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

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.

“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.

PART TWO: SHADOWS OF COMPTON

“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.

PART THREE: THE SALAMANDERS ARE COMING

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.