around the journalism room all afternoon smelling from photographic developer, an unlit cigarette between his lips, and whispered to the girls, “Call me G.B., sweetheart.” The fact of the matter was Glen couldn’t get laid at sixteen if his life depended on it, and his tough guy act was just as limp.
Glen and I became friends basically because he was forbidden. Cortez was a school of goody-goody kids. There was no juvenile delinquency in our clean American Phoenix suburb and Glen was considered a tough kid. His swagger and unlit cigarette was as close as we got to what the principal, George Buckley, called “negative influences on the community.” Buckley, who was a well-known community leader in Phoenix, a Mormon elder and member of the draft board, was obsessed with uncovering “negative influences on the community.” My friendship with Glen soon tainted me. Glen was suspended from school a half a dozen times for long hair and smoking in the bathroom, and when Buckley saw me walking around the Cortez campus with him I was automatically put on his suspicious character list.
In the fall of my junior year I got shafted with the job of organizing the Letterman’s talent show. My biggest problem was that nobody had any talent. Nobody even deluded themselves. I put up signs all over the school and all I found was a freshman who wanted to do magic tricks. I called a meeting in the locker room before a track meet one day and asked for suggestions.
“All right,” I said, clapping my hands together to get their attention, “who wants to do what in the talent show?”
“Let’s put Dunaway in a dress and have him sing ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl,’” John Speer said. John Speer loved to torture Dennis Dunaway. Speer was a senior, a tall well-built eighteen-year-old with a good mid-western face. He was a scene queen. He had to be the center of attraction and everything had to be his way, which he usually achieved because he was long-winded and determined not to fail. He brayed at people, donkeylike, insistent.
Dennis Dunaway was exactly the opposite and Speer hated him because of it. Dennis was my height and almost as skinny, with deep set, moist brown eyes. Speer was frantic and impulsive, Dennis lethargic and good- natured, like a farmer in Iowa. He had the slowest heartbeat on the team, a good advantage for a runner, but he was so very retiring sometimes we didn’t think he could have had more than two heartbeats a day. His placidness drove John Speer nuts, but all of Speer’s venom just splattered on Dennis’ impenetrable hide.
“C’mon. How about if we all sing?” I said. We had been making up parodies of Beatle songs as we ran around the track: “We beat you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” or “Last night I ran three laps for my coach.” But nobody was listening to me. John Speer was hovering over Dennis Dunaway like the Angel of Death, trying to get him angry. I stepped between them and Speer pushed me aside.
“Listen, Dunaway, I want to make a deal with you. Whoever wins this meet doesn’t say one word to the loser. I know it’s going to be a big deal if I beat you, but I won’t say nothing to you if I win, and if I lose you don’t say nothing to me.”
Dennis just sat there nodding, and I forgot about the talent show until after the meet. John Speer beat Dennis. At the last minute he took over in an incredible sprint. When they got back to the lockers Speer was screaming, “Ha! What’s the matter with Dunaway? Didn’t win the meet, did you? Huh, old slow poke?”
Dennis couldn’t have cared less. As he was getting dressed, he said to me, “You want somebody to sing with you? I’ll do it.” Speer was at his side instantly “Sing what? Track songs? Is that what you’re gonna do? Make it look like you’re the big track stars? Not without me, buddy. I represent the track team around here.”
That’s how it started. I convinced Glen Buxton, who already played guitar, to join Dennis and John, and along with the track coach, Emmet Smith, we formed the Earwigs. An earwig is a water scorpion. If you step on one, it releases a terrible stink, and if one gets in your ear it’ll chew right through the ear drum, get into your brain, and drive you crazy.
The night of the Letterman’s talent show we got dressed up in our track suits and long Dynel wigs. Save for Glen, none of us knew how to play any instruments, so we faked it. We all stood on the stage in the cafeteria/auditorium, singing Beatle parodies feeling like idiots. During the last number we arranged for three girls to rush on stage and scream, “Earwigs! Earwigs!”
We caused an uproar in the school, mostly because we were so bad, but I loved the sudden attention. Everybody was talking about it. People complimented me the next day for having the guts to do it, and girls started talking to me who never before would have anything to do with the skinny guy with the big nose from the track team. It stimulated my entertaining chemicals like never before. I got hooked on the limelight. That’s why I went into rock and roll. For fame and sex. I wanted more and more from that night on. To this day coach Emmet Smith hasn’t forgiven himself for letting me taste that moment.
Everybody in school was overjoyed with out new-found fame. There were, of course, the Balducci Brothers. These geeks were the school’s tough Mexican family, and Rubin Balducci was like the Phoenix Godfather. Rubin and his brothers weighed two hundred pounds apiece, and when they pulled up at school every day in a little blue Corvair we used to stand outside in the parking lot to watch the car scrape into the parking lot two inches off the ground.
Rubin had an odd sense of humor. He was always doing things like shaking your hand and then squeezing it real hard until he made you get down on your knees in pain or climb into a garbage can to get him to stop. Then he’d laugh a deep “ho, ho, ho” like a demented Santa Claus.
After Rubin saw us in the Letterman’s show he wouldn’t leave us alone at school. He tripped me in the hallways, pulled at my hair, and once led me around the campus by holding tight onto my nose until Mr. Buckley caught him doing it and made him stop. Somehow I got the blame and wound up coming to school an hour early for a week for punishment.
One afternoon I walked by Rubin in the parking lot and patted him on the back as I said, “Hiya, Balducci!” There was sand and cement under his feet and his legs slid out from under him. His ass seemed to twist up over his head as he hit the ground. When the tremors died down I knew I was dead. Suddenly I heard, “Ho ho ho! Hohohohohohohohoho. Hohohohohoho. You mean that little guy’s the only guy who ever knocked me down?”
After that he always protected me.
Over the year, we taught ourselves how to play instruments and changed our name to the Spiders. We learned all our songs from Yardbirds and Rolling Stones albums which we had to play several hundred times each to figure out the chords.
Although there were some personnel changes for the first two years, the line-up settled to John Speer on drums, Dennis on bass guitar, Glen Buxton on lead guitar, and a friend of Glen’s, John Tatum, on rhythm guitar. I didn’t want to play an instrument. I knew I wasn’t a musician. I was a front man. An entertainer.
I don’t know what we expected from the band. Certainly not to make money, and believe me, we didn’t. We played anywhere they would let us: parties, the community swimming pool, pizza parlors, the school cafeteria. We played our first gig at a party. A pimpled. ugly girl named Lisa Hawks gave a sweet sixteen party and she couldn’t get anybody to come, so her mother hired the Spiders fro twenty bucks.
We spent the summer of 1965 playing in the “Battle of the Bands.” A battle of the Bands was basically a volume contest held in the parking lots of shopping centers all around Phoenix. Every two-bit garage group like us turned up to compete with honking cars, screaming kids and the brutal summer heat. We developed some stage style and even began to play our Yardbirds songs with some ability and by the end of the summer the Spiders were winning every Battle of the Bands we entered. In September we were invited to audition for an ex-disc jockey named Jack Curtis who ran a teen club the VIP Lounge. Curtis hired us, not just for an evening, but as the house band.
The deal that Jack Curtis gave us was quite good for a group that hadn’t been playing more than a year. We had steady employment at $500 a weekend and Curtis even sponsored the recording of a single on his own label. It was called “Why Don’t You Love Me?” and Curtis pressed fifty copies of it. The group bought twenty-five of them and the rest rotted in a phoenix record store.
My sudden elevation to professional standing brought along with it the fruits of stardom: women. My great high school flame was Mimi Hicki. I loved Mimi because she was built like a Corvette. She had conically pointy tits and blue eyes. My zipper got hard whenever I looked at her. The year before I met her father had been killed in a car accident on his way to a corner store for a pack of cigarettes. Since then Mimi wouldn’t let her boyfriends out of her sight, and I loved every minute of the attention.
We were, of course, both virgins, but I was allowed to sneak feels in the back seat of a car or behind the garage where we’d get sticky and dusty from grappling on the desert. I wrestled with her tits and stuck my tongue down her throat, praying that one day she would loosen up and forget herself, letting her hand touch the general
