCs. An entire generation born inside the head of the chicken. This is DMFDM’s — and by extension, the Braindead Soundmachine’s — target audience.

Our audience is post-everything. “Absolutely no hope” is DMFDM’s message to them.

THE TOUR MANAGER

She is one of those girls who think that combat boots and an Addams Family lunch box is some postmodern manifestation of haute couture.

Because of the recent Milli Vanilli debacle/scandal and subsequent class action lawsuits that destroyed careers and cost record labels money, the girl with the lunch boxes is commissioned to sing DMFDM’s background vocals “live.”

There is a new law to prohibit consumer fraud that scares DMFDM and Maximum! Records enough to where they feel that even though the female background vocals are coming off of samplers and tapes, the presence of an actual female vocalist will placate both consumers and promoters.

I feel that having a person with a microphone in her mug and no sense of pitch is actually more fraudulent, but this pales in comparison to her attempt to masquerade as a tour manager.

Reality is even more vociferous in his contempt. From the moment they meet in St. Louis, the two of them are at constant loggerheads. They HATE each other.

MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS

We are in our hotel room looking out at the arches. The Gateway to the West.

The phone rings. It is the record label, explaining that the funds had cleared to pay for the motor home that we insisted we travel in.

It had been a non-eventful trip. I-40 into Albuquerque as the sun came up was quiet and exquisite, and the journey continued becalmed north through Denver and into St. Louis, the town that Judy Garland sang about while addled on diet pills at the insistence of some studio executives.

As I pull back the shade and look out of the hotel window, the phone rings again. It is Glen, from the RV rental place. He tells Reality he is “madder than a shit house monkey” about the late payment for the rental. He says he is sending over law enforcement to repossess the unit. Reality assures him money is on the way. Again.

There is a distinct lack of oxygen in the hotel room. I say I am going across the street to the Arch. The Lebanese lounge singer asks to see it too. Bo and Reality stay behind with the Missing Eyebrow and discuss Black Sabbath’s body of work.

We ride the elevator together and take in the outrageous expanse of the Mississippi. It is an inverted parallax… we can see forever.

It is about hope. It is about promise. It is about opportunity. And as her hand skims across mine as we continue to take in the view, it is about her forgetting about her boyfriend in Los Angeles.

LOOKING DOWN

We are all cowboy hats, pit uniforms and checked flags. The view looking down stage is rather awe-inspiring.

A wave of humanity coalesces into some strange gelatinous mass. Jell-O that breathes and almost thinks.

Pasty faces. Oblong haircuts. They are malleable. They can be formed in any image in a Machiavellian cum PT Barnum sense. It is euphoric yet appalling. Contempt as a coefficient to the endorphins rushing. I start the drum machine and the show commences. Now I know how Norma Desmond felt.

Reality is whipping his hair around like a dervish set on fire. Despite never having even rehearsed with the Soundmachine before (excepting that one night over the phone with me), Bo Fingers is ack-ack-acking his synthesizers with the aplomb and confidence of a tail gunner. Khalsoum is radiant. She is Keely Smith at Howard Hughes’ nightclub in Vegas. Forty minutes later I stop the drum machine. It wasn’t a bad gig, really.

COLUMBIA

Reality is beginning to sense that something is up with the Lebanese lounge singer and me. I am beginning to sense that something is up with the Lebanese lounge singer and me. Indeed, in St. Louis, our hands touched on the railing that keeps tourists from falling through the glass windows at the apex of the Arch.

I haven’t had a girlfriend in over a year. A few months before the tour started, I met a girl at a gig in West Los Angeles and we were making time until I told her I had to go.

“Why?”

“Because I gotta’ go start the drum machine.”

“Give me something real,” she said and began walking away in a pique of righteous, leftist Luddite indignation.

“I can give you something surreal,” I said as she walked away, but I don’t think she heard that sentiment, nor my asking for her phone number.

As I started the drum machine, I thought about the Purple Haired Girl, the girl who left because of drum machines and other issues.

THE ARCHITECT

A smart sartorial sense anchor a thin and not yet doughy face accentuated by thin but sturdy black eyeglasses.

He has a groovy girlfriend who is a gaijin chanteuse in Little Tokyo. He designs post-postmodern buildings that gentrify squalor and improve the human condition.

The Lebanese chanteuse wants a commitment. He does not know exactly where this is coming from. If he commits, he has an instinctual knowledge that it will turn to shit on him.

He hedges his bets. He enjoys the hipster cred of being seen with the lounge singer who is in the mix, singing Kurt Weill, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland standards.

She goes on tour with a metaldisco musical act. She complains about her relationship with the Architect. The Guy Who Starts the Drum Machine listens one too many times. Their hands glance at the top of the Arch in St. Louis.

Eventually, they kiss. Then they pleasure each other.

“You have to tell The Architect what is going on,” he says.

“I will,” she answers.

She doesn’t.

At a party one night, he says that Frank Gehry has replaced Frank Lloyd Wright as the definitive architect of Los Angeles. I tell him that Gehry is the Mick Jagger of Architecture — an embarrassment who should have retired a long time ago.

COMMON SENSE

Hormones and testosterone short circuit common sense. I want to give somebody credit for self-awareness, when it is really self-absorption that envelops that person like a portable mushroom cloud.

I just can’t see the mushroom cloud for pheromones and perfume. I want to do what everybody else wants to do at a rock concert — I want to fuck the singer. And I am.

DOTS AND NOTES

Two dates into the tour and Reality is appalled at the precious, prima donna temperament of our singer. She had been singing for a handful of hipsters and couple of half-dead doddering dandies in a lounge when the Soundmachine vacuumed her out of that existence and put her in front of 2000 angry teenagers. BZ was right. She is our Faye Greener. But the tragedy of The Day of the Locust is not that there is a riot and stampede in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, in which hordes of consumers are caught up in the violence and begin stomping child actors to a pulp of blood and gristle. No, the tragedy is that, not unlike Tod Hackett in his pursuit of Faye Greener, men who should know better will forsake common sense and dignity in order to diddle dime-a-dozen actresses who were not exactly Helen of Troy in scope and magnitude — but the fall is the fall, just the same.

Reality intuitively understands all of this and he knows I understand this also, but he can’t articulate his feelings because he is gobbling Fingers’ cache of out of date pharmaceuticals and guzzling tequila. But his sense of betrayal is soothed by the chemicals and the booze — but not without side effects…

Reality is not a bass player as much as he is attitude and id in waist length hair and a leather jacket. Dots and notes are not his strong suit. He is borrowing my chromatic tuner to tune his bass. There are four strings to tune. E, A, D and G. But the nature of the chromatic tuner means you can calibrate a string to any note in the western scale — flat, natural or sharp — any one of twelve tones. A small diode lights up when one is tuning to, say, A sharp or B flat instead of A natural. A light that Reality is oblivious to while tuning his instrument. In Columbus, Missouri, he tunes the A string to A#. It is one of two strings necessary to play Braindead music.

We go on and we create a god-awful racket. More god-awfuller than normal. It is an utter discordant cacophony. Fingers and I look at each other, trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong. Reality and the Lebanese lounge singer are in their own orbit, oblivious to just how many layers of skin we are taking off of the limbs of the innocent.

Between songs, I tell Reality, “I don’t know what key you are playing in, but if you want to tell Fingers and me, we’ll try and follow you.”

“You’re on glue. We’re all in the same key. Shut up and restart the drum machine.”

So I do. It is still beyond unlistenable. I think to myself, “This is a real test of our Zen mantra, ‘There are no mistakes.’” One third of the band playing an entire set in the wrong key is not a mistake.

But this feels like a mistake.

THE REVIEWS ARE IN

The record is released and the reviews are in. “This record is so bad, not even their parents will buy it,” says Alternative Press. Meanwhile, Playboy Magazine says four stars out of five.

Various college newspapers and sundry music magazines ask for interviews, hoping for us to explain our vision and ethos. “There are no mistakes,” I tell them. Reality says, “It is pointless to talk about the politics of music. Dogvillasan, our spiritual leader, tells us that everything is pointless. Do you understand that the entire planet is going down on itself?”

REALITY IS PISSED

Reality is pissed.

I am in the back of the rented recreation vehicle, making time with the lounge singer, as we motor through the ghettoes of Detroit. Reality and Fingers are in the driver’s compartment, smoking cigs and talking gew gaw while listening to music.

Earlier that day Reality had scored a cassette tape of some forgotten heavy metal recording.

So after the gig as we are leaving Detroit, en route to Windsor, Ontario, Reality breaks the wrap on his new Judas Priest cassette.

Thundering heavy metal rattles the particleboards of the motor home. It is more than I can take. The lounge singer and I had been whispering, kissing, touching, and soaking in the streaking flares of streetlights, each burst of photons punctuating every gesture.

I know this is wrong, but I cannot stop myself. Like most acts of debasement, the moments are stolen. But they are ours.

The blasts of chugga-chugga ack ack ack heavy metal guitars obliterate our pleasure. I reckon it is a calculated act of jealousy and antagonism.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I tell her.

I march to the cab of the motor home. I straddle the console and hit the eject mechanism on the cassette deck, palming the audiotape. The stereo defaults to an FM radio station, all talking heads talking and static. I lower the volume with my left hand, pivot to my right, reach across Reality and roll down the passenger window. It is a continuous motion, form in lock step with function. With a flip of the wrist, I zing the tape into the dark, benighted streets of the Detroit ghetto. I can only assume it splinters and unspools upon impact with the pavement.

“What did you just do?”

“What do you mean, ‘What did I just do?’ I threw out your Judas Priest tape.”

“No really. What did you just do?”

“Listen, dude. That was no sleight of hand. It was no magic trick. I threw out that tape.

“Why?”

“Because it is fucking unlistenable and I am trying to sleep.”

“You are doing everything back there, but trying to sleep.”

“Whatever, pal.”

Reality is pissed. “Stop the motor home.”

Fingers looks confused. It is three in the morning in the gnarliest part of Detroit. Every instinctual impulse in a white man’s psychology says to keep the hammer down and continue getting down the road.

“Just keep driving, Bo.”

“Fuck that. Stop this fucking thing.”

Fingers stomps on the brake pedal. The motor home seizes momentum and stops.

Reality gets out of the passenger door. And… he… is… gone…

We are stopped in the middle of the street. The lights are no longer streaking by. In the ghetto after dark, time, space and fate are both stolid. Impassive.

“What do we do?”

“I’ll go get him.”

“He’s gone.”

“I’ll find him. Lock the doors.”

I walk for blocks through the projects. It is like breaking curfew in a war zone — The DMZ of crack dealing.

I stop for a nanosecond and attempt to get my bearings. Through the darkness, an apparition of a human being metastasizes behind me.

“Hey man, I see you looking over there.”

I say nothing and start moving again.

“Hey man, I see you looking over there.”

I don’t respond. My hope is that my strategic oblivion will clue this drug dealer into the fact that I am not interested in buying rock cocaine. Drug dealers cannot take a hint.

His breath cuts through a night where nothing is moving except me.

“Why are you looking over there, when you can look right over here for free?”

Only in Detroit does Samuel Beckett sell narcotics.

THE COWBOY HAT

Reality is back. The tour continues. In the audience in Iowa City, a bespectacled teenager (or maybe a twenty-something) wears a cowboy hat as an ironic fashionable stance, a gesture that embraces and yet mocks the redneck ethos. I don’t want to deal in irony, which I consider the disease of his generation. But I am wearing the same make and model of cowboy hat.

If this kid is all hat and no cattle, as it were, what does that make me?

Our shtick is eating its own young. I am suffering from an instant personality crisis. Moreover, I am not sure I want to make music for teenagers in fucking Flyover, USA.

I tell this to Reality.

“Our audience is the least of your problems,” he says.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning who is singing in this band is a far bigger obstacle to you keeping your shit together.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you and the Lebanese chick fucking. It is affecting your ability to lead the band.”

“You’re on glue.”

“Maybe, but you’re on ginch. And she is everything we are supposedly against. When we hired a lounge singer to sing these dirges about the apocalypse, we thought we were getting over. But we’re not — IT is giving over. ‘It’ wins; we lose. And because you are sticking your manhood in this thing, you are the conduit.”

I did not have an answer for Reality, but I knew I wasn’t giving up getting laid. I was thinking short term, immediate gratification, and was oblivious to the consequences: how it was costing me friendships and song writing partnerships.

I knew this woman did not have the intellectual aptitude to keep me stimulated. Moreover, she was crushingly banal and unimaginative. But she is beautiful — olive skin and brunette hair that summons Mesopotamia and the birth of civilization. Her beauty speaks to me on an atavistic, primordial level. The physical beauty trumped any intellectual and emotional reservations I had about getting involved in a love affair.

Reality sees me zoning out, lost in reflection.

“How did you get so pussy whipped?”

THE COWBOY HAT REDUX

I can’t stop thinking about the bespectacled kid in the audience wearing a cowboy hat as an ironic gesture.

How is his ironic gesture different than ours? I ask myself. I am of the opinion that we are less smug about the whole cowboy hat as fashion statement thing. This touch of couture had been inspired by the crewmembers of Arley Langlo’s Top Fuel team at a drag race in Pomona. The crew guys all wore the coolest cowboy hats and then blew up the motor on their dragster with the reckless abandon of Hezbollah or the Nevada Test Site.

Yet years later, seeing this college student grooving to the scene, trying to pick up chicks and appear superior to the culture he mocked rubbed me the wrong way.

The Cowboy Hats playing to Cowboy Hats. It is too incestuous in the Uroboros sense. “The culture is going down on itself” as BZ prophesied, the shark is eating its own entrails, etc.

But seeing this bi-focaled Frat House Cowboy grooving to our dirge… inspired an Epiphany. I was coming to terms with the Braindead Soundmachine as redneck minstrel show. Stepin’ Fetchit meets Lonesome Rhodes.

The first seed is planted concerning doubt about what it is the Soundmachine is doing: Using dance music as a platform for social commentary. And for the benefit of whom? The kid in the Cowboy Hat? It is a futile gesture.

Seeds of doubt. Fuck. I am changing. I am wondering what I am doing. With drum machines. With music. With women. With Reality.

CHANGE YOUR JOB

The wheels are coming off. Only Fingers is keeping his shit together. Otherwise, Reality’s drunk, Khalsoum is completely histrionic, I am trying too hard and the Missing Eyebrow is pulverizing the audience with a mix that is an ice pick between the ears. During one show, somebody threw up a piece of paper into the sound mixer’s workspace, which read only three words:

“CHANGE YOUR JOB”

This is probably because his approach to mixing is to, in his words, “make everything louder than everything else.”

I told the Missing Eyebrow that maybe it was time to tame some of the Soundmachine’s random sound elements.

“There is a lot of noise being added off of the stage, and then you are adding yet more noise.”

“I know, it’s fookin’ brilliant, innit?”

“People are complaining.”

“Awww, c’mon. Just because you are fucking the singer, don’t go soft on me now.”

IOWA HIGHWAY PATROL

After spending a couple of nights crisscrossing the Midwest, we conclude a gig in the roarin’ podunk of Iowa City. We leave the gig and hit the road. Our destination: Chicago.

Due to every other member of the Soundmachine mistaking our tour across America as a 3-month holiday (thus their constant imbibing of any libation and/or pharmaceutical they could inhale down their gullets), yours truly was voted the only member cogent — and sober — enough to guide our tour vehicle into the Windy City.

Reality tells me later that his descent into chemical depravity had been a reaction to my liaison with the Lebanese Lounge Singer. Her function was merely perfunctory and utilitarian, and her self-absorption was beyond insufferable. My sleeping with the enemy was a betrayal that he took personally. Looking back, he was right.

Cut back to I-80, Eastbound, I haven’t slept in damn near two days and all I want to do is get to the Windy City, get a hotel, draw the curtains and hibernate. Before we can make time on the interstate, however, we must appease the appetite of the Lindy, which contrary to the wisdom of Glen (the owner of the RV Emporium where we got the vehicle), consumed far greater than a mere 10 mpg.

In Tipton, Iowa, I find an exit with a convenience mart/petrol parlor; everybody in the Soundmachine entourage is either playing possum or is truly zonked, so I grab my traveling coffee mug and exit through the side door of the motor home, give the lady behind the counter a couple of twenties and commence dispensing with the fossil fuels.

After topping off the tank, I drag ass back and get my change from the portly clerk, refill my coffee and retrace my steps back into the Lindy. I turn over the motor, put ‘er in drive and SHIT!

In my haze, I neglected to disengage the fucking hose from the vehicle. The kiosk itself is completely thrashed… FUCK… As band members begin to wake up, I truck back into the convenience mart, humbled and completely apologetic. The counter wench is completely FREAKED and hysterical — “You’re the second asshole this week to ruin one of our pumps, yadda, yadda, yadda.” I’m calm in comparison, I offer my license, the insurance papers, and a copy of the rental agreement but she’s having none of this. “I don’t care about the paperwork, you’re gonna’ have to wait until the boss lady gets here.”

(It turns out that the boss lady lives over ninety minutes away. It’s now 1 AM — I need sleep! I tell the gal, “Look, call the Highway Patrol, I’ll fill out an accident report, here’s the paperwork…” “I don’t care about no paperwork, you’re gonna wait until the boss lady gets here.” “Look, I don’t how you handle traffic accidents in Iowa, but in California we show our insurance papers and the officers fill out accident reports.” More hysterics on behalf of the counter wench, she refuses to call the HP, so I leave.)

So there we go, EVERYBODY in the Soundmachine is wide awake as we motor for about one hour towards the Mississippi River, out of Iowa and into Illinois and Freedom! We get to Davenport, I can see the fuckin’ muddy-ass river and BHHWOOOPPP — it’s the law dogs.

I am asked to step out of the vehicle as Fingers and Reality are stuffing more pills that have long passed their expiration date into the crevasses of various analog, monophonic electronic keyboards.

“I understand you had a little trouble back there in Cedar County. The clerk at the Jiffy Stop said you fled the scene of an accident.”

“No, not really,” I say, “I offered her my license and proof-of-insurance, but she was having none of that.”

“That lady is my neighbor, she lives right down the road from me; Are you calling her a liar?”

“Umm, no not exactly, but she did refuse to listen to reason,” I backpedal.

They haul my ass back to Tipton, Iowa in the squad car, with Reality and Fingers in tow. We get to the Big House and the bailiff decides not to throw me in with the drunks, but with the felons who are waiting there until the State Penitentiary can create some more room for real criminals. Great. It’s about 5 AM at this point and I still haven’t slept. I decide to sleep on my back because if I’m going to be violated, at least this way I’ll see it coming.

I’m awakened at 6 AM — “Getup!” — for a meal of flapjacks and coffee. I refuse the coffee, because I am going right back to bed (or so I think) after some carbo-loading and a phone call to my lawyer. I am told I’m in for “criminal mischief.” Worst case, according to Lolita’s Mom’s Attorney in Los Angeles: “Ten years.” But that’s worst case, he assures me. Until the phone call, I have refused to make eye contact with my fellow cons because I was sure I would be released at any moment. Wrong. After a morning of cleaning the jail bars with a tooth brush (I actually didn’t want to interfere with the other fellows routine, it kinda’ looked like I would just get in the way — ironically, these guys really knew how to work a toothbrush, although you would never know it from their smiles) and putting Field & Stream magazines in a stack (“They’re already in a stack,” I tell the trustee, “Put ‘em in another stack,” he counters), I am finally shuffled off to the Courthouse to see the Magistrate around noon.

Handcuffed, I pass Fingers and Reality in the corridor as they take snapshots of me with their Instamatics. Their goddamn cameras have flashbulbs popping and I feel like Frances Farmer on her way to the Funny Farm. Two hours later — after sixty minutes of shuteye in the last two days, I am led into a small office with the “magistrate.”

The judge is in a wheelchair and his hands are all sclerotic and discombobulated. He immediately tells me that he was interrupted from a luncheon and a golf game (!) to come review this matter. He then feebly attempts to turn the page in the police report concerning my arrest. Great, I think to myself, I’m going to jail for the next ten years because I put a crimp in social calendar of the Stephen Hawking of Jurisprudence — who apparently golfs.

At this point the Magistrate’s phone rings. And rings. I’m new at this: I don’t know whether to help him left the receiver off its cradle or whether that will piss him off more. I decide to let him struggle with the telephone. He finally gets it positioned in the groove of his shoulder blade and tells the party on the other end: “Yes, I’m reviewing it right now; I’m really disturbed by this.” Ten Years.

He wrestles the phone back into its holster. “It says right here you accidentally destroyed a fuel pump at the Jiffy Mart out on I-80.”

“Uhh, yeah, I accidentally destroyed the fuel pump.”

“If it’s an accident, then how could it be mischief?”

“Uhh, yeah,” I say.

“I suggest you get Iowa in your rear view mirror as soon as possible — like now.” Not a problem…

GETTING PAID FOR IT

As Reality pounds out the bass line to “Dogvillasan” at the end of our set in Minneapolis, Khalsoum leaves the stage and I borrow the mic. “You are braindead, we are Braindead. The only difference is that we are getting paid for it.”

The Lead Kraut takes it upon himself to wire a variation on that message into the end of his band’s performance.

“You are DMFDM. We are DMFDM. The only difference is that we are getting paid for it.”

I AM FUCKED

I am fucked, but I know I am fucked; therefore, I am not truly fucked. Or so BZ’s theory goes. But I think I am more fucked, know that I am fucked. I am fucked because I am worse than Faye Greener. I am fucked because I am fucking Faye Greener. Faye Greener doesn’t know any better. But I should.

It is more than Reality can take.

THE NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE

We are motoring through New Jersey towards New York City.

Reality is driving the Lindy; I am in the sleeper berth above the driver’s compartment, sawing some serious logs in a deep REM state. Reality, who has been piloting our craft in the fast lane of the Jersey turnpike, is being pulled over by the Highway Patrol. Apparently Reality has been hogging the passing lane in the motor home, with all four barrels of the carburetor wide open, sucking down petrol like a camel and maxing out at 62 mph.

This is a thermodynamic exercise in diminished returns. The more fuel you throw at the Lindy, the slower it runs, bloated on hydrocarbons. It just blubbers.

No matter. Reality is king of the road and everybody will have to take a number as he cranks up the Black Sabbath and puts the proverbial hammer down.

But commandeering the fast lane in New Jersey is against the law, apparently. A state trooper hits his baby blues, and Reality slides all four tons across four lanes of traffic and stops. Despite cop lights, sirens and a panicked flock of band members I sense something, but nothing of enough importance to wake me from my sleep.

“Hey Man, wake up. You gotta’ drive,” Reality bellows.

“What… what?” I stir.

“Listen I have a couple of ‘failures to appear’ and some warrants.”

“What?”

“If the cop runs my CDL I’m going to jail.”

“Fucking hell.”

I sit in the driver’s seat and wipe my eyes. I buckle up, and try to gather my still-deep-in-a-coma sensibilities in preparation for dealing with a Joisey patrolman. As I roll down the window, Fingers is still stuffing placidyls into his Korg analog synthesizer.

The trooper walks up to my window.

“I suppose you know why I’ve pulled you over?”

“Actually officer, I have no idea.”

The cop explains the law about monopolizing the passing lane. It turns out the last time he had pulled over an RV with California plates he had struck the mother lode in the form of a massive cocaine bust; I listen and I nod. I am stupefied. My brain is trying to kick in and I am attempting to formulate a sentence that will articulate my contempt for narcotics. Words fail so I continue to nod. I get off with a warning after he tells me “not to do this again.”

I promise him I won’t.

WE ARE FRIENDLY…

We get to New York City. The front page of the Arts Section of the New York Times has a half-page spread on DMFDM.

The Bald Kraut in the Skirt had given the interview. They asked if his band was made up of fascists. He didn’t really understand the question.

“We are friendly fascists,” he explained.

DMFDM: FRIENDLY FASCISTS COME TO MANHATTAN read the headline.

That evening, back stage, The Lead Kraut is livid and is waving the newspaper around like a whirligig. The Bald Kraut in the Skirt is cowering in the corner, smoking a cigarette and dropping ash on his trench coat.

“Vot ze fuck did you tell them?” The Lead Kraut yells into a cloud of smoke and running mascara.

PHILADELPHIA

After the New York show, I drop off Khalsoum at La Guardia Airport and she flies back to Los Angeles. JenJen is en route to take over the job of vocalist. Bo, Reality, the Missing Eyebrow and I drive to Philly and unload the gear at the club, the Trocadero. The rats in the alley behind the Trocadero are the size of car tires. They are everywhere, but I am the only one who can see them.

I pick up JenJen at the airport. She is unrehearsed. Unbeknownst to me, she was put on the plane moments after some rather intensive and invasive female trouble-type surgery.

As she and I drive back from the airport, she tells me that she is worried about not being able to remember how the songs go, and that she might lose her place in the tune.

“Listen, if you get lost, just start chanting our mantra.”

“I didn’t even know we had a mantra.”

“Sure, it goes like this: ‘We believed it then and I believe it now… This music is a manifestation of the rising tide of awareness on the planet… This music contributes to a positive environment, it feels good and it casts a comforting spell over every one who hears it.’”

“I think it would be easier just to rehearse the songs, don’t you?”

“There is no time. Okay, if you get lost onstage and don’t know where you are in the song try this. Just chant, ‘Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby.’ Over and over and over.”

I do not know that, as of the last few days, her emergency surgery has left her barren.

CLUTCH DISCS

We are in Memphis. We have a day off, so we drive out to the drag strip, where a drag race had been run the day before. There are used, surplus clutch discs lying on the starting line and in the deserted pit area.

I gather them and say, “These are for the Krauts.”

In Memphis, The Lead Kraut wires them onto his percussion kit. And bangs on the metallic disc as part the act. Asbestos dust shakes off the discs and hangs in the air, caught up in the nightclub’s wind machines.

DALLAS

Ikky flies into Dallas. We drop off Fingers in Memphis, motor south through Jackson, Ms. and head east to Dallas.

Dallas is where lives are changed, permanent-like, but maybe not for the better.

I also did not know that Ikky would walk into a minefield of amour with the girl with the lunch box. The entire coterie of Krauts would conspire in ways to get off of their very expensive tour bus and mooch rides with the Soundmachine and their increasingly decrepit motor home.

So yes, Ikky and the Tour Manager are overheard discussing Hitchcock lighting angles backstage in Dallas and then the next that happened is *SHE* wants to cop a ride with us, whom she seems to hate unequivocally.

She wants to get on the motor home. Reality threatens to walk out if she gets onboard. He has survived Detroit. Can he survive Dallas?

Meanwhile, in the hotel pool, JenJen and The Bald Kraut in the Skirt are dipping their toes in the shallow ends, smiling at each other and basking in the reflection of the Dallas sun. They have become fast friends. They seem to have matching polish on their cuticles, although he has on more mascara. They are giggling and lightly splashing.

I am bemused and appalled. Of all the couplings on this tour, theirs makes the most sense.

SAN ANTONIO

JenJen looks down the parallax of railroad tracks running east and west. She looks back towards the east, where we just came from. She sees nothing, just spare, desiccated bits of shrubbery, abandoned railroad ties, coated with goops of oil and tar; rocks broken not from the violence of the crushing weight of a freight train’s wheels, but that of a gradual splintering from the ennui of a relentless cosmic heat.

The tour is creating some strange couplings. JenJen is trying to come to terms with her budding romance with the Bald Kraut in the Skirt. Making time with a man in a skirt is more than a little strange and surreal.

She walks outside the gig and disappears down a parallax of railroad tracks. She is completely disoriented. And lost. She then looks west, as the sun sets over her home, 1300 miles away in the Pacific Rim. That doesn’t excite her either. She stares at the broken rocks.

Next is El Paso, Phoenix, San Diego and then back to Los Angeles.

She quits the tour in Los Angeles. Khalsoum gets back in the Lindy.

FREE PERSONALITY TEST

We get to Los Angeles. After the gig I go backstage, in DMFDM’s dressing room. The Bald Kraut in the Skirt is cocooned in a leather trench coat and is chain smoking.

“You always looks like you are waiting for a train,” Ikky Shivers says to him.

I laugh. The Krauts laugh. I point to the Skirt. “You’re coming with me,” I say and tug on his trench coat. The Skirt had been fascinated by Los Angeles, as he heard the Soundmachine sing about it for months. He had come to equate LA with the Final Judgment. I told him we were going to see the town, all bright lights and big city. I tell him we are going to see what JenJen, his new girlfriend, has been singing about.

“Yah? We go see the epicenter of the Apocalypse?”

“Ground Zero, pal. I am going to show you the three buildings in Hollywood which will survive the Wrath of God.”

After The Skirt grabs a bottle of tequila and stuffs it into a pocket of his coat, we leave through a stage door that dumps us onto the parking lot. The night is thick with the smells of Hollywood: burritos, marijuana, car exhaust and coyote shit. Adding to the olfactory stew are the followers of DMFDM who are mixing and mingling outside the theater, smoking pot and clove cigarettes and urinating as they make their way to their cars.

The Bald Kraut’s trench coat only partially covers his leather miniskirt and his fishnet stockings. Still his haberdashery is not any more outrageous than that of his fans, most of who look like they have just come from a séance for Sharon Tate, and he blends in the assembled rather seamlessly.

We are directly across from the Capitol Records building. I gesture to the top point of the building — a spiral needle which adds another couple hundred of feet to the building’s height — which the architects designed to resemble the spindle of a turntable from the era when teenagers stacked a bundle of vinyl records onto the record player.

“So, zis building, he vill survive?”

“Yes,” I tell him. “Think of the Reichstag fires. Despite its crimes against humanity, the Capitol Records building will survive the forty foot wall of water that will envelop this city, washing away the mountains of bullshit as the cosmic consciousness attempts to purge itself.”

“Undt zhvy vill it survive?”

“It has proved itself bigger than any of us or our attempts to topple it.”

“Like Nietzsche, ya?”

I tell him about an unreleased Beach Boys recording, SMILE, whose master tapes rest in the vaults of the Capitol Records building. After writing dozens and dozens of smash hits for Capitol with a formula of Chuck Berry guitar riffs underscoring a smorgasbord of Four Freshmen harmonies and melodies singing out simplistic paeans to surfing, drag strips and malt shops, Beach Boys’ wunderkind Brian Wilson endeavored to write something that would transcend the temporality of pop music.

“The record was conceived as a ‘Teenage Symphony to God.’ That was Brian Wilson’s direct quote: ‘A Teenage Symphony to God.’ It was never released after the label heads put the kibosh on its completion.”

The Skirt raises an eyebrow.

“The same men who vetoed SMILE’s completion — the Coyote Gods that run Capitol Records — are courtside at Laker games nowadays, and they will be swept up in the Almighty’s tsunami. The denizens of Capitol won’t survive, but the edifice will.”

The Bald Kraut in the Skirt steps on a cigarette and smiles. His mascara smiles with him. “Like ze Indiana Jones and das Temple of Doom?”

“Something like that.”

*****

We make our way down Hollywood Boulevard, as often as not with the bottom of the Cuervo bottle pointed towards the stars. We walk for miles. I show the Bald Kraut the Scientology HQ on Virgil. On the marquee overlooking the boulevard is the verbiage: “COME IN FOR YOUR FREE PERSONALITY TEST” I point and say, “That’s us.”

“I need my personality examined zhvy?” he asks.

“I’ll explain later. Just take the test. It’s just a series of multiple choice questions about basic metaphysics, potential chemical dependency and junior high school psychology.” He nods.

With a closed fist, I knock on the glass doors, which are locked shut. The Kraut takes a hit off of the bottle and rings a buzzer.

“Can we help you?” comes a disembodied response from a speaker.

“Definitely. We’re here for our Free Personality Test,” I croak toward the general direction of the speaker.

“Ya. Free Personality Test,” the Kraut echoes.

“We’re closed. Please go away.”

This is unacceptable. As many times as I have been hit on by Scientologists to take their free personality tests and I now I am ready and I am being denied.

“Look. We demand our free tests, dammit.”

“We’re closed sir, please go away.”

And so it goes, a contest of wills, which volleys to-and-fro for about five minutes. The confrontation reaches it crescendo with the Kraut screaming “Achtung!” and goose-stepping across the well-manicured lawn and my banging on the glass door like Stanley Kowalski.

Unfulfilled, we begin to leave.

“Will zis building survive ze Apocalypse?”

“Yes, mien fruend, this too will survive.”

A six foot eight inch Teutonic cross dresser is more than the Scientologists can process. It is beyond their ken. The Kraut looks hurt and forlorn not unlike Frankenstein coming to terms with rejection.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him. “You didn’t fail the test. They did.”

*****

We cross the street and begin making our way west. We pass Jumbo’s Clown Room and enter the back door of Club Mugi.

“He-rro gol-geous,” Yoshi croons. Shots are proffered. Shots are downed. More are lined up.

Hospitality aside, tonight is not about free shots for me, with the vague tease and pretense of Yoshi getting into my pants. No, tonight there is a bigger agenda, one of Biblical proportions, one that portends of Revelations in the New Testament and Genesis in the New, New Testament.

Yoshi and the Kraut eye each other and mutely compare eye shadow.

I explain to the Kraut that this is the third and last building in Los Angeles to survive the impending and imminent rapture.

But there is bigger issue than the survival of buildings: the survival of the human race.

“When the shit gets weird, you will come here to ensure the perpetuation of the species.”

The Kraut raises an eyebrow, like a Black Alsatian.

“Yes, you must come here to claim your mate, Yoshi. When the winds die down, 2/3rds of the Axis powers will be reunited. You two will climb the gleaming spire of the Capitol Records building and there you will consummate your relationship. You will create a new master race. Germany and Japan, together again.” I am torn on Cuervo, but the drunken riff connects with both the Bald Kraut and Yoshi.

“Like ze Fay Wray undt King Kong on the Empire State Building?” he asks.

“No, me Jessica Range,” Yoshi demands.

“Whatever.”

PLEASE DON’T HATE OUR TOWN

“Now is ze time

To get on ze right side

You’ll be God’s Reich”— “God’s Reich,” DMFDM

It is a small town, a suburb of Chicago and some weird bastion/pocket of White Supremacy. The skinheads and the master race types have come out en masse for the Krauts.

The fact that one of them is a sexual deviant in fishnets is a minor, unfortunate detail for these Seig Heil skinheads, an aberration that can be overlooked until the master race machinations are installed in the United States of America.

To the assembled in the VFW Hall in Elgin, Illinois, this is a homecoming of sorts for those who want to repatriate or reconnect with Das Fatherland.

Elgin. It is a Nuremberg Rally set in Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell. Or maybe the suburbs. I am trying to figure out how we are complicit in this Teutonic/Aryan freak show. Maybe I am overanalyzing the situation.

As soon as I start the drum machine, the booing starts. They HATE us. The hatred is very palpable. It manifests in the form of a chorus of extended middle fingers, arcing rooster tails of beer and a cacophony of catcalls that are louder than Reality’s bass rig. It is truly intimidating: four musicians against a thousand hoodlums high on the scent of what could be construed as the Return of the Final Solution.

The pandemonium expands like a balloon and is beaten down like a piñata. In their zeal to eliminate the one obstacle between themselves and the Second Coming of the Final Solution, the throng begins working as one ball of bad energy, maneuvering their way towards the stage and attempting to climb on.

I look over stage right and Reality has stepped towards the fracas, belching bass notes and extending his gut. Ikky is twisting knobs, smoking cigarettes and laughing.

I think to myself that people die in these kinds of situations. I am trying to ascertain why these lovable skins hate us so much. Possibly it is the skin tone of the Lebanese Lounge Singer. Maybe it is the fact that we are preaching the Apocalypse, a scenario where everyone gets it, including the blonde haired and the blue-eyed. Perhaps we are not the buzz saw of noise that DMFDM is. Maybe we just suck.

The violence is on the cusp of critical mass. The skins have broken through the perimeter, as it were, and begin to attack the Lebanese Lounge Singer. She stops crooning and begins fighting back, drawing blood from the distended foreheads of the skinheads who have perpetrated the virtual concertina wire of the concentration camp we have found ourselves in.

I am in awe. I don’t know why I fell in love with this woman, whom I met while she serenaded drunken hipsters and doddering dandies at a piano bar in Koreatown section of Los Angeles.

It is the kind of moment that will stoke, inflame and prolong misguided affection. I stop playing guitar for a few bars and just admire her bravado.

But the ugliness continues to simmer. I stop the drum machine. The Lebanese Lounge Singer walks off. Ikky stops playing and concentrates on his nicotine fix, his synthesizers looping in a “Look Ma! No Hands!” two-bar arpeggio of doom. Reality, however, is in a groove, regardless of the possibility of the Braindead Soundmachine’s imminent crucifixion or no. He continues with one foot on top of a floor wedge, a looping, loping bass pattern ad infinitum.

I am on my knees and I restart the drum machine, hitting the play button on the downbeat of the musical phrase Reality is driving into the ground. Ikky stubs a butt with his snakeskin cowboy boots and joins in. I walk into the mic pattern center stage and begin to filibuster about the futility of existence in a town upwind of the Chicago stockyards.

Driven by Reality’s relentless sense of purpose, we continue to play the same song for twenty minutes. BLAHTT… BLUH BLUH BLUH BHANT… BLUH BLUNH BLUH BLANNTT… Finally, I get on my knees and turn off the drum machine. Then jeers.

Silence. We pack up our gear among sporadic showers of beer.

The Krauts begin their set. I can hear them through the concrete, steel and insulation. I am sure they are appalled by the Pavlovian reactions of their audience. It is a not-so-friendly-fascism.

We walk up the street, looking for a tavern so we can have a beer.

A carload of teenagers drives by us with their window down. “Please don’t hate our town,” one pleads.

Ikky comments on the Doppler shift in the voice as it passes us by.

REALITY BAILS

The tour ends. Ikky flies back from Chicago. The drive back from Chicago is more than Reality can stand. Khalsoum and I have our hands in each other’s pants or skirt or blouse at any semiprivate moment.

To Reality, it is the mother of all betrayals and the drive back cannot end fast enough. When we get back to Los Angeles, he will begin his career and move out of the music business altogether. He will flirt with a couple of opportunities: distressed properties, and junk bonds in Japan. It is because he cannot stand to be around me.

I cannot blame him. I have chosen the song of the siren over whatever existentially correct essence Reality proffers.

We get into Los Angeles in the Lindy. I drop off the Lebanese lounge singer at the home of her boyfriend, the architect. We kiss. It is a long kiss, a soul kiss.

“This is very weird,” she says.

“Yes, it is.”

*****

Reality and I return the motor home to the RV rental office in Yorba Linda. It is basically destroyed. Glenn is madder than a shit house monkey. Barbara, his wife, cries.

Once in Los Angeles I continue to meet with the Lebanese lounge singer. We record songs in the Wind Tunnels. We pleasure each other. I tell her to have a heart. In that, she must make a choice between the guy who starts the drum machine and the architect. At the very least, she has to tell him that she is unhappy with his lack of commitment and because of this unhappiness she is seeing someone else. Instead, she chooses the architect. And she goes back to singing in lounges.

JenJen meanwhile, is also going through changes. She no longer is sleeping with the guitar player in Broomtree Disease. Meanwhile, their records are suffering from a lack of sensual tension that made their records interesting. The material gets more milquetoast as their recording budgets increase.

Reality has had it. He is too disgusted to come over to the Wind Tunnels and collaborate for awhile. Meanwhile, Num-E-Num buys some recording gear and becomes more of a presence with the Soundmachine, bringing over his very expensive pieces of hardware driven off of a computer. It could be the monolith in 2001 and I could be a monkey. Ikky and I continue collaborating, recording stuff in our respective studios and then dropping a floppy disk at each other’s house. It is hard for me to be at his house. The tour manager lives with him now in his crowded apartment and I do not want to hear the first words out of her mouth. BZ has lost his job and is reading scripts at the Paramount Studios. Everything is strained.

REALITY, THIS IS BZ

“BZ has really lost it.”

Reality has me on the phone. “Call my answer service and listen for yourself,” he says, supplying me with his number and his access code. It seems that BZ is very disturbed by Reality’s method of making a living, which is recording heavy metal bands. BZ has devised a method of jamming Reality’s message service by filibustering for half an hour into the phone until all of his allocated time/memory is used up.

I call Reality’s service and punch in the access code.

*****

(beep) “Yes, Reality this is Jeffers. Give me a call at the studio.” (beep)

“Reality, this is BZ. What the fuck, uhhh? Hey listen, uhh, don’t be picking at your weenie, man. Just knock that shit off. All I’m trying to say is if you are trying to get a grip on making money and the metal thing, don’t be breaking bread with the Devil. The winds aren’t blowing that way, they’re not. You’re going to try to get a handle on what’s really going on and it’s not fucking heavy metal man, it’s just not. And you know that as well as I do. Y’know, with the money thing on it, fine. But I don’t think it is. I think you’re getting caught up in it. So uhh, clears throat, just uhh….” (beep)

“Phhhheewwwww…. Reality, this is BZ. Uhhh…. ‘The Xandria Collection is a very special collection of devices which can provide an entirely positive source of pleasure. It includes the finest and most (cough) effective products available… unique-three-way-guarantee…’ But anyway, what I’m, ummm, the thing about… ummm… where is it? ‘Black dudes and butt fucking are two erotic concepts at which many smut sirens draw the line…’ ‘Back Door Lambada,’ ‘The Girl’s Club,’ ‘Girls on Girls,’ y’know? ‘Where The Boys AREN’T.’ Y’know what I’m trying to say here? ‘Her tunnel turd tunnel.’ ‘Her turd tunnel takes a rough grind riding on and under Ray Victory’s reamer.’ ‘Ray Victory’s reamer.’ ‘A couple of girls want to get back at their boyfriends’ — this is a pitch. This is like a treatment. ‘A couple of girls want to get back at their boyfriends who have gone away for the weekend, so they decide to FUCK ANYTHING THAT ISN’T TIED DOWN,’ Reality. Christ, do you hear what I’m saying? Nawww, just don’t… don’t even bother at this point, but that’s going to Orion Pictures tomorrow. I’m over the top, Reality. I’ve got cash now, I can do things with it. Am I interesting you? Maybe not, I don’t know. Give me a call.” (beep)

Reality and I are in the Ski Room (Sunset and Bronson), telling Gary, the bartender, about my getting thrown in the pokey in Tipton, Iowa.

He says, “You know my Uncle’s a judge a Cedar County, Iowa.”

He then gives me a quarter to put in the jukebox and asks me to play his favorite song. I punch in A 34, “I’ve Been Everywhere,” by Hank Snow.

Posted in cole coonce, come down from the hills and make my baby Tagged: hank snow, i've been everywhere, ski room ]]> http://comedownfromthehillsandmakemybaby.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/the-ski-room/feed/ 0 colecoonce