I meet a couple at this glass class in the middle of nowhere in Pasadena. The girl is petite, dark haired, and really interesting looking, and she grabs my attention if not my loins. I write a song about the two of them. “Gary’s Girl” doesn’t have enough of a rock-and-roll ring to it so I rename him “Jessie,” misspelling the male version of the name because of the Los Angeles Rams’ Ron Jessie T-shirt I’m wearing at the time. I toss the finished song onto the heap with the rest of my unheard music.
My thirtieth birthday is fast approaching, and as far as the general public is concerned, my music career—what there was of it—has come and gone. I’ve had my shot: a Top 10 hit, some teen magazine coverage, a famous girlfriend, and the whole pop-idol-for-fifteen-minutes thing. In the eyes of the world (or at least those who even noticed), I’d shot for the David Cassidy throne and missed.
So I take a hard look at where I am now in 1979. In many ways I seem to be a happy man. I have a beautiful girlfriend, Diana, an ex-model who is artistic and loving; we rent a quiet suburban home with a flock of chickens (each individually named) in the backyard. We attend big Sunday dinners at her parents’ house; her brother Doug is my best friend; we share art projects and her very much loved dog, Sasha. You cannot be far from a dog or life is meaningless. Our friends and every busybody with a fucking opinion are sure Diana and I will marry. I assume we will. I guess this is what marriage feels like. I don’t know. I’ve never done it before. I love her dog, I know that much. Can I marry her dog? Is that legal?
My momentum is slowing. I’ve grown a beard and taken to wearing suspenders and flannel shirts. I’m settling down. But inside my head, a small, clear voice is rising. It is saying it’s time to save myself, my dream, my life. It’s getting louder and more insistent as the days pass.
I know in my heart that it’s time to run.
CHAPTER ONE
THREE WISHES
GLENDALE, CALIFORNIA
1980
I tell the small, clear voice in my head to please shut the fuck up. I’ve heard its haranguing tone before. This voice is what has gotten me into the predicament I now find myself: almost fifteen years into a life in the music business with nothing to show for it but a handful of unrecorded songs, a few guitar licks, two albums that went nowhere, and as much groupie sex as my road-worn penis could handle. That last one being the biggest benefit so far, in my humble opinion. But I am driven. Compelled by a force that still refuses to take no for an answer. I have always had a deep, restless desire to push myself to have a successful career in music—to have it be my life; it already is my love. Ever since I first touched a guitar and it touched me at the tender age of eleven, I have wanted this. Wanted to be a part of music, the world of the musician, and everything it heralds and promises. But making a living at it has been like trying to suck pregnant goats through a garden hose. Difficult, to say the least.
Diana and I (and her very charming dog) have been together for three years, and we’re living in Glendale in a small house we rent from an overzealous missionary who is at present in the Philippines fighting a losing battle to convert the local heathen bastards to his particular brand of Christianity. But he’s giving us a killer deal on the house, so I encourage him to remain abroad for a while to fight the good fight. Diana and I have carved out a quiet suburban existence here in the smoggy hills. She has helped me emerge from some pretty dark days after my second album (Comic Book Heroes) came and went and I was unceremoniously dropped by Columbia Records with a cursory letter that had one word next to my name: DELETED. The subsequent black depression I fell into was because of more than just not having a record deal: it was because I was literally alone in America. Every person I’d befriended here— business and music associates alike—had deserted me like flies from a burning corpse with the 1973 failure of that record.
I owe Diana so much. Her family took me in and treated me like a favored son when I was at my lowest and most forsaken. Her mother Corinne especially was an ally and would remain so until the day she died. She and her husband, Don, had championed my budding acting career, cheering me on when I landed my very first paid acting role as a Roller Derby skater on the ’70s show The Six Million Dollar Man, where I’d told the director that “Yes, I can absolutely roller-skate,” though I’d never been on a pair of skates in my life. And of course on the first day of shooting I’d tripped all over the fucking things and had given myself a monstrous shiner that made it necessary for the extremely pissed-off director to film me from the left side only, in order to avoid my very discolored and swollen right eye.
Diana has stood by me, even when I appear to be nothing but a big doofus (see first acting gig, above), and she has always been a cheerleader for my musical aspiration. She has given me the connection of family again, supported me in every way, loved me well, and let me and Doug make up some extremely rude songs about her dog Sasha. Now I’m thinking of leaving this girl? I can’t tell whether this is a real desire to break out from the complacency I’ve settled into, essentially living a “family life” with her, or just my old reckless need to play Russian roulette with my life again. I suspect it’s a bit of both. I miss the edginess and the promise of sudden opportunity that comes with hanging by the skin of my teeth over the precipice—not knowing where the next meal or the money for the light bill will come from. And I am certainly not feeling that here in Glendale, California, in the preacher’s house.
There’s a creativity and a powerful energy that invades me when I’m not feeling secure in this world. It’s part of why I became a musician in the first place: to get away from the steady, mundane existence I perceived my parents and all their friends lived. Now I feel like I’m headed toward that same predictable end: the gentle, sheltered, small life. I’d rather be fighting for something I believe in and living in the gutter with all the other freaks and misfits than disappear quietly into the woodwork of a house like the one I’m now living in. Sex between Diana and me is, at this point, infrequent and obligatory. My dreams, ambitions, energy, and libido are slipping down the drain of a muted, safe, white-picket-fence existence.
I began to pursue an acting career a while ago, and, along with the previously mentioned “Six Million Dollar Skater” role, I’ve been guest starring on some of the other prime-time ’70s TV shows as well. But now the roles seem to have dried up, and my agent, Mike Greenfield, hasn’t called me in over a year. I can’t say I’m missing acting, although I am missing the money; I feel that the small success I was having in my actor’s life was pulling me away from what I really want—music. The dissatisfied voice of ambition and desire for more in this world, which lives inside my head, has somehow gotten hold of a microphone and a rather large PA system. He is screaming at me to do something about my safe, soft life before it’s too late. He is so loud that I’m wondering if the neighbors can hear him. It must have been that waiter’s gig I applied for the other day that pushed him over the edge.
But there is another voice in my head as well. And this one isn’t quite so gung-ho for me to wake up and aim higher. I know him as the Darkness, and he is the voice of my lifelong depression. While the guy with the microphone is encouraging me to get off my ass and do something, the Darkness is whispering a sentiment that is altogether different. “What’s the point, Sport?” he says. “You don’t have what it takes, and you know it.” And goddamn it, part of me does believe that. But I am still young. Even at twenty-nine years of age I have the unbridled energy of the adolescent I will never truly cease to be. On this occasion I’m feeling strong enough to tell the Darkness to sit on a hairbrush, and I head back to my old acting class in Hollywood with the vague idea of doing something productive and artistic, even if I am paying for the privilege. But in class I meet a pretty young actress named Jennifer. Uh-oh. In this case, all things considered, my sexual issues work in my best interests and I latch on to this girl with the tenacity of a deer tick in summer. After class we head to her apartment and sit up all night sipping wine and dis
cussing the theory of Cartesian dualism and its effect on the mind of twentieth-century man. No, not really. I fuck her brains out. And she, mine.
As I head back to Diana and my Maryland Avenue home at 3:30 the following morning, I’m pretty sure I have made a step, if a somewhat cowardly and self-serving one, to terminate this three-year relationship. Annihilate the ant colony with a nuke. It’s an ugly, meretricious way to go about ending our live-in affair, but it is quick and effective. I am filled with a mixture of elation and remorse as I walk through the front door for the last time as Diana’s boyfriend. She is waiting up with swollen eyes and accusations. I waffle and hedge for a while and then admit what she knows to be true. She understands exactly what this means to our relationship. She is humiliated, angry, and heartbroken, and I realize with guilt and some amazement that I am free. I will not settle down, become a househusband in Glendale, and play my guitar in my bedroom. For better or for worse, I’m on my way to another destiny.
Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly where that is, I have no money to get there, and my shit is far from together. Due to a severe lack of finances and the speed at which this all went down, Diana and I agree to coexist under a precarious truce at Maryland Avenue for a while until I can find another place to live. Our swift breakup soon turns into a ragged and prolonged war of attrition. We try to stay out of each other’s way, but our conversations are tense and curt and they sometimes turn into screaming matches and entreaties from her for reconciliation. I think to myself, “There was probably a better way to handle this than the path I took.” My Darkness runs the video by me of the life Diana and I will never live: the kids we will never have, the family I will no longer be a part of, the road I have forsaken forever. It makes me miserable. But I confess that my biggest regret is leaving Diana’s dog, Sasha, who I love like she’s my own.
Miraculously, serendipitously, and I know all you proponents of the “it’s-meant-to-be” theory will cheer when I tell you that one morning (shortly after the self-serving fornication with my classmate) out of a bright blue sky, an orphaned black-and-white bull terrier mix—filthy, starving, and half-wild—is picked up off the street by my ex and dropped off in our garage, where he proceeds to take a large poop on the cement floor. A short, one-sided turf war follows, in which this headstrong mutt and I draw our respective lines in the sand—mine are wishy-washy because I love all dogs, his are firm because he’s a bull terrier—and come up with a game plan for living our lives together. At the end of two days, the quirky pooch and I are inseparable and “Lethal Ron” (so named because of his staggeringly bad gas), the future “Working Class Dog,” is now front and center and fast becoming my hair-shedding soul mate, just when I need one the most.
I have made a decisive, life-changing move, and the Universe responds. I take the arrival of Lethal Ron as a good omen, and I am right. Suddenly my destiny opens before me like a flower to the morning sun. The gods smile. The genie pops momentarily out of the bottle and the formerly tortured, starving artist is granted three wishes. Four, if you count the dog. I most certainly do. And this all happens within the space of a month. After years of living in a music wasteland, I am staggered by the speed and force with which this all unfolds.
Wish one: The long-awaited record deal
I’m sitting in the soon-to-be-vacated-by-me Maryland Avenue house one morning, holding my breath as Lethal Ron basks in his own feral stink, feeling despondent over my meager cash reserves and the resulting absence of any prospects of a new pad, when the phone rings. It’s my manager, Joe Gottfried, a sweet man with not a mean bone in his body but unfortunately not a lot of managerial savvy either. I love Joe. He rescued me and took me in when no other manager was interested in my future—if any even thought I had one. Joe owns Sound City, a successful recording studio that’s part of a hideously ugly industrial complex in the ass end of LA’s San Fernando Valley. Joe’s only claim to artistic managerial fame is that he once handled Teresa (“Music! Music! Music!”) Brewer. He has no business sense whatsoever, a penchant for talking with his mouth crammed with food, and, at age fifty-five, reminds me very much of the comic strip character Charlie Brown all grown up. But Joe is, God bless his sweet heart, a firm believer in me.
And he is calling to tell me that RCA Records, a struggling label with no one on its roster who’s selling records except the now-dead Elvis (the two-legged one), wants to talk to me. I am floored. So, quite honestly, is Joe. He tells me that Ed DeJoy, the head of A&R at RCA, would like to hear some of my new songs. It happens that Ed, almost inconceivably, is a fan of my second and most miserable failure of an album, the aforementioned Comic Book Heroes.
I have a lot of homemade demos of my new songs. A real lot. Despite the primitive state of home recording in the late ’70s, my song demos are intricate affairs. I have the basic “songwriter’s four-track” tape machine: a TEAC 3340 that I purchased after my ex-girlfriend Linda Blair reclaimed the one she bought for me as a present so she could give it to her new boyfriend, Neil Giraldo. Neil, who is now dating and playing guitar with Pat Benatar and having some major radio success, will further figure in my life in the not-too-distant future.
The demos I am about to take into RCA are all made on this extremely heavy, hernia-inducing tape machine. I begin each new song with a drum track. The drums are not so much drums as cushions. A big fat Indian pillow, which I furiously pound with the tip of a sawed-off broom handle, is my kick drum, and a Naugahyde ottoman that I drag in from the living room and whack with the business end of a wooden spoon approximates the timbre of a snare for a reasonable backbeat. It’s close enough to the sound of a real, if badly recorded, set of drums to fool drummers, so I am okay with the extremely laughable visual of me sitting on my music room floor, flailing away at house furnishings with wooden kitchen implements. I then add bass, played on a “pawnshop special” I picked up for $35 at a gun store on Santa Monica Boulevard. I load on guitars, bouncing down tracks to open up new ones so I can add keyboards and a lead vocal, and finally all the vocal harmonies. I leave nothing to chance or imagination in case a record company should ever express a desire to hear these songs. And now one actually has. Fuckin’-A.
I gather up some demos in my arms, like a mad artist picking a few precious paintings, and head to the meeting at RCA. After much consideration I’ve chosen three songs: “Easy to Cry,” a ’70s-excess-type rock tune; “Television,” a sing-along faux-reggae thing; and “Love Is Alright Tonite,” a new, edgier song I’ve just finished that’s full of punk-inspired energy and three-chord thrashing. It’s a disparate batch. A diverse, mixed bag to be sure. I don’t know what they want to hear, so I’m bringing them choices. I feel not unlike Elvis (again, two legs, no fur), who used to wear a cross, a Star of David, and an Egyptian ankh around his neck so all the bases were covered when he went to meet his maker. I wonder which one got him through the Pearly Gates?
I sit fidgeting in Ed DeJoy’s office while he plays the three songs I’ve brought with me. Joe is next to me, noisily munching potato chips. Ed taps along and nods now and then but says nothing. In the nine minutes it takes to play my songs I run the gamut of his possible responses from “These songs suck duck shit through a straw” to “Yea, verily, the Beatles themselves could learn a thing or two from this young and gifted lad.” He lands somewhere in the middle.
“These are all good, but they’re very different styles. Which direction do you see yourself heading in?”
Wait … did a record executive just ask me an artistic question? Well, yes he did.
“‘Love Is Alright Tonite’ is the newest one. That’s the type of stuff I’ve been writing lately,” I reply, not sure if he’s leaning more toward the cross, the Star of David, or the ankh.
“Yeah, that’s the direction I was hoping you’d say,” says Ed. “When do you think you’ll be ready to go into the studio?” asks this angel in a three-piece suit.
Bells go off, the audience cheers, Vanna White smiles a Wheel of Fortune smi
le and opens the curtain, and there on the dais is a brand-new recording contract with yours truly’s name on it.
“Wha … ?” is all I can manage. After five previous record deals have come and gone for me, am I really getting one more shot? A stunned silence settles over the room. Joe stops munching; I blink unbelieving, like a schoolboy in a whorehouse; Ed smiles; and this incredible moment is fleetingly frozen in a glorious tableau.
I have a deal!
Back at Maryland Avenue I jump into overdrive and begin writing songs frenetically, working long hours into the night while Diana tries to sleep, adding more tension to our already tenuous coexistence.
RCA pays me a $5,000 advance to record the album that I will eventually name Working Class Dog. I’ve never seen my name next to so many zeros on a check before. So I decide to do something really “grown-up”: I buy a house with it. Obviously it’s only a down payment; even in 1980 houses aren’t that cheap. My new main man Lethal Ron and I go to check out a small homestead in La Crescenta, a working-class neighborhood that’s a step or two down from Glendale in social standing. The split-level backyard looks out onto the parking lot of the bank across the alley, and I could throw a dead gerbil from here and hit the restaurant where my old Top 40 bar gig was. I find this kind of weird but also oddly satisfying. I check to make sure Lethal Ron approves of the backyard. He proceeds to take a poop. I take that as a yes.
Late, Late at Night Page 2
