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.
CHAPTER 7
Life in Los Angeles seemed to change overnight for us. With a recording contract and sudden legitimacy, we moved into a whole new circuit of people. The rock world exploded for us. We got to meet everybody on the LA scene. We moved up a few rungs on the social ladder to boot; we were invited to parties given by rich people instead of dope dealers and hippies, and when we passed out at night we slept on Beverly Hills carpeting instead of dirty wooden floors.
Without exception I think everybody I met in rock and roll was a groupie on one level or another. The rock music business was built on idol worship, and it was filled to brimming with insecure, sexually maladjusted, lonely people who wanted to live also in the limelight. You know, you don’t have to fuck anybody to be a groupie. To some people, just breathing the same electric air was enough to get them off. Groupies come in all ages, sex, and professions. I never met a record company president who wasn’t somebody’s fan, and I never met a musician who didn’t think he was a star.
Everybody knows about the kind of groupies you run into backstage or hanging around hotel lobbies. These are common C-level groupies; dirty, emotionally crippled, tragic girls and boys who burn themselves out using drugs as fuel and fuck anybody who ever set foot on the stage, down to the last roadie. These kids are there for sex. They want to incorporate you, take part of your stardom away with them, even if it’s only a fee drops of semen. These kids hardly ever worked or went to school. These were drug dealers mostly, and lived in a twilight world of dingy dressing rooms and third-rate musicians. They needed to be abused. They begged for it on many levels, and these were the kind of kids the chambermaid found in the morning, tied to hotel beds with dead fish inserted in their vaginas, or half conscious from bad drugs or too much booze.
C-level groupies are often nymphomaniacs, and when you tell them to get out or leave you alone, it starts a lot of trouble. Somehow each and every time they sleep with a musician they make themselves believe it’s going to be forever, and when it’s over in an hour they’re hysterical. Of course the C-level groupies are the most fun to be with, you better believe it! Basically I think that C-level groupies are the most honest of the bunch. At least you both know what they’re there for. In the back of their heads they know who they are and their place in society. They sure know their way around the blue vein, penis-wise.
B-level groupies always went out of their way to put down the C-levelers. They despised the lower class of groupies because they saw reflected in them the worst side of themselves. B-level groupies usually supported themselves legitimately, which sets them apart from the wandering gypsy kind. Most of them worked in the music business itself, as secretaries in record companies and booking offices and publicists. An efficient publicist is always a groupie in rock and roll. These B-levelers wanted sex, too, God knows, but not just a one-night stand. This plateau of idol worshipers wanted to possess you, have you around as a companion. They were the most difficult to deal with, too, because they didn’t want to go home in the morning.
A-level groupies were famous themselves, and if not famous, at least successful in their own right. Their bunch was comprised of actors, motion picture executives, writers, talent scouts and other rock stars. It’s an example of why Gregg Allman married Cher. It’s why I once watched the president of the largest record company in America trip over himself to get to say hello to Mick Jagger in Orsini’s restaurant. No matter how much of a star you
