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:
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
