from a phone book, and ran down the streets trying to hitch a ride. Nobody was about to pick us up looking the way we did so we had to run halfway until we were out of breath and took a taxi the rest of the way which left us with $12.
From the outside the place looked more like a brightly lit greasy spoon diner than a sleazy motorcycle bar, but there were plenty of tough bikers there all right. I could see dozens of them and their girls in the window as the taxi pulled up. The curb was crowded with a row of choppers, and it looked as good a bet as any that we’d find a gun there.
Our entrance caused quite a commotion. The second we walked in a buzz started that grew to a roar until it was louder than the jukebox. Everybody was staring at us, huge hulking leather bikers who whistled and cat-called. Somebody yelled, “Take it off, faggot!”
We sat down in a corner and I stared at the floor.
“You can’t just sit there, man. You have to ask somebody,” Glen whispered.
“Ask somebody!” I choked back. “Do you think I’m nuts? We’re not going to get out of here alive! You want me to ask for a gun on top of it?”
I looked around the room at all the motorcycle jackets and the girls with teased hairdos left over from the fifties and I shuddered. I figured my chances for survival were better if I picked a really big guy to talk to. Anybody near my size would have taken a swat at me immediately.
I felt a sharp pain in my ribs and across the table from me Glen turned white. A huge, filthy bearded biker was shoving his knuckles into my layer of skin and bones.
“I know you,” he said. “You’re that weirdo rock group. You’re the rock group of the Hells Angels in San Francisco.”
“I killed a chicken tonight and drank its blood onstage,” I offered.
Well, we were in. I knew we’d get out of there with our hides intact and maybe a gun, too. Glen suggested asking some of those guys back to the hotel with us for protection, but I couldn’t think of anything more horrible than having to play a minor celebrity with four smelly bikers. When I asked about a gun they thought it was a terrifically cool idea. They loved the idea that we were looking for a gun. “No wonder the Angels like you,” one of them said. “You guys really are weird! You going to hold up a bank or what?”
I told him I needed it as part of the show, which he readily accepted. He talked with some buddies for a few minutes and informed us we could buy a revolver for two hundred dollars. Glen looked at me. “This sucks.” he said. “You and your stupid murder threats. I’m leaving.”
“Murder threats,” the biker asked. “Somebody coming down on you guys? If you need protection we’ll be glad to stick the guy’s head up his ass.”
I said we wanted the satisfaction of taking care of it ourselves, but that our financial situation was rather poor. Would it be possible to get a gun for twelve dollars? There was a lot of discussion among the bikers while Glen sat there glaring at me. He kept punching me in the arm and every time the bikers weren’t looking I’d slug him back.
Finally they said we could have a gun for ten dollars, only it didn’t work. I didn’t really want to shoot anybody so I said it was all right with me and they asked us to step to the back of the bar. Glen suddenly got very brave and said he would handle it and left me sitting out front with all the people staring and nodding at me like a freak in a sideshow. I smiled back at them for twenty minutes while Glen was gone.
Walking back to the hotel Glen told me that before he paid for the gun, the biker offered to shoot him up with LSD. When Glen declined the biker insisted that Glen help tie off a vein for him. Glen waited while the guy diluted the acid in a cold drop of water. Then he tied the biker’s biceps with his belt until the veins bulged and he watched the guy shoot LSD straight into his veins.
When we got back to the hotel we found we had bought only half a gun and got plastered drunk telling Cindy the story. We even fell asleep with the door unlocked. The next morning we woke to find Steven himself, his pockets filled with hundreds of Seconal, sleeping on the floor beside us, a loaded gun in his hand.
That day while the rest of the group flew to Buffalo for a gig at the State University Cindy and I drove Steven back to Detroit in his car. He was unconscious for the rest of the day, and we stuck another Seconal in his mouth every time he opened it. We only left him alone once, to eat dinner at a diner just outside of Detroit. When we got back to the car he was asleep on the hood, stark raving naked. We left him lying there, like a hood ornament, and hitched the rest of the way to Detroit. It was the last time either of us saw him.
CHAPTER 10
There wasn’t a promoter in the country who would have us on stage. After the chicken incident we had a dual reputation: not only were we bad, we were dangerous. We were a treat to the music business. We would give rock and roll a bad name. The reaction was the same everywhere, from record company executives to other musicians. They were outraged. We obviously didn’t belong. What the fuck was a band doing dressing up in drag and killing chickens? Anything for a buck?
Janis Joplin’s manager, Albert Grossman, let it be known that he wouldn’t let us onstage with her. We went to Washington, D.C., for a concert and the Grateful Dead refused to let us use their sound system. Grace Slick insisted we be allowed to go on or she and Jefferson Airplane would refuse to play.
Alan Strahl didn’t even want the headache of handling us anymore. He was thinking about retiring and moving to Jamaica. He didn’t need to break his ass peddling a rock group that everybody hated. He handled the most expensive and prestigious groups in the country, and Alice Cooper was making him lose his credibility. One promoter told him he could take all of IFA’s rock acts and shove them if he had to book Alice Cooper as an opening act as part of the package deal. That’s a ten-million-dollar shove and a lot of bad vibes.
When we went back to Los Angeles for the first time in seven months the John Phillip Law house was full of strange people, a rock group called the Doak Savages, and all our belongings were gone. We had been moved out. Jack had been fired. He had told John Phillip Law that we had moved out seven months ago and pocketed the rent money ever since.
We moved instead into three furnished rooms at 2001 North Ivar, in Hollywood. The rooms were dumpy and depressing, with two double beds in each room that we had to share. It was a long way from the pop star house and swimming pool and a hard homecoming.
Alan Strahl finally found a promoter who had never heard of us and needed an inexpensive rock band to open a new coliseum in Las Vegas. Las Vegas seemed the least likely place for us to play, but it was $1,500 for the night and not a long drive from LA. It turned out we were opening the show for “A Group Called Smith.” They were a family act, like the King Family, and they had scores of children who locked themselves in the dressing room when they saw us coming. The audience loathed us.
The only possible shot left for us was to come up with a hit album, which we had as much chance of doing at that time as going to the moon. First of all, Zappa wasn’t anxious to spend money recording again. He had no interest in us anymore. I lost contact with Zappa at that point. He was a terrific friend but a mean businessman. As things got progressively sticky, I ducked out and let Shep and Joey handle him. We hired our own producer, David Briggs, and finally recorded a second LP, Easy Action, with Herbie Cohen sitting in as executive producer. The record went very badly. We had poor material and no enthusiasm. By the time we got to the final mix I knew it was all over for us. On a penniless Thanksgiving morning Cindy arrived from Detroit and my parents came in from Phoenix. We ate turkey in the spooky room at 2001 North Ivar and my mother’s eyes filled with tears when she saw how I lived and the way I looked. In the beginning of December Shep and Joey left for New York, to stay there indefinitely. They stopped paying rent for us at 2001 North Ivar. We all packed it in and went home to Phoenix.
I told everyone we had taken a month off before we started a cross-country tour. I told everyone from Jack Curtis to old schoolteachers that Easy Action would soon be a hit record, and they all nodded and clucked. My parents went along with me, but they knew I was lying. Nickie didn’t know what to say. She avoided looking me in the eye for a week. I brought Cindy home with me which didn’t make my parents happy. Now that it was over — this business of being a rock star — Cindy should have been over, too, they thought.
Nickie said that gossip in Phoenix was buzzing that the five of us had come home. The story was we had all become drug freaks, and me a sex-change. LA had ruined us. The church members couldn’t wait to get a look at
