Chapter 4

The year 1967 was the year of the follicle. Hair. Hippies.
	Boy, what a strange movement that was. I never understood the hippies at
all. Communes? Drugs? Sharing everything? How dumb. I thought the American Way
was to want to be rich and famous. I never understood people who dedicated their
lives to causes, like politics. The only politics I knew about was Mr. Buckley
and the draft board. What did I know from free love? I still got excited if Mimi
Hicki let me feel her up!
	But that's all there was in Los Angeles in 1967 - hippies - and you had
to learn to deal with it. The first time the band ever went there was on Easter
Sunday to play at a hippie free concert in Griffith Park. We drove straight to
Sunset Boulevard and couldn't believe our eyes. There must have been 10,000
hairy, barefoot, stoned flower children, listlessly gliding along Sunset Strip.
And all the girls had hair under their arms. They lived up to ever cliche I had
ever heard about them in Phoenix. They threw flowers in the open windows of the
car and waved Easter Sunday palm branches at us. We hung out of the car and
shook hands with them and kissed the girls. One girl ran alongside the car and
fed me half and egg roll in little bites. Somebody in the backseat dropped down
his pants and stuck his cock out the rear window of the station wagon which the
girl managed to kiss as the car picked up speed. It was astounding that all this
energy existed in Los Angeles when Phoenix was so low key. And it was even more
shocking to me that I had little in common with all those kids, even though our
hair was the same length.
	Later that afternoon I stood on a food line in the park for two hours and
watched 15,000 people sway in unison to Iron Butterfly playing "Ina Gadda Vida."
I had smelled grass backstage at gigs and in open cars and houses, but I'd never
been in a huge open park where there was literally a pot stench. When I got up
to the line a fat slob with a hairy belly dished a spoonful of watery stew on my
plate and said, "Peace, Brother." I couldn't believe he was serious. I was
afraid to eat anything. I figured that anything anybody gave me for free had to
have LSD in it. 
	I took my plate over to a tree behind the stage where Glen and Dick were
talking to a hippie with daisies stuck in his furry hair.
	"It's true man," he was saying. "They come in off the freeway. They use
the freeway as a landing strip, see? And then they steal people out of their
houses for experimentation."
	Dick said, "This is Sergeant Garcia, and he knows a lot about flying
saucers."
	"Don't they land on any cars when they hit the freeway?" Glen asked him.
	"That's the thing man!" Garcia said, his face suddenly contracted into a
ripple of nervous twitches. "They crush dozens of cars every night, and the
government tries to cover it up so the people won't panic. It's our job, man, to
spread the word."
	I learned from Dick that Sergeant Garcia had just been released from a
psychiatric hospital and felt attracted to us because we were crazy, too. He
gave us his address and phone number if we ever needed a place to sleep and even
helped us load the equipment into the station wagon when the gig was over.
	The next day we walked into a club on the Strip cold and asked if we
could audition. The owner, who wore beads around his neck and smoked cigars, was
surprisingly pleasant and told us to come back the next night at seven. Just as
we set up our equipment he opened the doors to the club. He said he wanted to
see what the public thought of us. This was the first of many scams we were to
have perpetrated on us in LA. We "auditioned" for three hours that night, to a
fairly crowded club, and when it was over he told us we didn't sound just right
but thanks anyway.
	We went back to Phoenix and finished up some jobs; a prom in Gallup, New
Mexico, one in Albuquerque, a rock concert in Riverside, California. But we
couldn't stay home another week after that. We decided to change out name to the
Nazz, one of those arbitrary decisions that seemed very practical at the time.
We were each able to save up forty dollars from our salaries and again we piled
into the station wagon and headed for LA.
	We checked into six-dollar-a-night cubicles at the Sunset Motor Inn and
set off for the Hullabaloo Club. In 1967 the Hullabaloo was one of the most
important clubs in the country. It was a showcase for new talent that spawned
hundreds of rock musicians. Like the Scene and Max's Kansas City and many other
famous clubs, the Hullabaloo provided the space, setting and ambience for rock
people to meet and make deals. The Hullabaloo worked an after-hours policy,
running live acts from midnight to dawn. While Los Angeles withdrew, another
world was just beginning to buzz at the Hullabaloo. The place was filled to
capacity every night with record company A&R men, managers, groupies,
publicists, and the whole rainbow of drug dealers, con artists and homosexuals
that appear wherever rock and roll is.
	If you were a known group with a record label, you were paid one hundred
dollars to play. The Doors played the Hullabaloo often, even after their hit
single, just to get off playing for a hip crowd. But most groups played for
free, and we were lucky to get the chance. Being seen at the Hullabaloo was a
ticket to heaven. We signed up for two nights and lucked out with a good time -
four A.M.
	I guess we expected a talent scout to come running out of the audience
and offer us a million-dollar contract. We didn't even get applause. By the end
of our second show we were thoroughly depressed. The audience was completely
indifferent to us. The speakers might as well have been turned off. All our
money was gone and we couldn't even afford the six-dollar-a-night motel. We had
to leave Los Angeles again the next morning after only a five-day stay, and I
couldn't believe we had been devoured so quickly. We hadn't.
	As I glumly watched the equipment being loaded in the station wagon, I
saw a woman with red lipstick and matching frizzy hair pushing her way through
the crowded backstage area towards me. She grabbed hold of my jeans, dragged me
to a corner and said her name was Merry Cornwall, and she was the booking agent
for the Cheetah. The Cheetah was the hottest discotheque on the West Coast. It
was hardly a year old and already a rock and roll legend. The interior design of
mirrored chrome and flashing lights made it the hippie acid palace of the
decade, and I would have given my right arm to play there.
	Dick Christian saw me talking to Merry Cornwall, and when he found out
who she was he began laying on the bullshit thick and heavy. In ten minutes she
started giving us boy-I-would-love-to-fuck-you looks. I had never really gotten
those looks from an older woman before. (Merry, it turned out, was only
twenty-three years old. I was nineteen.) And I was a virgin to boot, but I
understood how to play the game. She told us that she adored the group and would
try to book us at the Cheetah. She wanted to know where we were living so she
could get in touch with us. Since we were supposed to be leaving the next day we
took her number and promised to call. Merry Cornwall's promise was enough
motivation to get in touch with our only LA contact, Sergeant Garcia.
	Garcia was on welfare, nearly as broke as we were, and lived in a tiny
apartment in downtown Los Angeles. He took us in like long-lost inmates. We
waited by Sergeant Garcia's phone for Merry Cornwall to return our phone calls,
but she never did. We got more depressed every day, dragging Sergeant Garcia
down with us. John Speer played drill instructor every morning, dragging us up
off the mattresses and making us set up our equipment to practice. The noise
drove Sergeant Garcia out of his apartment. He would either walk the streets or
go to see his psychiatrist at the welfare center. Sometimes he would wake up
screaming  in the middle of the night, "Harriet, take it out! Take it out!" He
was starting to flip out again. This was the first time I had been exposed to
somebody that crazy, and I tried my best to act natural. I made jokes about
Harriet, which he didn't laugh about, and about our being stuck in his house for
the next five years, which he did laugh about. One day he came home from his
shrink and told us that he had finally told his psychiatrist we were living with
him, but the psychiatrist thought he was making it up and threatened to put him
back into the  hospital. He asked if one of us would go to his next session with
him so his psychiatrist would know there were really eight people in his
apartment. We thought this was very funny and drew straws to see who would go to
Sergeant Garcia's shrink the next session. Charlie Carnal won. 
	Charlie came back from the doctor's and told us that when the shrink
stuck his head out into the waiting room, he took one look at Charlie with his
short hair and one side and long on the other and closed the door. Forty minutes
later Sergeant Garcia emerged and told Charlie that his psychiatrist insisted
that we move out for Garcia's own good.
	By the end of the week we were flat broke and couldn't find a paying job
anywhere in the city. We made plans to leave Sergeant Garcia's and head back to
Phoenix in three days' time, and Dick went scurrying out into the streets for
the last two days to hunt up a job so we could stay in LA. He was able to get us
one more booking at the Hullabaloo Club, but again for no pay. We packed all of
our things, loaded them into the car, thanked Garcia and went to the Hullabaloo
Club for a farewell gig.
	Dick disappeared around midnight, and just before we were supposed to go
on he came back with a sharp-looking older guy in his thirties named Robert
Roberts. Dick had gone to a bar, ordered a beer with his last sixty cents,
walked over to the first person he saw and told the guy our whole story from
Phoenix on. Bob Roberts offered his living room to sleep in, and again we were
saved.
	Bob Roberts lived just off Sunset Boulevard on Wetherlee Drive, not far
from the Whiskey-A-Go-Go where we also dreamed of getting a gig. The
neighborhood was called Evil Hill, which I thought was a very neat name for a
neighborhood and I didn't question it any further. We slept on a mattresses
across the living room floor, all except for Dick Christian, who had wrangled
his way into the mater bedroom. We weren't at Bob's a week when Mike Bruce went
outside on the lawn to stretch out in the sun one morning. He was back inside in
five minutes.
	"There was this old guy who came out of the house next door, and kept
yelling inside, 'Bernard, get the kids and come outside! Bernard? Are you going
to take the kids for a walk?' Then this other guy comes out of the house with
four poodle dogs and the first guy is yelling, 'C'mon, kiddies, mama gonna take
you to the corner.' A couple of minutes later I was lying on the lawn with my
eyes closed, and I got this eerie feeling somebody was watching me. I opened one
eye and there was this guy sitting on a car, grinning at me. Finally he said,
'Hi, fella, you got nice arms.'
	We shrugged it off as weird LA people, but the following day while Mike
was out on the lawn again, an older distinguished man started a conversation
with him, and Mike told him about the band. The guy offered to discuss managing
the group if Mike had dinner with him. Since we were practically starving and
the chances were that Mike could take home a doggie bag, we insisted he accept
the invitation. The man picked Mike up in a Cadillac, and we all stood in the
doorway of the house grinning and waving and trying to make a good impression on
our potential manager.
	Mike was only gone for half an hour when he came back to Bob's house
ashen white. His friend had taken him to a drive-in southern-fried-chicken
joint, and just as Mike was about to bite down on his first piece of solid food
in days the guy asked if he could give him a blow job. Mike made the man take
him right back to the house while his friend cursed him all the way home.
	"He called me a cock teaser," Mike said, astonished at the thought. "Can
you imagine that?"
	Dick and Bob Roberts listened to this and roared with laughter. All of us
were wide-eyed suburban innocents, and we were baffled as to why Dick and Bob
thought it was so funny. We found out the next night. Mike, who was sleeping in
the closet because there was no room in the living room on the floor, began to
raise hell about why Dick was getting to sleep in the master bedroom in a real
bed, while Mike, who was a full-fledged member of the group, had to sleep on the
floor of the closet. He made quite a stink about trading sleeping space for a
few hours, and Dick looked worried for the first time.
	It must have been a terrible night for Dick. One by one he took us into
the bedroom and told us he was gay and that the only reason we had a roof over
our heads was because he was fucking Bob Roberts. It was a horrifying thing to
learn about a close friend for an unsophisticated bunch of eighteen- and
nineteen-year olds. It was like Dick had told us he had leukemia. Dennis was
baffled. He knew it was earthshaking consequences, but he really didn't know
what it meant that Dick was "gay." 
	It was a touchy time for everyone. Did he really suck on cocks? we all
wanted to know. Up the ass? We were all very tense until I figured what the
hell, we were friends and he never came on to any of us, and I started making
terrible jokes about it. "I feel a little gay myself," and that kind of thing.
As much as we tried to take it in our stride, it was never forgotten. It created
a break between the band and Dick. It set up a barrier of fear, and as hard as
we tried we just couldn't chalk it up as another of those strange things that
happened in LA. What if that kind of thing happened to us?
	At the night we escaped the claustrophobia of Bob Roberts' house by
walking up and down the Strip, around the record stores and headshops, trying to
score chicks. Three hot months passed at Bob Roberts' house. I suppose that if
we could have afforded it, we would have used drugs to pass the time, but it was
simply too expensive for us to get into. I smoked a couple of joints, but I
didn't like getting stoned. It made me nervous. Yet it was impossible to face
the months of future shock without a buffer. Everything went so fast, we all
grew so quickly, that we needed lubrication to keep on going. I was twenty years
old, and I never in my life tasted alcohol. The first time I took a drink, I
chugged on beer out of sheer terror. It was quite an evening, my first glimpse
of the weird LA scene. The group and I were standing in a psychedelic headshop
across the Boulevard from Tower Records, when an LA surfer waif, one of those
seventeen-year-old girls with sunstriped blond hair and a plastic
surgeon-manufactured pug nose, asked if I was a singer. Not that she had seen me
anywhere, but she said that I looked like I was a singer in a rock and roll
band. She invited the five of us up to a party on Sunset Plaza Drive where a
film crew from the University of Southern California was filming a documentary
about hippies. 
	We walked up the hill with her to a white stucco house. As soon as we got
through the front door the chick disappeared up a staircase. The house was
unfurnished, wood floors and large windows overlooking the city. There was a
table made out of a door turned on it's side resting on four bricks and a dozen
pillows thrown about the room. There were also kittens, at least twenty-five of
them, sleeping, crawling, pissing on the floor. In the corner, with her head
resting on one of the pillows and her body covered with sleeping kittens, was a
little girl. I stood there for a long time waiting for the surfer waif to return
from upstairs, and when she didn't come back I sat down on a pillow next to the
sleeping girl and looked out of the window at the city below. The other guys
went upstairs to explore the house.
	A half an hour must have passed when the front door opened and a tall,
dirty-looking hippie came in. He walked over to the sleeping girl, kneeled down
and kissed her on the cheek. She didn't move. He gently rolled her over on her
back, and I even helped. Then he kissed her on the lips. I thought "What the
fuck's going on here? What is this?" The girl groaned with pleasure. He
unbuttoned the top of her jeans and as he worked her pants down around her hips
she smiled in her sleep, caressing the kittens on her chest. I watched in
disbelief as the guy leaned over and gave her head. She began to moan
rhythmically in her sleep, although I doubted she could have slept through all
that cunt lapping. When the guy came up for a breath his mustache was glistening
wet and he motioned for me to take a turn. I whispered, "No thanks," and went
upstairs to find the band and then get the hell out of there.
	The other guys were sitting in an empty bedroom watching a rolling TV
screen with the sound turned off. There was a pile of empty beer cans lying on
the floor next to them  and a large bowl of grayish sugar cubes. The surfer waif
pushed the bowl towards me and said, "Have some, baby."
	"What are they?" 
	"Just some lousy Watts acid."
	This all sounded like code to me, and I felt so intimidated by the
cunnilingus episode downstairs that I grabbed a can of beer, held it in my paw
and watched the blank TV screen with the rest of the group and the girl, who
were obviously seeing a program I was not.
	After I chugged the first can of beer I was drunk, and midway through my
second can I started feeling sick and decided to walk down the hill in the fresh
air and go home. By that time my friend was talking to herself in the corner of
the room. Somebody who walked by the bedroom actually recognized me from the
Hullabaloo Club, and I went downstairs to find the party had started. I never
saw the girl and the cunt lapper again.
	When the other guys got back to Bob's house I was still pretty ripped.
Dennis thought I was faking it, but just before my head seemed to cave in and
somebody shut off the sound I threw up all over Glen and passed out.
	The next morning instead of being angry with me Glen was thrilled. He had
the beginnings of a new drinking partner. He assured me that the only thing to
do for a hangover was to have another beer. We scraped together half a buck and
went to the store to get some for breakfast. From that time on I was never
without a can of beer in my hand.
	My body didn't adjust easily to the sudden consumption of booze and to
tell you the truth I didn't exactly ease myself into it. I went from teetotaler
to binger. Beer all day and then cheap wine at night. Getting drunk became a
part of my life. I'd collect empty pop bottles from all over Evil Hill and bring
them in for deposit money. Then Glen and I would guzzle a fifty-cent bottle of
Ripple Peg and Pink wine - warm - and run up a hill quick to hyperventilate and
get stoned. If you ask me Peg and Pink wine had never seen a grape. They must
make the stuff in a cauldron. Any stomach that can take as much of that stuff as
we drank and still continue to function has to be made out of cast iron. Glen
and I were a medical Ripley's Believe It or Not. People who knew us back in
those days would say, "Are you two guys still alive?"
	Glen, by the way, had fucked Merry Cornwall, and the magic labia was
opening for us. Word was we would be playing at the Cheetah soon. We were
getting desperate for money and nothing had changed except that Bob moved out of
his house. I don't know how Dick managed to arrange it, but one morning Bob
moved all his belongings into another apartment in a house next door and told us
to take our time but to find another place. 
	The Cheetah sat on the tip of the Santa Monica Pier, part of the Pacific
Ocean Palisades Amusement Park. A few years before it had  been the Aragon
Ballroom, a dancing  emporium where all the big bands had entertained people in
ball gowns and tuxedos. Lawrence Welk held court there for years. The new owners
covered the massive place with gleaming chrome and mirrored ceilings and walls
that bounced off three mirrored stages.
	Out on the middle of the dance floor, which held three thousand wriggling
bodies, there were giant chrome mushroom pedestals you could climb and dance on.
I always felt like we were on a giant set from a space movie at the Cheetah.
There were webs of lights blinking and popping. When the light crew threw the
Cheetah into "full strobe" effect you couldn't walk in a straight line in there.
Just being inside was the closest I ever got to taking a psychedelic.
	Merry Cornwall asked us to audition, again, on a Sunday afternoon. For
several months Merry had been trying to convince us to move into a house with
her, but I didn't want to end up in another hippie crash pad with Merry inviting
half the homeless kids of LA home with her. It was interesting how Merry was
very involved in the hippie love movement and at the same time could be a
no-bullshit businesswoman at the club. I thought of her as the hooker with a
heart of gold. She had three kids and had never been married. She had no idea
who the fathers were - just another faceless fuck on a series of one-night
stands.
	But in business and at the club she was responsible and straight. She
wanted to manage us and promised to get us a recording contract, which Dick
Christian wasn't happy about. We had to get out of Bob Roberts' house any day,
and we took Merry up on her offer of finding us all places to live (with our
salaries from the Cheetah as insurance we could come up with our share of the
rent). Merry said she'd hunt up a terrific house for us on the beach near the
Cheetah and in the meanwhile we could live in a two-room apartment she kept near
the Hollywood Freeway.
	The apartment was literally right underneath the Freeway, and the traffic
buzzed by so loudly we were up every day at the morning rush hour. Within two
hours our hangovers would subside enough for us to practice. On the third day we
were living there, there was a tremendous pounding on the door in the middle of
rehearsal. It was the police.
	I was to meet and greet the LA police on numerous occasions during my
sojourn in sunny California. The LA police and I were to become asshole buddies
in the years to come because they loved to taunt wise-ass kids like me, and more
than that, they loved to taunt Alice Cooper. I knew how far to step out of line
with my teachers, but I had not yet learned that with the police.
	I was standing in the middle of the tiny living room with a microphone in
my hand when the door opened up and three cops were standing there with the
manager of the building. I said in my microphone in a very queer voice, "Oh,
officers, thank God you showed up. These boys were about to shoot the canary."
Then I realized how big and mean those guys were and that they weren't going to
laugh at all. As a matter of fact, the LA police never had a sense of humor.
	They told me to shut the fuck up and amidst Bowery Boy protests of "Hey,
what's going on here?" and "Careful officer, I'm not wearing any underwear,"
they frisked us and told us to pack up and move out. Merry Cornwall had run out
on the rent in that apartment two months before, and if we didn't split in ten
minutes they were going to take our equipment as payment. 
	We loaded the car and drove straight to the Cheetah to find Merry and
give her hell. When we rushed into the cool, empty hall, Merry was sitting on
the edge of the stage drinking a beer with the Chambers Brothers. I was a big
fan of the Chambers Brothers, and forgetting about our near tragic escape with
the police I opened one of Merry's beers and talked with them.
	"What are you guys doing here?" Merry finally asked me.
	"We had a little problem at our apartment," I told her. She glanced at
the Chambers Brothers, expecting me to embarrass the shit out of her.
	"What happened at your apartment?" she asked pointedly.
	"Castro Convertible came and repossessed the sofa. The florist refused to
deliver fresh flowers every morning, and two guys in black leather with
motorcycles and gun threw us out!"
	"Hell's Angels?" Merry frowned for a second and then said, "Hey, these
boys have a big old house in Watts. Maybe you could stay there."
	"Oh man," one of the Brothers said, "that place is a mess. And anyway,
you'd have to put up with Long Gone Miles and his pirate radio station."
	I knew this was a straight line, but I'm a sucker for not taking people
up on straight lines. I was too theatrical. I wanted to be surprised by Long
Gone Miles. Anyway, everything we owned was in the back of Mike Allen's station
wagon in the parking lot, and I wanted to stay in LA at least till we got to
play the Cheetah.
	"I'm sure we can put up with Long Time Miles," I told the Brothers.
	"Gone," he said.
	"Long gone," I said, and we moved into their house.
	It wasn't exactly their house. They owned it, all right, but they hadn't
lived in it since they were teenagers. Their parents had moved out of Watts to a
better neighborhood and except for Long Gone Miles the house had been empty for
years.
	It wasn't exactly empty, either. On every floor of every room of the
three-story building there were food wrappers, cans, broken glass, beer bottles,
soda bottles, whiskey bottles, used condoms, stained mattresses, piles of
plaster and tons of dog shit. When you flushed the second-floor toilet it
dripped through the ceiling on the kitchen table below. Up on the third floor,
in a rear bedroom, was Long Gone Miles.
	I never saw Long Gone Miles the entire month we lived there, but I heard
him alright. He broadcast from his room. Every nook and cranny of the decrepit
house had been wired with radio speakers and every three hours, like clockwork,
he would broadcast to the house. I was asleep on the floor in a little space I
had cleared of empty TV dinner pans when I heard this old southern black man
singing. At first I thought it was the voice of God:

	There was a poor black man from Tennessee
	The white man stole him wrong
	He worked his ass but never got free
	And he's the one who's singing this song

	Oh Lone Gone Miles
	Oh Long Gone Miles
	And he's the one who's singing this song

	Woman say she loved him
	Gave her grits and loved her strong
	Then she go and fucked his best friend
	And he's the one who's singing this song

	All of his songs were about himself. The melodies changed, but the verses
went on endlessly, and they all ended with "he's the one who's singing this
song." He sounded like a classic nigger. He never came out of his room either,
and none of us bothered with him. He must have had a hot plate in his room
because we'd smell  food every once in a while and once a week an old black man
with one arm would bring him a bag of groceries.
	On afternoon Long Gone announced a special broadcast in the middle of one
of our rehearsals. 
	"Long Gone Miles, here c'mun to ya fum Crenshaw Boulevard and the
Freeway. It's a good-looking day out there, but 'bout two blocks away I can see
the army settin' in."
	We all ran to the window, but we couldn't see any army. I thought that
Long Gone had finally gone completely mad. We went back to rehearsals, but in
fifteen minutes we saw a battalion of police pull down the street, called in to
keep a vigil in Watts, which had exploded in riots the beginning of the summer.
	The band was safe in Watts because we had long hair, and we were hungry
and bedraggled enough to pass for hippies. The hippies were friends of the
militant blacks because they were anti-establishment, but I was sure one of the
local residents would have shot me dead if they ever figured out that I coveted
their Cadillacs.
	Merry Cornwall finally found a house for us on Venice Beach. It was a
narrow Wooden building with a screened porch in the back and enough rooms to
create five bedrooms so only two of us had share space. It was decorated with
pillows, mattresses and posters from the Fillmore West. Merry wasn't a great
housekeeper either, and within a week the place looked no better than the
Chambers Brothers' house on Crenshaw.
	When I first got to LA I had a small suitcase carefully packed with stage
clothing; velvet suits made from old drapes and brocade jackets and pants from
old evening dresses and slipovers. But with all the moving I either lost or
ruined most of my clothing and my stage outfits became interchangeable with my
street clothes.
	I went everywhere with Merry Cornwall dressed that way. We traipsed from
record company to record company trying to find somebody who would listen to us.
We got auditions, too, dozens of them. But some people didn't like us at all,
some of them wanted the group if we did other kinds of material and some of them
wanted us to add an instrument or drop a member. Nobody liked us the way we
were. Most of all record companies hated the name the Nazz. We were warned
several times that a group from Philadelphia led by Todd Rundgren was already
using that name, and we would have to change it to get a contract.
	I had my first glimpse into the higher echelon of the rock world when I
made my rounds with Merry. It was a fantasy world of telephones in suitcases,
credit cards that turned gold like the albums, free-flowing drugs, the best
booze and free-flowing sex with the prettiest girls and boys. Offices were
decorated with carpeting that ran up the walls and covered the ceilings.
Everybody at record companies drove Jaguar-XKEs and wore sandals. It was a
super-psuedo hip business world of high-powered forty-year-old guys who had
wound up cutting vinyl in LA instead of cutting velvet in the garment center.
They were making a fortune off the hippie movement and the tremendous national
interest in rock music that had come with it. 
	As soon as we moved in with Merry we played the Cheetah. The four months
we lived with her she booked us into the Cheetah almost every week, and
eventually, just as we had done at the VIP in Phoenix, we got to be the house
band there. A year before we would have swooned at the thought of being the
house band at the Cheetah, but now that it happened we were immediately
discontented. There was something missing (other than a manager and a recording
contract). There was no gratification. The audiences didn't mind us, and we
weren't too bad, after a fashion, but wee were just another rock band playing
the English blues - too typical, too sane, too average.
	I let a groupie pick me up on the pier one night, and because I didn't
fuck girls at that point we got drunk instead. The reason I wouldn't touch any
of the girls that began to throw themselves at my feet at the Cheetah was
disease. Everybody in Los Angeles seemed to have syphilis or gonorrhoea or anal
warts or something! Groupies were a  walking laboratory of disease. Pasteur
would have wept for joy. I didn't even think twice about the crabs. Crabs were a
national disease of the young. But crabs could be washed off with that magic
elixir, Pyrimate A-200. I learned to live with crabs just as I eventually
learned to live with the Holiday Inns. By syphilis or gonorrhoea was another
story. I believe in faith healing. I was, for the most part, still a spiritual
member of the Church of Jesus Christ, and we didn't believe in doctors and
medication. I also hated the thought of getting an injection.
	So I got lots of blow jobs starting then. Blow jobs were safe. You
couldn't get the clap from a mouth unless the chick had been kissing toilet
seats. I got blow jobs in bath rooms from sleazy groupies and blow jobs under
tables from fabulous-looking girls. I got sadistic blow jobs where I thought the
girl was going to rip the skin off my cock with her teeth and soft, sensual blow
jobs where I had to look twice to make sure the chick hadn't slipped her false
teeth out and she was gumming me.
	I must have shot, I'm pleased to say, gallons and gallons of come into
hundreds of mouths. I didn't even let them undress all the way. They'd bare
their breasts enough for me to get hard and I'd let them devour my cock. If only
I had known about blow jobs when I was eleven years old I wouldn't have cared
that Edward Satriano made me believe my cock was broken. It fit into every mouth
I ever came across.
	Of course getting a blow job is a very passive act, and there's not much
chance to be creative. Oh, sometimes I'd stand up and sometimes I'd lay down and
sometimes, if I was feeling raunchy enough, I'd just get on top and fuck a
mouth. But when it was over I'd feel pressured to say or do something
interesting, and the night I went home with the groupie from the pier I let her
dye my hair. I don't know what I was thinking. Groupies were always fascinated
by musicians' hair. It was a symbol of their power. Perhaps I was drunk enough
at that time to think that blond dye would turn me into a pretty boy. It didn't.
It just made me look very weird. At first I just got a frosting, but a few weeks
later I dyed the whole thing. Here and there, dyed locks began to show up in
Glen's and Mike's hair. Dick Christian was ecstatic.
	John Speer was very upset about the dyed hair. It was too dangerous, he
thought, and we had to stick to more sensible and commercial images and music.
He even got into fist fights with us. It was around the first Christmas we spent
in LA that Glen suggested we hire Neal Smith to replace John Speer.
	I always thought Neal Smith was a jerk. I first saw him as a Battle of
the Bands in Phoenix when he was the drummer in a rival band, the Surf Tones.
Every group in that particular Battle of the Bands agreed to pool their
equipment so each band wouldn't have to reset the stage after each set and lose
the attention of the parking lot audiences. Neal Smith was the only musician
there who was against it. He made all the musicians disassemble their equipment
so he could set his drum kit on risers. Then in the middle of a sixteen-minute
version of "Wipe Out," he did a fourteen minute drum solo.
	The next time I saw him was when I smacked up my car with Glen. He just
happened to be riding by at that moment in his '61 Chevy (with mag wheels), and
when he saw my car sitting there and smoking he revved his engine at me and
waved. I swore vengeance, and now Glen suggested he replace John Speer! I hoped
he still didn't know how to play drums.
	Neal Smith, the world's tallest blond drummer, the platinum God, is not
just tall. Neal towers. Careens around corners like a giraffe. With a shaft of
glossy yellow hair half way to his ass, Neal's presence in a room is
unmistakeable. Actually, for a very tall person, Neal is very uniformly built.
Everything is big. Long, square and handsome face. Huge long hands. A tremendous
mouth.
	Neal showed up one day on Beethoven Street with a snare drum and three
drumsticks. He set up his lone snare next to John Speer's gleaming drum set and
left it there. He hadn't changed a bit. He insisted on not playing  Speer's
drums, out of some ridiculous musician's code, and auditioned for us on his
snare drum.
	I don't know where our minds were at, letting a drummer audition on one
drum, but compared to John Speer's messianic, military drumming it sounded fine.
As a matter of fact, the monotony of the snare created an interesting musical
pattern. By the time John Speer got back to the house he was out of the group.
The line-up was set for good. Me, Mike Bruce, Glen Buxton, Dennis and Neal
Smith.
	Christmas was depressing. We tried to laugh about how poor we were. Time
was going too slow. Time was going to fast. Nothing was happening. No recording
contract. No managers. Merry Cornwall pushing hard for us to sign a contract
with her. The Cheetah gig got repetitious and crowds less interested. It got to
a point with Merry that we were being rude to her and we knew we had to get out.
She threw us out, eventually, but I guess we deserved it. I brought a spaced-out
groupie back to the house for a quick blow job and with typical groupie couth
she left a used tampon under the bathroom sink. It was there for a month before
Glen walked into the living room one night holding it by the string. We were
instantly grossed out. It was disgusting. Naturally we put it under Merry's
pillow.
	She came home with a bass player that night and while he was shoveling it
in her he stuck his hand under the pillow and came up with the tampon. Merry was
in the living room in ten second, full of sweat, wrapping an Indian print robe
around her.
	"How could you do this to me? We're supposed to be a family! Don't you
guys see? How is all this going to work if you do things like this to me? Get
hip!"
	We got out.