Chapter 6

In Los Angeles everybody wanted to know just two things: your sign and what you
did for a living. It was the mentality of Hollywood. They needed an instant
identity to hang on you. They wanted to know in you apartment building when you
moved and when you brought your clothes to the cleaners. They asked when you
rented a car or cashed a check at the supermarket. "What sort of line are you
in?" "What is it you do?" They even wanted to know in a chic little boutique on
Wilshire Boulevard that made shredded jeans to order at ninety-five bucks a leg,
where Neal Smith's sister sewed her little heart out in the back.
	Cindy Smith was a blond, strong-willed twenty-year-old who had gotten it
into her head, from some unfathomable source, that life in Los Angeles was
glamorous. She offered to come live with us in Topanga Canyon when she left
Phoenix, but we denied her the privilege. Undaunted, she took her own apartment
in LA and found a job as a seamstress.
	One morning she was stitching away at her machine when she heard two guys
with New York accents tell the salesman they were rock managers. Shep Gordon and
Joey Greenberg were nothing of the sort. They were gamblers by nature, two New
Yorkers in LA with a good head for poker and chips. They met each other five
years before in the Port Authority Bus Terminal and spent their college years
roaming up and down the hotel circuits of one-night poker games.
	With a sociology degree from Buffalo, Shep went through a quick
succession of unlikely jobs: cabana boy, parole officer for a day, and as
delivery boy for Devine garments, a shroud factory. After a year he hooked up
with a Joey Greenberg, and they were soon in the chips again. I'm not sure how.
By September of 1967 they had amassed a considerable amount of cash and moved to
LA in search of action. A few months later they turned up in Cindy Smith's
hippie boutique. When the salesman asked him what he did, Shep lied. As soon as
Cindy heard Shep tell the salesman he was a rock manager, she glommed on to his
sleeve and told him all about her brother who was in a rock and roll band. Shep
couldn't have cared less. He said, "I'll take another shirt." Cindy said,
"They're in desperate need of a manager to sign a contract with Frank Zappa,"
but Shep didn't know who Frank Zappa was.
	Cindy said, "They're getting a six-thousand-dollar cash advance."
	Shep and Joey lit up like Christmas trees. A quick six grand with nobody
to take it off their hands. Well, of course, they were rock managers! Two nights
later we met them at the Landmark Hotel.
	I don't know if Shep and Joey were shocked when they saw us, all glitter
and streaked blond hair, but if they were they didn't show it. They took it for
granted we were weird like we took it for granted they were rock managers. They
lived in a two-room aqua plastic hotel-apartment with dirty dishes in the sink
that let off such a stink it smelled like the Toledo garbage dump. We didn't
discuss business or the $6,000 once. He was a smooth operator and besides he
liked us. Instead we got very drunk. Shep was low-keyed about rock and roll,
since he didn't know the slightest thing about it, and avoided the subject. He
said the next time we had a job he wanted to come and see us.
	Zappa in the interim was chomping at the bit for us to sign contracts and
record an album so he could meet the terms of his distribution deal with Warner
Brothers. He also had a new bug in his head: he wanted us to change our name to
Alice Cookies. He decided that the only way we had a shot at making it was if we
played it as a comedy act. I was insulted. To top it off, he was insisting that
his partner in Straight-Bizarre Records, Herbie Cohen, become our manager -
making us completely Frank Zappa controlled.
	We stalled for two weeks until Shep Gordon and Joey Greenberg could hear
us play at the Lenny Bruce Birthday Celebration held at the Cheetah. Lenny
himself was six feet under, but the celebration still attracted every hipster in
Los Angeles. The Cheetah was wall to wall with high-energy speed freaks tripping
out on the dance floor. Outside on the pier, five big-name bands, including Jim
and the Doors, were playing to another crowd of 10,000 people who were stretched
along the beach on blankets.
	We were halfway through our first number that night when the heckling
started. When the audience realized the boos and yelling didn't phase us they
started throwing plastic cups, some full of booze and soda. I booed back. When
the screamed, "Get off!" I screamed back, "Get out! What do you expect? Idiots!
I'm a star. Don't boo a star!" I spit at them. I shoved my hand down the front
of my pants and yelled, "Eat me, you cowards!"
	After fifteen minutes Merry Cornwall stopped the show and called for the
houselights. WE had nearly emptied the club. The people who were left stood
along the back wall as far from the amplifiers as they could get. About
twenty-five feet away from the stage, Shep Gordon stood there clapping like a
seal.
	"You cleared the auditorium in fifteen minutes!" he said. I kept asking,
"Did you like us? What do you think?" Shep just went on, "What power! To run
three thousand people out of this place in one stroke!"
	"What did you think about us?"
	"Do you know how hard it is to get three thousand people to do anything
in fifteen minutes?"
	"We do it all the time," I confessed. "Do you think we have a chance to
make it with an album? I mean, what do you think of the music?"
	Shep was in reverie: "Three thousand people in fifteen minutes! I don't
care if they fucking hated you. It's mass movement. There's power and money in
that. Jesus, three thousand people!"
	I didn't honestly get the point. But I understood that Shep was honestly
sparked by something that had happened in the auditorium that night. Six
thousand dollars in the hand was a sickly goose compared to what he saw waiting
in the bushes.
	We met with him and Joey the next day to discuss management. He finally
admitted he knew very little about rock music (although he continued to claim he
was a business manager for several groups including the Left Banke), but you
didn't have to be a critic to know our music was putrid. When he got down to it
he told us it was the worst show he had ever seen. But the sight of those three
thousand people running for cover still gave him orgasms.
	"I'll get into this for one thing," Shep said. "I want to make a million
dollars. Then we'll get out. I don't care what you sound like or what you look
like, I think you can do it. If you want to make a million bucks you'll have to
stick with it for as long as it takes and as hard as it gets. Okay?" It was okay
with me.
	Frank Zappa and Herbie Cohen were furious when we told them. Who the fuck
was Shep Gordon and Joey Greenberg? Where did we pick up these two shyster New
Yorkers? Why them? Why not Herbie Cohen?
	Shep and Joey ruled Zappa and Cohen off limits until we signed the
contracts. No phone calls. No socializing. Not even with the GTOs. Either we
signed correctly, with a third part protecting us, or not at all - a heady
attitude for a rock group who just a month before were desperate enough for a
contract to sell themselves into bandage. Most important was we learned that
Zappa and Cohen were not friends, but business associates, and had to be dealt
with that way. It was the first commandment of the music business: Nobody is
your friend.
	In early October of 1968, a week before we were supposed to sign the
Zappa contract, Shep moved us into an enormous glass and stucco Spanish style
house on Quebec Street in the Hollywood Hills that was owned by John Phillip
Law. Five bedrooms, gleaming kitchen, dining room, study and heated swimming
pools. Shep said nobody wanted to connect with a bunch of losers, and if we were
going to be pop stars we had to appear to live like pop stars - at least from
outside. The rent, a big $350 a month, was going to be paid out of our $6,000
advance.
	Law owned several houses in the hills, all of them rented and tended by
his caretaker, Jack Crow. Crow, Shep warned us, treated the houses like they
were his children, and one broken window or scratch and we'd get heel. Crow was
waiting for us the moment we got there. He was a tall, hefty man in his late
forties with tweezed eyebrows. It looked like he was wearing his mother's
nightclothes.
	"Hi, hi, hi, kids," he screamed. "It's Jack! Jack! Who are we?"
	We introduced ourselves, grinning from ear to ear. Jack grabbed my sequin
top. 
	"Lovely. Lovely! Have you seen the tops they got in at the Bandit
Boutique on Crewshaw?" He pulled the top up and grabbed at my right nipple,
squealing in delight. I slapped his hand away. I knew better than to haul him
off and smack him, or even raise protest about my sexuality or why we looked the
way we did. Nobody, especially fags, believed me. So I relented and allowed Jack
to give me a wet smack on the cheek and help us move in.
	Jack was very upset that we lived on a twenty-dollar-a-week allowance and
didn't have bed sheets or dishes or food to put in the refrigerator. He dashed
away in his car and came back a half hour later with bags full of groceries and
made us all ham and cheese sandwiches with big glasses of milk. Later the night
he came by with an odd set of dishes he collected from other rented houses.
	Jack was always worried about us not eating. There was never any food in
the house, and it drove him crazy. Every day he brought us lunch or dinner and
bawled us out for spending our allowance on booze instead of food. He pinched
out sides and behinds and hit ribs and bare buttocks and ran out of the house
clucking about rickets to get another carload of food.
	Zappa was about to begin a national tour and demanded the contract be
signed immediately. The last hitch was that I was only twenty years old and
Zappa insisted that all our parents consign the contracts with us. We arranged a
pilgrimage from Phoenix to LA.
	I called home and told my mother and father that we had a $6,000
recording contract, and they were incredulously happy. Then we told them we had
managers, two guys from New York, Shep Gordon and Joey Greenberg. They hit the
ceiling. Gordon and Greenberg? From New York? Everybody's parents had the same
reaction right down the line, exploding on the other end of the phone in Phoenix
like champagne corks. They were outraged by the thought. Gordon and Greenberg?
That was like giving it away. Our mothers and fathers rushed to LA in a frenzy.
We were so proud of our new house, and they were horrified. "Where did all this
come from?" they wanted to know. "Suddenly you're living in a house with a
swimming pool! This is convenient! Where did you dig these two guys up? How do
they pay for this house? What do they do?"
	They refused to sign the contract. There we were, in our strange
clothing, chasing them around the huge house with a contract and a pen so we
could become rock stars. Rock stars! And they wouldn't sign the contracts!
	We settled in the kitchen around the only table in the house, possibly
for some rock soup - I don't remember - and tried to finesse their signatures.
My father was in the middle of telling me how he was not going to "be party to
my signing my financial independence away" when the kitchen door flew open. Jack
was standing there in a muu muu with two large brown bags of groceries.
	"Hi. Hi. Hi. Oh, who have we here? Mom and Dad Cooper! Just in time for a
snack? And whose mommy is this bleached blonde?"
	My parents sat there paralyzed! Mortified! jack kept right on chatting
and chirping and cooked us all lunch. We all sat around the table, all the
parents and the band and Jack, and discussed signing contracts.
	The parents decided they wanted to meet with Shep and Joey, these
twenty-two-year-old wunderkinds whose brainstorm it was to put us in that
massive house to live like pop stars on twenty dollars a week. We arranged for
the meeting the next morning, and stayed up all night trying to figure out an
angle to ensure the signing. The next morning we were all lined up in the
unfurnished living room waiting for Shep and Joey. As soon as Shep walked in I
felt like I was making a Jewish sacrifice. The moment I got through making
introductions, Shep said, "All right. I'm a Jew. What should you care? We know
how to make the money." There was terrible silence.
	In the dining room Jack was lolling about pretending to dry-mop the
floor. He said, "If I was going to hitch my wagon to a rock star. . . ."
	Everybody laughed. They signed.