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.
CHAPTER 5
DIRECT FROM HOLLYWOOD — BACK IN THEIR HOME TOWN — THE NAZZ!!
Phoenix. Five-hundred-dollar-a-night gigs in high school and clubs. Home. My own bed. Nickie, Mom and Dad. Instead of being comfortable in Phoenix I was miserable. As long as we were in Los Angeles we were fighting, even if we were destitute. Going home to Phoenix was admitting we were licked, not good enough to make it in the majors. But there were more reasons than Money or Merry Cornwall that we were back In Phoenix. One by one we were getting little greetings from George Buckley and the draft board. The battle of Cortez was not yet over! Dennis and I were even called for our physicals on the same day by some miraculous coincidence considering we were a year apart in age and had totally different birthdays. Neal Smith’s physical was scheduled a week later, and Mike Bruce was already fighting the draft out in court.
When we went to deal with the army clowns at the induction center, Dennis was a nervous wreck. I wasn’t the least bit worried. How could they possibly want to draft me? I only weighed ninety-eight pounds and I had bleach-blond hair. I thought it was funny. The first time I went down there I even wore a pair of my dad’s baggy underwear. Dennis was finished in a few minutes, awarded a 4F because of his slow heartbeat. They measured me, examined me, poked in my ears and up my nose and ass. They classified me 1A. Me, 1A, I couldn’t believe it. No matter who I met after that, the first thing I said was “I’m 1A, you know, I have to represent this country at war,” and people would look at me and laugh.
The group was forced to stay in Phoenix while I had four more physicals. I drank a bottle of whiskey at five in the morning before every physical and every time they took my blood I passed out, but nothing seemed to satisfy them. And if I appealed to the draft board I had to appeal to Mr. Buckley. After two months of petitioning, I was finally allowed to see the psychiatrist.
The shrink asked me what I did and I told him I was an entertainer. He aksed me what I wanted to
