Working as an extra, Jack told him, sounded even more unreliable than temping as a set decorator. But Maynard was determined to piece together whatever odd jobs he could to make ends meet, and he spent his evenings calling the numbers printed on the strips he’d torn from the flyers. He left countless voice messages that disappeared into the AT&T ether. Once in a great while, he reached a recruiter only to learn the roles had been cast days before. By spring, he’d appeared in only two or three crowd scenes in unremarkable films, films forgotten almost before their release, his roles undistinguished and uncredited.
Clearly, finding film work would require more than a studded jacket and tight black jeans. Maynard had put plans in place before, seen them through step by step to completion, and surely he could do it again. “Here I was in Hollywood, so I thought I might as well take advantage of classes and workshops and learn to do shit,” he recalled. “As soon as my paycheck was spent, I could barely feed the animals, but I mapped it all out. If I could work X number of set gigs, I could pay my rent, buy food, and take some acting classes.”
By night, Hollywood Boulevard’s 6100 block was dominated by Raji’s, the smoky, jam-packed club where strung-out junkies consorted with the queens just back from nearby drag bars. Concertgoers clustered in the shadows behind the club, passing joints and convincing the sympathetic bouncers to allow them back inside for the closing set of the Nymphs or Thelonious Monster.
But by day, the block was serene, the destination of committed actors and ingénues who dreamed of joining Brando and De Niro and Candice Bergen as alumni of the Stella Adler Academy. One of the many such schools throughout the city, the academy catered to the steady influx of hopefuls whose boundless faith in the courses and workshops kept their dreams of stardom alive.
Maynard walked the three blocks from the loft to his classes in scene preparation and character analysis, voice and movement and visualization techniques he’d need to bring convincing realism to his roles. “No matter what your scene is,” he explained, “it has to be about your mother being run over by a truck. You make it real by making an emotional investment, by going to the memory of something that puts that ‘look’ behind your eyes.”
Until the day his acting training would pay off, Maynard rationed his animals’ food, replenishing it when his next paycheck arrived, and in the meantime, closely monitoring what remained. “One day,” Danny recalled, “he ran low on crickets, so I gave him a ride to the closest pet store to get buckets full of them to release into his bedroom. As soon as he jumped in my beat-up BMW, he expressed his interest in getting a band together.” Stunned, Danny glanced across the console toward Maynard, the set decorator with the curious menagerie, the neighborhood defender adept at wielding a baseball bat.
Danny had passed many a free evening in the Green Jellö loft, challenging Bill to a round of Space Invaders and sharing stories with Maynard of their high school accomplishments on the wrestling mat and track practice along muddy Midwest roadsides. Maynard had told him of West Point Prep and the frame shop in Boston, but until then had never hinted of musical talents or an interest in performing.
“Then he popped a tape in the cassette deck and played me some of his favorite songs,” Danny continued. “Industrial ’80s things and Nirvana, which nobody really knew about yet. And I was like, ‘Well, this sounds kind of cool.’”
Intrigued as he was with the songs on Maynard’s mixtape, Danny ignored his hint of a musical collaboration. Between Green Jellö and his other gigs, he had no time—or intention—to even consider becoming involved with another band.
But Maynard was restless. Participation, he knew, could be a partial remedy for his financial and employment anxieties. A headlong plunge into the punk-club world would be at least a distraction, at most a step toward regaining a modicum of self-confidence.
“He was the weenie guy,” Jack would recall. “We used to joke that his part-time job was as a performer—throwing hot dogs to the crowd.”
Maynard had become by now an established member of the movable L.A. music feast, mingling from club to club with friends of friends and audiences often made up only of members of the next band on the bill—Green Jellö or Lock Up or Electric Love Hogs, or the ubiquitous angry bands competing to become the next Red Hot Chili Peppers. “They were funky metal, bonky-bonky snap-snap guys,” Maynard explained.
Before long, Love Hogs fans looked forward to Maynard’s antics as eagerly as they did the band itself. He toted a 12-pack of hot dogs to English Acid, the underground club on West Pico, and slipped over his head a white apron—Satan’s Weenies printed across the bib. In the shadows at stage left, a toque atop his head, he warmed the hot dogs in a microwave, then meticulously slathered them with ketchup and mustard and wrapped them somewhat securely in Baggies. Guitars blazing and drumsticks a-blur, the Love Hogs snarled their lyrics, tossed their heads, and leapt across the stage, while Maynard, with a leaf blower from the nearby Home Depot, propelled the hot dogs into the delighted crowd.
His role, albeit peripheral, was like a tonic, as intoxicating as the long-ago days of lip-synching to the Jacksons in his Ohio basement. Forming a band of his own seemed increasingly far-fetched in a city where new talent emerged overnight and disappeared just as quickly. Suggesting he join Adam’s band was out of the question. Mother’s vocalist and musician lineup was complete. But if Maynard wished to test his music mettle, he realized, the opportunity was at his fingertips.
“Green Jellö looked like a perfect fit,” he remembered. “Bill had an open-door policy, meaning I could come and go as I pleased. I was like, OK, if I want to get involved in any of this, this might be the way.”
Green Jellö’s rotating cast of characters was an ever-changing array of costume and mask, a group whose job it was to provoke, to amuse, to tell stories. As part of the troupe of shifting personas, Maynard could explore just what his place in the entertainment world might be and develop a stage presence as he portrayed rock idols and nursery story characters and a mustachioed, white-haired redneck he called Billy Bob.
Manspeaker had from its inception dubbed Green Jellö the World’s Worst Band, the band with the sole purpose of being mocked. “Whoever was in the band was encouraged to do that thing the teacher told them was dumb or their mom told them they couldn’t do,” he explained. Serious vocalists and musicians joined the troupe for the chance to let their hair down, to forget for a little while the constraints of their profession, to experiment and explore and make all the mistakes they wanted.
“You don’t have to fear being bad, because you’re already saying you’re bad,” Manspeaker said of its members. “You’re the best at being the worst. That’s what Green Jellö’s about.”
April 13, 1991, marked the most well-attended Green Jellö show to date. “It seemed like there were a thousand people there,” Danny remembered. “That was a really fun show. The punk energy was definitely in the air.”
The evening in the Hollywood High gymnasium was as eclectic as it was electrifying. A more conventional dance band would perform for the school’s junior prom in only a few weeks, but the April show was the antithesis of pastel gowns and wrist corsages. Punks and moshers crowded the gym floor, their cheers and screams reverberating from the high ceilings when the opening act, the punk rock Dickies, made their entrance.
A power outage interrupted their performance, and the audience began filing, disappointed, from the auditorium. But the lights came back up just in time for the somewhat incongruous second act, Tiny Tim, who strummed his ukulele and grinned through his signature “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and “America.”
Next on the bill was headliner Celebrity Skin, the secondhand-store version of glam rock. A maniacal revolving jack-in-the-box clown announced their arrival in keeping with their theme of the evening, “Under the Big Top.”
And then it was Green Jellö’s turn. Guitarists and vocalists filled the stage, their cost
umes and masks crowding the small space. The long latex spider legs attached to Danny Longlegs’s back bounced with his every beat, his cymbals glinting under the spotlight. As emcee, Maynard announced the performers as they morphed from character to character in a variety show treatment they called “A History of Rock ’n’ Roll According to Green Jellö.”
“The premise was this bad version of the history of rock ’n’ roll,” Manspeaker would explain. “We started from the beginning of time and went through the present day, and when we got to the future, the idea was that all the ’90s would have to offer would be Green Jellö—and they suck.”
Their chronicle began with Maynard’s flawless and urgent embodiment of Ted Nugent, his strong, sure voice rising in “The Great White Buffalo.” In loincloth and wig, he told the lyrical tale of mythologies and magic, of Indian lore and the white man’s destruction, of ultimate salvation.
He transitioned from Nugent to Johnny Rotten, delivering a driving rendition of “Anarchy in the U.K.” that brought the audience to its feet. Verse after verse, his intensity increased, his growl deepened. Just as they’d instructed in the Stella Adler workshops, he remembered—and remembered again: endless Boston winters, a rainy Grand Rapids street, a lead pipe tucked in his sleeve, coins collected from a gritty sidewalk, red lights like a strobe against a split rail fence. The Sex Pistols’ lyrics became his own, his scream of anger, his bitter resolve to at last have what he wanted, his long-repressed wish to destroy.
“Here’s Maynard,” Manspeaker would recall, “this shy, quiet dude who’s kind of grumpy sometimes. Then you gave him a microphone and he turns into fuckin’ Johnny Rotten.”
His song segued into Green Jellö’s adaptation, “Anarchy in Bedrock,” and the cast joined his lyrical desire not to annihilate, but to become Fred Flintstone. Their shrill “yabba-dabba-doos” echoing through the gym, Bill and Gary Helsinger, skinhead versions of Fred and Barney Rubble, chased each other up and down the aisles, shattering the fourth wall and drawing the eager audience into the performance.
If the future of rock ’n’ roll was to be Green Jellö and Green Jellö only, the Hollywood High crowd wasn’t one to argue. The penultimate piece, “Obey the Cowgod,” was a crowd-pleasing extravaganza featuring Manspeaker in an oversized bovine head, his red eyes flashing as he strutted across the stage, demanding submission.
When the lights came up on Green Jellö’s closing number, the audience stood and shouted as one. The stage was set for the band’s newest piece, “Three Little Pigs,” complete with miniature houses of straw and wood and brick. Moshing pigs accompanied the bullying wolf in updated lyrics to the old tale, their long latex tongues lolling from massive latex heads. In a frenzied finale, the stage erupted in clashing cymbals and droning guitars and faux machine-gun fire trained on Manspeaker’s Big Bad Wolf as he burst among the pigs in defiance of Maynard’s falsetto “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin!”
Becoming an onstage little pig or bewigged Ted Nugent satisfied Maynard’s dramatic urges and provided a pleasant diversion from his long days building sets. His involvement with Manspeaker’s band gave him entrée into the wider music world of rehearsals and creative comrades and the chance to observe bands that shared the bill with Green Jellö at venues throughout L.A.
After the clubs closed at night, Tom Morello often accompanied him back to the loft, where they discussed Devo’s innovative time signatures and the blues roots of Led Zeppelin. They loaded the tape deck with music a step beyond the mainstream, the obscure and innovative music Maynard had always appreciated the most. “I remember he played for me a Swans album, which was way outside my comfort zone,” Tom would recall. Maynard explained the group’s minimalist chord structures, the emotional effect of their snarling vocals, their primal interpretation of heavy metal, and Tom took careful note.
Now that Lock Up had officially dissolved, Tom focused his energies on laying the groundwork for a new band he planned to call Rage Against the Machine, a group he envisioned would push the boundaries of metal and challenge political complacency. Determined that Rage would be a cut above the fledgling bands he and Maynard saw at Coconut Teaszer and Raji’s, he set about learning all he could to avoid the missteps that had doomed Lock Up. “Maynard taught me drop D tuning,” Morello would recall.
The two sat on the park bench that completed the aviary’s décor. Maynard cradled Tom’s Fender Telecaster and tuned the low E string to D to create the Seattle sound, the heavy resonance that gave bands like Soundgarden and Nirvana and Pearl Jam their signature sonic quality.
Tom had recruited the best of the best to populate his new band: longtime musician Tim Commerford on bass and backup vocals and Greta drummer Brad Wilk, who’d contribute his extensive percussion skills. He had only to identify a suitable lead vocalist to round out his ensemble. By now, he’d attended plenty of Maynard’s Green Jellö performances, had heard the C.A.D. cassettes, and respected Maynard’s vocal talents as highly as his ability to analyze complex arrangements. “There was sort of in the air an idea of us working together,” Tom would recall. “Brad and I had been jamming with both Maynard and Zach de la Rocha. We really liked playing with both of them, and Brad and I had this long phone call to discuss who we should ask to the dance.”
In the end, rapper de la Rocha proved to be the most logical partner. His hardcore band, Inside Out, had gained a substantial underground following, and his success would help validate Rage. It would be only a matter of time, Tom told himself, before his band would be noticed by one of the labels scrambling to be the first to sign distinctive and serious acts.
Even Bill Manspeaker, whose group included clownish farm animals and a moped zipping across the stage—and little apparent talent save Danny’s drumming—came home one evening and announced Green Jellö’s 11-song video deal with BMG affiliate Zoo Entertainment.
“When I saw them perform, they got up there with stuff they’d collected from the garbage, the foam they made these costumes out of,” Zoo founder Lou Maglia recalled in a 2014 interview. “I thought, ‘Yeah, they suck, but they’ve got something going.’”
Maynard’s minimal Green Jellö role hardly warranted a recording contract, and he’d written nothing new since his Grand Rapids days. No guitarists or drummers were on deck to perform even his C.A.D. songs, and he’d prepared no business plan or artistic manifesto. But he had one thing most other bands lacked.
From his table in the shadows at the back of Club with No Name or English Acid, he cast a jaundiced eye on the performers who cavorted about the stage. “I’m at the back of the room watching those bands and criticizing everything they did,” he would remember. “They clearly wanted to be up there. But they didn’t have a need to be up there.”
These bands were just there to dance around and be popular, to get into the club without paying or to get laid, to catch the attention of A&R guys who might be in the audience, or whatever it was that they were trying to do. They’re wearing stupid hats and hopping around and not telling any story. And they’re not even bonky-bonk-snapping very well. The whole scene was just vapid.
If he were ever to take his place in the spotlight, Maynard knew, his act would involve more than superficial leaping about. He had stories to tell—decades of stories—and an aching need to tell them. His was an instinctive drive to transform pain and loneliness to riffs and chords, an imperative to translate fear and disappointment and plans gone awry to words and rhyme until sadness and anger dissipated in pulsating sound that beat in rhythm with his soul.
“Even if you don’t know what your endgame is or what you’re trying to do, if you fuckin’ mean it, I can feel it,” Maynard explained. “When Brando did a scene, he meant it. When Dee Dee Ramone hit the stage, he meant it even if it was the one millionth time he’d done it. I wasn’t seeing that in L.A.”
Maynard’s frustration only grew when he realized he’d become an appalling cliché, just one more j
aded L.A. hipster living hand-to-mouth and finding fault with the soulless posturing of bands whose sense of teamwork was as out of tune as their thrift shop guitars.
“Eventually, people got tired of overhearing me being a judgmental asshole,” he would recall. “They finally started saying, ‘Well, if you think you can do better, why don’t you?’”
Imagine a table with only one leg.” Boots Newkirk’s class never knew what life lesson he had in mind when he began his lectures. He stood a copy of the 11th-grade history text on end and laid his grade book off-center across its top. The class burst into nervous laughter as his shaky construction collapsed across his desk.
His message that long-ago day had been on the importance of friends—or, more precisely, on the absurdity of depending upon one best friend, one girlfriend, one significant other whose inevitable abandonment would result in locker slamming and tears.
Better to build a community of support, Boots advised, a more complex framework with enough components to withstand change and uncertainty. He illustrated his metaphor by standing two books, then three, then four on his desktop, at last setting the grade book atop the secure base. It was a matter of simple geometry, he explained, the axiom that stability increased as forms progressed from point to line to triangle to square, the notion that the strength of a whole depended on a sufficient number of parts, each in place, and a counterbalanced tension among them.
Maynard had thought from time to time about forming another band, but he’d never taken the whim seriously. He’d watched C.A.D. dissolve as its members focused on the rush of popularity to the exclusion of details that might bring success: sensible spending and attractive flyers, commitment to creative advancement, and a shared vision of the band’s future. Like the L.A. groups he criticized, C.A.D. had toppled into oblivion under its own imbalance.
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things Page 16
