Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking It in Hair Metal L.A.

by Anne Thomas Soffee

“Hey, cutie,” Stacey says when I sneak up behind her at the party. A big girl, Stacey favors drapy ankle-length layers in various shades of moss and stone. Tonight, she’s also wearing a porkpie hat and a jean jacket with a Let’s Active album cover painted on the back. Her randomly assigned freshman roommate, Emily, is a pocket-sized butch lesbian with a mohawk. They are the wacky friends in the sitcom that is my freshman year. Stacey passes me a beer and I look around the party. It is a sea of Bono haircuts and Lennon glasses across both sexes. I think of what I am missing at home, and I sigh. For this I gave up punk rock matinees and coffeehouses. Aside from Stacey and Emily, I have no friends at William and Mary. Aside from the universally unappealing pencil-necked weird-guy suitors who think I’ll date them just because I’m weird too, I have no social life. And, aside from weekends and summers, I have no reprieve. This is what I have to look forward to for the next three and a half years of my life. I open my throat and pour down the rest of my bottle joylessly. Hooray for the best years of my life.

  “Nice nose ring.” I look up and see Jack Pettinger, the premed junior who hosts the Friday night trivia show on the radio station. Short and stocky, with a shock of curly blond hair, he looks like he belongs in a striped shirt with a slingshot in his back pocket, not at the alma mater of presidents. He’s grinning like an idiot and nodding at his suave opening line. Another loser who thinks he’s in my league, the poor fool. I nod back warily, waiting for the wooing to begin.

  “Thanks.” I look around for quick access to another beer, and while I am looking away, he unbuttons his shirt. I am silently wondering what the fuck when I see the reason. Jack Pettinger, radio station trivia geek and yellow-haired kid, is wearing 10-gauge BDSM rings in both nipples. Where I was the punk rockingest kid on campus five minutes ago, I am now a wannabe piker. Satisfied with my dumbfounded expression, Jack buttons his purple paisley shirt back up and struts away, way too undercover cool to waste his time talking to a wannabe piker like me.

  JUNIOR YEAR

  “What is this crap you’re listening to?” Stacey plops herself down on the couch and squints at the television, where a spandexed blonde writhes underneath a wailing guitar.

  “Bite your tongue—that’s Lita Ford,” I say reverently, then quickly realize that Stacey might not even know who Lita Ford is—or, more important, was. “You know, Lita Ford from the Runaways? Joan Jett, Jackie Blue? Cherie Currie?” Even my rock-hating sister could pick Cherie Currie out of a lineup, if only because she played opposite Scott Baio in the bad-girl drama Foxes, a Jodie Foster Cinemax classic rife with hotdogging skateboard scenes, a plethora of tube tops, and even an Angel concert at no added cost. Stacey blinks at me, shrugs, and lights a cigarette. College radio people don’t know from seventies glam rock. “Kim Fowley,” I howl, as if this will trigger some recognition. “CHERRY BOMB!”

  Nothing. To Stacey, this is just cheesy heavy metal she’s seeing on MTV, made that much cheesier by virtue of being played by a scantily clad bimbo. I know that’s no bimbo, though—that’s Saint Lita of the Runaways, Lita who sits at the right hand of Suzi Quatro in the hierarchy of all that is holy to rocker chicks. But Stacey doesn’t know. Doesn’t care, either, and gets up and heads to the kitchen to cadge a soda. I am duty bound to stay and watch, because the Run aways represent all that is rock ‘n’ roll to me, the same way that Iggy Pop and Ziggy Stardust and Sid Vicious do. The Runaways were dirty and mean and a little bit greasy, with their feathered hair and too-thick blue eyeshadow. They wore Lip Smackers and satin jackets and Candie’s slides, everything I remember about the seventies, only that much more, because they were teenagers on the Sunset Strip and I was just a chubby little third-grader in Richmond, Virginia. Even then, though, I knew. In my third-grade class picture, you can see that I knew. I was the one in the Alice Cooper T-shirt.

  This is the whole problem with me and the college radio people. They don’t want their music greasy and dumb like I do. They want clever couplets and wordplay from English majors and poets wearing clean shirts. They want music you have to think about and lyrics that make you rifle through the files in your prep school head until you go “ah, yes, they’re referencing Joyce!” I don’t ever want to go “ah, yes,” and I certainly don’t want to do it when I’m listening to rock ‘n’ roll. I want to bite my bottom lip and maybe flip somebody off. I want to stop just short of playing air guitar and cuss a lot. I want to feel like maybe if I ran into the Runaways behind the 7-Eleven, they would let me hang out with them. I don’t want to feel like I’m in school. I’m already in school enough. And I’m not going to tell Stacey, but even if Lita Ford hadn’t been a Runaway, I kinda like this song. I mean, what’s not to like about a tough chick who sings about getting laid and fighting in a bar?

  Q: So I take it you weren’t an REM fan.

  A: Funny, that. I saw REM open for Gang of Four at the Empire Theater when I was in ninth grade. Maybe it was an off night, but they pretty much blew their chance with me then and there. Anemic is the word that comes to mind, and about the only word, which tells you how much of an impression they did not make on me. I could never really get it up for them after that, even though all the paisley-clad music journalist types at ThroTTle loved them. Give me Stiv Bators over Michael Stipe any day.

  Stacey comes back from the kitchen with a Coke for me and reclaims her spot on the couch. Reaching across the coffee table, she picks up a magazine. Not just any magazine. The magazine that has single-handedly restored my faith in music journalism and maybe music itself. The magazine that made me fail my British Poetry exam last week, so enraptured was I with my new find. Not since I was in eighth grade, poring over the latest issue of CREEM, devouring articles on Iggy and Blondie and the New York Dolls have I found a magazine that speaks to my soul like this one does. I am in love.

  “Ick,” Stacey says, and drops the magazine back on to the coffee table.

  “What do you mean, ick? That magazine is fantastic,” I say, picking it up. I had stumbled across it completely by accident the previous Monday night. In the throes of yet another night-before-the-test all-nighter, I developed a pressing need for more caffeine—real caffeine, not soda or chocolate. Late-night bottom-of-the-pot Tinee Giant caffeine. I made the trek across campus at three A.M.

  Dark and deserted, the early morning hours were the only time I truly liked William and Mary. The bright green Olde English letters on the roof of the Tinee Giant were like a beacon, calling to me, singing a song of something seedy and base that I had been craving more than I’d been craving coffee. Propped on the metal news rack between People and Rolling Stone was a magazine I’d never seen before—Rip.

  “ATTENTION MOSHERS, BANGERS, THRASHERS, HESHERS, SLAMMERS, AND ROCKERS! IT’S ALL HERE!” blared the purple cover. I was intrigued—and only partly because I didn’t know what a hesher was. I picked up the magazine and leafed through it. I saw bands I recognized from the punk rock days—Agnostic Front, Mötor-head, Suicidal Tendencies—and a lot of screeching guitars and greasy-looking singers, but what really intrigued me was the cover. Two guys who looked like the second coming of T-Rex—one skinny, sneering, and wearing a snake-skin jacket, his lank hillbilly-red hair falling from a leather cap, the other snarling and unshaven, with a stovepipe hat perched above a mop of curls à la Noddy Holder. These were my people, the kind of greasy, gutter-dwelling punks and lowlifes I’d idolized since I read my first CREEM magazine in sixth grade. These were my heroes, my muses, in all of their stringy-haired glory. They were what was missing from college radio—rawness, stupidity, and filth. They tugged at something deep inside of me, something left over from afternoons spent listening to Patti Smith and Johnny Thunders. This was what I had been looking for. This was where I belonged. This was where I wanted to be. I bought the magazine and read it over and over, instead of John Donne and Andrew Marvell and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who probably wouldn’t have minded. The men don’t know, but the little girls understand.

  Q: Let me get this straight. You were so
impressed with a magazine that you stayed up all night, reading it repeatedly and thereby failing your final exam?

  A: I wasn’t impressed, I was obsessed. If you were born without the gene for obsession, thank your lucky stars right now. You will never lie awake nights wondering how you are going to get tickets to a sold-out concert in Canada and get there and get back when you’ve only got $125 to your name. You are spared the endless search for a 12” copy of “Miss You” on pink vinyl with a picture sleeve, backed with “Far Away Eyes.” You will never have to explain to the policeman who pulled you over for weaving that you were merely looking for a music store that might still be open at 11:30 at night because you just realized that the bass riff of the Who’s “Substitute” is a direct steal from “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown” and you’ve absolutely got to find it right now so you can listen and compare.

  However, you will also never know the joy of rooting through three boxes of LPs on someone’s dew-covered front lawn and finally unearthing the holy frail, an actual 3D cover mono copy of Their Satanic Majesties Request. You won’t hand it to the homeowner and wait breathlessly silent, hoping he won’t realize the value of what he has, then chew your lip as you give him the twenty-five cents he asks for so you won’t blurt out the truth before you get away with your prize. (And, before you judge me, remember we didn’t have eBay back then. Thank God.)

  “Those guys on the cover are from Guns N’ Roses,” I say, making a futile stab at relaying their coolness in words. “Hang out for a little while and maybe the video will come on. The guy on the right does this snake dance thing, and he’s got on purple eye-shadow and his voice is all screechy.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me want to stay why, exactly?”

  “No, it’s really cool! And he goes ‘you know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby! You’re gonna die!’ It’s cool.”

  “Yeah, you said that already,” Stacey says, leafing halfheartedly through the magazine. “Hey, look. These girls don’t shave under their arms! Is that the new style? Does that mean I can stop shaving under mine? Because that would really save me some hassle.”

  “Those aren’t girls. That’s Poison. But really. And the guitar player from Guns N’ Roses looks like 1972 Keith Richards and he has a nose ring.”

  “Well, that I might stay for.” Stacey and I have cake and Jack Daniels for Keith Richards’s birthday every year. He hasn’t shown up yet, but we’re still hoping. “Can we at least mute it?”

  “We’d better not. I had it muted while I was on the phone yesterday, and I thought I was watching a Bon Jovi video and it turned out to be Stevie Nicks. It was kind of traumatic.” Stacey nods sympathetically. We may not be on the same page with Guns N’ Roses, but nobody wants to be caught ogling Stevie Nicks. Leather and Lace notwithstanding, she ain’t no Lita Ford.

  “Hey,” Stacey says, changing the subject somewhat obviously. “Do you want to go to Norfolk this weekend to see the Waxing Poetics?” See what I mean about the clever names? I shake my head, not sorry at all to be missing out on that fun.

  “I’m going home this weekend. I’ve got stuff to do.” What I’m not letting on is that the stuff I have to do consists of drinking domestic beer and watching Headbanger’s Ball with a bunch of rivethead friends I made over Christmas break—forklift drivers and drywallers, guys with mullets and concert T’s who don’t see the irony in any of this, not even in Judas Priest’s high-camp leather daddy shtick. They have an unnamed band that plays dead-on covers of Blue Öyster Cult and Sabbath in a wood-paneled basement behind Lakeside Baptist Church, and I cram on the ratty plaid couch between the drummer’s girlfriend and the singer’s roommate and sing along. It’s a dirty little secret that is easily covered by my general dislike of the social scene at William and Mary. I’m usually not around on the weekends anyway, so nobody suspects that I’m a closet metalhead of the nonironic kind.

  It isn’t that the college radio people mind me listening to Poison and Bon Jovi. They don’t mind that I show up to their parties in leather pants and an Iron Maiden T-shirt with the sleeves hacked off. This is all cute to them in a hey-guys-let’s-go-to-the-truckstop-at-midnight kind of way, the same way Elvis busts and pink flamingos are cute to them. As long as they think I have my tongue firmly in my cheek the whole time I am rocking out, I suffer no hipster backlash. But what they don’t know is I am dead serious. When I crank up the new Faster Pussycat album, my heart is in every note. I don those leather pants with utmost seriousness, just as Lita Ford and Suzi Quatro donned them before me. They’ll never understand that, and I’ve resigned myself to having to hide it Monday through Friday. Since Christmas, though, I’ve gone home every weekend to watch Headbanger’s Ball in the basement with my new buds, none of whom expect me to snicker up my sleeve at Nikki Sixx’s hairpiece, and none of whom ever mention James Joyce or Michael Stipe.

  Which is absolutely jake with me.

  1

  “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”

  King-Sized Beds and the King Himself on the Road to L.A.

  since I was in middle school, I dreamed of becoming the next Lester Bangs. Just in case you weren’t greedily devouring music rags like I was in the 1970s, Lester wrote for everything I read as a teenager—CREEM, NewYork Rocker, Rolling Stone, you name it. He was gonzo and edgy and passionate about the music and the words he used to describe it. As close as you could get to being a rock star while still being an English nerd—as in the subject, not the nationality—Lester was just as likely to turn up in the gossip columns as he was in a byline. I hung on his every word, and when he died in 1982, I felt destined to pick up the mantle, as I’m sure plenty of other little punk rock nerds like myself did all across the country. I got a jump on the other would-be Bangses by getting my foot in the door at ThroTTle, where they published me far more often and with far fewer edits than they probably should have, subjecting Richmond readers to my teenage would-be gonzo musings on everything from MTV to Chick Tracts to Soldier of Fortune magazine. So when I graduate from William and Mary I already have a sizeable portfolio of press clips, some pretty damn good and some cringeworthy, but each bearing my name in smudgy black ink on the byline, which is what matters in the end, right? Clips in hand, I immediately begin searching for my jumping-off point to music journalism greatness, mailing my resume and portfolio to every single rag on the newsstand that sports a bare-chested guitarist on its cover.

  Q: Lester Bangs. Lester Bangs. The name sounds familiar, but not being a punk rock nerd, I can’t really place it.

  A: I’ll bet I know why. While checking some facts for this book, I was heartened—and actually a little misty—to note the number of teenagers and twenty somethings in the online communities who list “Lester Bangs” among their generally less cool interests. I was misty and heartened, that is, until I checked further into their little blogworlds and found that it wasn’t the real Lester Bangs they admired, but the fictionalized portrayal of him—by a suave, unpudgy actor—in the movie Almost Famous. You know, kinda like all those kids who like “Lust for Life” because they heard it on the Trainspotting soundtrack. Only more horrible.

  Even though my dream of being the next Lester Bangs is alive, the rock journalism industry is terminal, bordering on critical. Some of the magazines to which I’m applying are so poorly written I am almost ashamed to be seen buying them. “Vince Neil met his wife Sharise at the club she was a mud wrestler at,” one caption in Metal Edge blathers, its preposition sticking out almost as far as Sharise’s muddy tits. It makes me wistful for afternoons spent in my bedroom, poring—or “pouring,”as Metal Edge would say—over the latest issue of CREEM. Not just a music magazine, CREEM was challenging reading, stuff that made you think. Even the letters to the editor (mine numbered three, thanks) were filled with clever asides and obscure musical references that made you fairly tingle just by knowing you were one of the select few who caught them. You were as likely to find Miles Davis as Van Halen in Robert Christgau’s recor
d reviews, and irony was the order of the day. CREEM stopped publishing in 1988, leaving me high and dry when I finished college the next year. Ladies and gentlemen, Boy Howdy has left the building.

  Naturally, when one’s dreams are dashed by the newsprint gods, the only logical rejoinder is to gift wrap a ham. Allow me to clarify. At this point I have finished college, I have no plans for my future, no destiny to fulfill, and no money in my pocket. Figuring I can address two out of these three with a pick-up job while I ponder the third, I take a stylin’ gig at the mall making gourmet Virginia gift baskets for people with a lot of money and a desire for more salt in their diet (a lot more salt—consider that the two main ingredients in the top-selling basket are Virginia Diner peanuts and Smithfield Ham). Living on sample peanuts and food-court lunches, I spend my spare time sending clips and queries to music magazines and drinking beer at Newgate Prison, Richmond’s only metal bar— and the less said about it, the better. All of this excitement follows the year’s main event, which was me following the East Coast leg of the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour in a perfectly adorable used Hyundai my dad gave me as a graduation gift. I have a feeling if he’d known what was coming, he would have considered a nice savings bond or something.

  Q: Did the Stones tour come as a result of some great journalistic opportunity? Was this not the assignment of a lifetime?

  A: No, it was not. It was the culmination of a decade of fandom bordering on sick obsession. Not that I didn’t try to get some kind of sponsorship, press credentials, something, anything—but come on. These are the Stones. Even magazines like Rolling Stone itself reserve that assignment for the big names and celebrity guest writers, the Dave Marshes and Stanley Booths, not peons like me with a few local bylines and a deep and abiding love for side one of Exile on Main Street. But yeah, I came, I saw, I sang along. It fucking rocked.