become, there’s always somebody who’s a bigger star.
I fell in love with a B-level groupie. I met her at a party and didn’t get around to genital insertion for two months, but I loved her with a passion that was only topped by my high school affair with Mimi Hicki. Her name was Marlene Mabel and she was a secretary at A&M records from El Monte who gave excellent head. What’s more, she never bothered me when I didn’t want to see her. I never had to fuck her or call her up. She just gave me blow jobs. She worked during the week and came by on weekends, swinging her long, tweezerlike legs out of a white convertible Comet, bringing along with her a can of tuna, five dollars in cash (because she loved me, too) and a bottle of gin.
We spent idyllic Saturday nights dangling our feet in the pool and talking about rock and roll trivia before we’d retire to my room for festivities. One night, as I watched Marlene’s white legs distort and curve as she dangled them under the blue water, I happened to mention that I could never get married, that it would interfere in my career. She got hysterical. She threw the bottle of gin in the pool and then jumped in after it. She stood there in the water, her mascara running down her cheeks, her mouth curved into a big lump, crying, “I spent two months of my life with you and I’ve been had! Had! What do you mean, “You’re not getting married’?”
She went on like that for an hour. Here I had violated her head any number of times, and I had no intention of making her a legal woman. Not even to go all the way with her! She walked out on me and I never saw her again.
Not long after I met Susan Cochran. They called her Susan Starfucker, and she had attained this fame as far north as San Francisco, where she gave birth to the child of a famous bass player when she was fourteen and as far south as Puerto Vallarta, where she ran off with the lead singer of an English rock group who was hooked on morphine and had to kick. Her baby was four years old, and Susan still looked only fourteen herself. I had never seen a girl as beautiful or sexy before in my life, so elegant and confident. I found it unbelievable that she was going out with me. I was no star, and everybody knew Susan only fucked stars.
With a groupie like Susan there was no fooling around with fellatio. While a leggy little secretary from the valley might have put up with some pop star’s idiosyncrasies, Susan’s whole mission was sex. I either took the big plunge or none at all. I made an agreement with Susan. I made her promise, on her word of honor, that she would give up fucking other rock stars while she was with me. In return, I’d try to cut down on my drinking, for Susan had become a crusader for healthy living since her stay in Puerto Vallarta while her rock star kicked morphine.
Glen had also fallen in love. Her name was Ginny, and she was a tall, auburn-haired girl who worshiped Glen. She talked constantly, a great deal about rock and roll, and when she wasn’t theorizing about the Rolling Stones she was very giggly, walking around the house like she was stoned, dropping off globs of giggles and laughter here and there.
Ginny and Glen shared a glass-enclosed porch on one side of the house that Glen had quickly boarded up so that he could live in perpetual darkness and sleep when he wanted. The glass and tile ceiling made the porch a giant echo chamber, and as soon as Ginny and Glen started fucking, everybody in the house knew it. A ghostlike chant echoed from the porch as Ginny built to an orgasm. She always chanted one word, a word she seemed to get stuck on like a phonograph needle skipping. Usually it was “shooting,” which she must found erotic or descriptive. I’d be alseep in my dungeon (I was attracted to dark, damp places) when suddenly a deep groaning would come up over the house and soon we were all chanting in unison with her, waiting for release, “Shootin”, shootin’, shootin’.”
Living with a rock band you get used to not having any privacy. Privacy is something you don’t even think about in a rock band. It’s not even part of your dreams you stock away for when you become famous. You dream of mansions and boats and houses but never of privacy. My most personal moments were often reduced to public spectacles and it didn’t even occur to me that it was a bizarre way to live. Eventually it became quite common to see people fucking and masturbating or going to the toilet.
Dennis had his own bedroom for the first time since we had moved out of Phoenix, but he never told any of the girls about it. He had filled a walk-in closet in the hallway with mattresses, and when he invited visiting groupies to his room he took them into the closet. His strategy was that if he took a girl in there she’d have to be in bed. There was nowhere else.
My bedroom was in the dungeon of the house. Many years ago it had been used as a speakeasy, and there was actually a panel in the living room that became a door when a little buzzer was pushed on the other side. Behind the door a flight of stone steps led down to a stone-walled cellar where the walls were painted, all-too- realistically I was afraid, with signatures and dates: “Whitey — 1926”; Dora and Dolores — 28.”
Mike enlarged his family, too. He got a puppy as a gift the first week we moved into the house.
Glen’s girlfriend, Ginny, brought her own dog when she moved in, and suddenly the house was a kennel. The two dogs would shit all over the place, and Jack would show up in the morning for a crap patrol. He’d call the two dog owners into the living room and demand a cleanup. A marathon argument would ensue.
“That’s Yo-yo’s shit.”
“No it’s not, man. I’m telling you that’s your dogshit and you have to clean it up like a man, man. What a baby, man. It’s a little piece of shit. What’s the big deal. Clean it up.”
“That’s the point, man. It’s a little piece of shit, and my dog shits bigger. And browner, too, man. I’m telling you. Honest!”
Michael was head over heels about Suzi Cream Cheese. She had gumdrop eyes, a big heart, the mind of a stockbroker and the soul of a hustler. She trusted no one. To Suzi Cream Cheese the world at large was a narc. Suzi had mastered the art of double-talk, not just the mumbling of disconnected words, but the grave intonations that went along with it. She gave the impression she understood something very deep and at the heart of the matter that you were obviously not getting. She was famous for being eccentric, the only purebred Warhol person I met in LA.
Suzi Cream Cheese lived for a time in a log cabin stuck in the woods behind Frank Zappa’s house, and the day before our big contract signing, Mike and I snuck over there like two kids disobeying daddy’s orders. We spent the evening watching Miss Christine, Suzi, and Pamela bounce off the walls, all very nutty and charming. We left the cabin near dawn to find the van on a steep incline, the windshield frosted over with a thick layer of ice. I sat inside while Mike wiped hard on the windshield with a rag. I guess he wiped a little to hard. The van started to roll backwards down the hill with me inside and crashed into Zappa’s fourteen-thousand-dollar sports car. Mike ran down the hill after the van and jumped in just as the lights went on all over the house. Zappa ran out after us and chased us down the road in his bare feet.
We were sick with fear for two days, especially when Zappa’s office called that afternoon to say the contact signing was postponed. We waited for him to call back and cancel altogether, but the following day, as scheduled, we put our signatures on the dotted line. Either he never knew it was us who wrecked his car or he never cared.
In November of 1971 [1968 I guess it’s meant to be] we recorded our first album, Pretties For You. For a week straight we arrived at the studio and played through every song five or six times with Herbie Cohen and Zappa working over the levels in the control room. We thought we were just getting down to business, ready to lay the bed tracks and experiment, when Zappa walked out of the glass-enclosed booth and said, “Okay. Your album will be ready next Thursday.”
I said, “There are a few mistakes in that stuff. We weren’t even ready to record,” but he just patted me on the shoulder and said, “Not to worry. Not to worry. We’ll work everything out in the mix.”
We didn’t see or hear the album until five months later.
Nighttime was scene-making time for me in LA. Nobody would pay fifty cents to see us perform but we were first on party guest lists. Instant celebrities. No fuss, no waiting. Just add recording contract to one rock group and stir. We met literally thousands of people at these parties.
We had, unfortunately, the reputation of being the ultra-gay band in Los Angeles, and there were a few people who took the initiative to find out the truth and get to know us better. People who did, and got to know us and what we were about, often became entangled in our madness, possessed with the concept of Alice Cooper, and wound up deeply involved in our lives for years to come.
I was at one of those parties lurking in the kitchen. Kitchen lurking was my favorite pastime. It was compulsion motivated purely by greedy hunger. Parties were the best place to eat. You could fill up while you were there and usually find something in the kitchen to take away with you.
I was rifling through a pantry, tucking away a can of tuna fish into a tablecloth I wore as a shirt, when I
