being brought up at the Landmark Hotel. Eva, when she wasn’t throwing temper tantrums, spoke with the vocabulary of a ten-year-old and painted her fingernails Groupie Green.
Susan Starfucker was covetous of every moment I spent with Janis Joplin. It wasn’t that she was jealous of Janis, but Janis would get me drunk enough to only want to roll into the sack and go to sleep. Susan would cry and scream at me when I knocked on her door at four A.M. looking for bed and head. She looked just like Eva when she cried like that. She told me that getting drunk with Janis was just as good as being unfaithful. I couldn’t see how these things were parallel, but Susan said that if I got drunk with Janis our mutual celibacy vow was off.
On the nights I was too drunk to get home, too drunk to face Susan, and in need of cover, I slept in the back seat of cars in the musty concrete garage beneath the hotel. I woke up many a morning wedged between dirty ashtrays and Naugahyde seats. My alarm clock was usually somebody banging on the window of their car, “Hey, creep, get out of the fucking car.” Once I woke up and found Glen sleeping in the front seat of the same car by coincidence.
My relationship with Susan Starfucker came to an abrupt end that spring. I actually believed that Susan wasn’t sleeping with anybody else, even on her nights off. She reinforced this belief by constantly reminding that she had thrown away her address book. An address book to a groupie is like the key to heaven! Her address book was thrown up to me at many points in our relationship. “Here you are, too drunk! Too drunk to fuck and I threw away my address book! Threw it away! My whole life, all those numbers, for you, and show up with a belly full of booze and a limp dick!”
One night Susan went down to the lobby to get a pack of cigarettes and there on the dresser, in full view, was her infamous little black book. I went through it and found not only names and numbers of every musician in LA, but dates and scoring. I was smitten. My love, the starfucker, was unfaithful. I was sure I was filled with disease. How could Susan do this to me?
When she got back to the room we had a terrible fight. In pleaded with her to give me an explanation, tell me it wasn’t the truth, but she couldn’t believe my melodrama. She said I was becoming to serious.
“Too serious?” I shouted. (Probably the only time I can remember myself shouting.) “I’m probably a walking incubator for every venereal disease in LA. I thought I itched funny! How could you?”
I scooped up all the records I had loaned her and left her with Eva. I went to the garage, crawled into the back seat of an old Cadillac Shep had purchased the day before, and cried myself to sleep on my Laura Nyro albums.
CHAPTER 8
The parties, people, places, surrounding our lives and blurred days. Through all this, this seamless madness, we were poor, but happy. Like all bad times, they were good times because they had to be to survive it. Looking back on it, it was frantic and forced. In reality, nothing was going right. Our first album, Pretties For You, was nowhere in sight. There were technical delays, problems with mixes, hassles about packaging, disputes over rights. We heard every conceivable excuse not to release the album. By the time winter had passed the $6,000 was gone and we had giggled every go-go bar fraternity house in Southern California. Merry Cornwall dubbed us “Desperation Rock and Roll.”
The tour that Zappa promised never seemed to materialize. The only halfway decent booking we got that winter was a package deal at the Shrine Auditorium in December, where Zappa displayed us, The GTOs, and Captain Beefheart for the press. The reviews brushed us aside as another burned-out bunch of acid heads.
The real problem was we were the antithesis of everything that was happening in music at that time. Rock and roll was the pride of the nation’s young. Never before in history was music as important a social force. It unified an entire generation, a very powerful and offbeat generation. It was the journalism of the sixties, an electronic minstrel singing of peace, flowers and LSD. And it was taken very seriously. So many rock musicians really believed that they were the prophets. There was only one way to compete in the rock industry then, and that was with quality music. Music we didn’t have. We had an abundance of weirdness and a lot of guts, but no listenable sound. There were complex chord changes every few beats and monochromatic melody lines. We didn’t even know what a melody was. So we completed the only way we knew how — theatrics.
We used everything we could borrow or steal as a prop: fire extinguishers and pillows, goggles, a toilet seat, an oar or a broom. We let out instruments feed back an ear-shattering squeal and beat each other up on stage like the inmates at Charington. Once we almost suffocated ourselves. We stole a large container of CO2 gas for a Coca-Cola plant and at the end of the act, when we did a big rave-up on a song called “I’m a man,” I let a weather balloon slowly fill up with the gas. On the last chord of the song I climbed up the amplifiers and broke the balloon with a sword. The heavy gas dropped on us. Neal fell into his drum kit and spawled on the floor and I passed out beside him. We got a standing ovation when they carried us off the stage on stretchers with oxygen masks. It was also around that time that Glen Buxton started to smear cigarette ashes under his eyes. This quickly snowballed into mascara and eyeshadow, and within a month we were all wearing makeup.
The time had come for us to get out on the road. In New York, She and Joey were frantically looking a booking agent to handle us before we bankrupted them. They played the telephone game, trying to get through to people who had just stepped away from their office or were in meeting. A million phone calls trying to get past a million closed doors. Using the invisible album as an edge, Shep finally got up the International Famous Agency, where we cajoled, begged and befriended a man named Alan Strahl. At twenty-four, Strahl was one of the most successful guys in the business. He was a short, sunshiny-faced man with a remarkable sense of humor — probably the reason he took up on us as clients.
Alan Strahl didn’t exactly know what he was getting into. He heard through the grapevine that we were a little weird, but that was all. Shep, after all, was a nice boy from Long Island, like Alan, so what could be wrong? With Strahl behind us we got a few dates.
We played Salt Lake City for $700, The University of Boulder for $1,000, The Black Dome in Cincinnati for $1,250, and Vancouver, British Columbia, in March for $1,500, where we saw the first copy of Pretties For You with an Ed Beardsley painting on the cover sealed in plastic.
Pretties For You may have been declared a classic years later in Germany, but in 1968 it was a dud. People hated it in droves. It was called a “tragic waste of vinyl” by one critic although it had some of our best compositions on it, like “10 Minutes Before the Worm” and “Swing Low Sweet Cheerio.” Dennis had written a masterpiece for that album called “B.B. On Mars.” When Alan Strahl got a copy of the record in New York, curious to hear what it sounded like, he was only able to listen to twenty seconds of it before he had to shut off the record player.
We had our fans, however. The Hells Angels adored the album. The president of the San Francisco chapter of the Angels was a longtime Zappa fan, and when Pretties For You came out he was one of the few thousand people who bought a copy. He told Zappa to tell us that we represented more of what the Hells Angels stood for than the Grateful Dead, a supreme compliment. As word spread on us, the Angels would show up backstage everywhere we played. It was a frightening fan club, and we treated them gingerly and with respect.
In April, only seven months after signing a recording contract, we were $40,000 in the hole. There was literally no work left for us in LA. We had played the town out. The only choice was to find another city or another location where the Alice Cooper band would be better received.
Whatever you do, if you’re new and haven’t played around, you don’t go to New York. New York isn’t considered a “breaking town” in the record business. You have to be big already by the time you hit New York, and then you’ve got to be good to stay big. If they don’t like you in New York they put the word out on you and you’re crippled in the music business. They send you back to the hinterlands without a second chance.
I don’t know if Shep knew how dangerous it was to take us to New York, but I think he wanted to get it over, put us out of our misery, so to speak. Alan Strahl and Shep wrangled a whole East Coast suicide spree for us. Strahl’s influence got us a booking fourth on the bill at the Felt Forum on June 6, 1968, followed by two nights at Steve Paul’s Scene. On June 13 we went to the Electric Factory in Philadelphia for two days before returning to New York for three more nights at the Scene.
Memorial weekend we piled into a station wagon like lambs to a slaughter and with a van full of lights and sound equipment following us we drove to New York. We arrived on a hot, humid day, a city-broiler that makes the tar soft and glistening and the air fetid and thick. We spent a good hour driving in circles around Madison Square
