“What? Nothing what.”
“Nothing what, says nuthin’. Say somethin’!” I muscle up in his face and give him a little whack on his left shoulder with my open right palm. He don’t react. Don’t clench up, just puffs on his cigarette and blows the smoke away from me. So I pull back.
He says, “I feel these are a tiny bit pedestrian.”
I says, “Okay.” Again, I ain’t sure what he means. Like pedestrian traffic? I says, “What’s yours?”
It’s all political, like “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” or shit I don’t know, which I’m guessing is political, so I says, “Are we a rock band or a political group?”
“We’re a rock band with a point of view. You get two vetoes like everyone else.”
Lux and Absurda are with him on this, so I got two choices — agree or step out. I let it go. Later, at the house, I look up “pedestrian” in Absurda’s dictionary and it says “dull or uninspired.” Me and Absurda stay up all day and night doing speedballs and fucking, but I am still pissed when we get to rehearsal. Right off, he apologizes in front of Absurda, Lux, and Falstaffa. “I’m sorry. They’re some good songs.” We choose Deep Purple’s “Never Before” and Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band,” and they became crowd pleasers. Years later when I do my solo covers, I title it Songs for Pedestrian Tastes.
But his apology don’t cut it and I’m still sizzling from the coke. Before we split for the night, he corners me alone and this time he gets in my face, inches up to my nose, not his usual style, and says matter-of-fact, “We, the band, need your unpredictable edge. I’m glad you and Absurda are together. Only thing … if you two keep hitting the smack and coke so hard, it’s you who’s out. Not her—you.”
Protesting is useless. I could eat shit or I could quit. For once, somewhere, I figured out, truth, he was being selfish, but also truth, he was trying to protect me and Absurda. I still did more than a bit a dabbling after that. I can’t understand why I never got hooked. I could quit easier than quitting eating Twinkies.
It’s clear Alchy was in such a damn hurry ’cause he was obsessed with springing Salome from the funny farm. He was writing songs like one a day. Before we even had a contract, he wants to start a company to handle publishing rights. Sue hired some clammy-mouthed entertainment lawyer who asked for some scambooger deal. Alchemy didn’t buy that shit. He found Kim Dooley, a super-juicy, super-sharp paralegal who saw us early on at a USC frat party. She and Alchy had a quick thing and stayed friends. Kim set up Scofflaw Music for a few hundred bucks. A few years later, we paid for her law school and she got richer than she could’ve ever dreamed because she became our lifelong lawyer. Alchemy gave us each credit for writing the music even though he wrote ninety percent of it, and that turns out to be mucho millions.
In the summer of ’93, Sue and Andrew invite a bunch of A&R guys to the St. James’s Club on the Strip. That day we was as nervous as I ever seen us. Even Alchemy, who’s usually the picture a confidence. Before we go on, Alchemy tosses me a T-shirt that says CAN I KILL YOU, PLEASE with a drawing of a 357 on it, a riff on the “Please Kill Me” shirt Richard Hell designed with a bull’s-eye back in the ’70s. Alchy yells, “My mom made it for you.”
“Really?”
“You’re a killah, right?”
’Course I put it on.
We’re standing just offstage and I see two hundred men in suits. Even if they ain’t in suits, they’re in suits with their shiny STDs — Silicone-Titted Dollfaces — on their arms. I see a few grungy crit types, and some who is old enough to be my father. Not our usual audience. I hear Alchemy muttering and repeating, “Failure equals death. Failure equals death.” Which kind of scares me.
When he’s ready, he leads us out. The lights is dim and we’re so fucking amped we hit the stage and never lose it. This big-shot critic, Zed Cone, who was a friend of Sue Warfield, wrote about the show for LA Weekly and really started the buzz.
THIS WEEK’S ZED CONE
What Is the Color of Alchemy in the Silence?
“Tonight’s the dream you’ve been waiting for all our lives …” With a glint of cheek and irony, the Insatiables singer-songwriter and soon-to-be superstar Alchemy Savant led his band into the spellbinding “Futurific.” Never was the future so danceable. Song over, still in his trance, eyes closed, he swilled the last drops from a bottle of whiskey as his band mates, whose musicianship is as precise as a Swiss clock and their stage presence as combustible as a Molotov cocktail, strummed and drummed to a bristling backbeat.
Savant glided into the mesmerized crowd, and in one graceful motion placed the empty bottle of whiskey on the tray of a nearby waitress. A group sitting at a front table leaned forward, nearly propelling their bodies out of their seats toward him. Savant flashed an enigmatic smile, leaned over, made a slow snakelike motion with his right arm, and swiped a beer bottle from a woman at the table. He took two huge gulps.
Savant wet his lips salaciously with his tongue and staccato-stepped backward in time to Compton’s own Lux Deluxe’s smashmouth drumbeat. Then — bim bam BOOM! The lithe, erotic, and dexterous CalArts-trained lead guitarist Absurda Nightingale and the menacing, teenage ex-con bassist Ambitious Mindswallow bashed into the rock noir “Licentious to Kill.” The song over, the stage went dark until two spotlights settled upon Mindswallow and Lux Deluxe, face-to-face and clench-fisted. In a harrowing reimagining of Sly Stone’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey,” they raised the tension from taunting to warlike — and ended with Lux kissing a stunned-looking Mindswallow on the lips.
For the encore, Savant returned to center stage and led his cohorts in mayhem into “More (Is Never Enough)” their three-chord, jaw-breaking comic anthem declaring that all he — his band — each of us — that all America ever wanted was more, more, and more.
Zed Cone answer: The color of the music in your dreams.
(I read the thing about five hundred times. Sent it to my parents, who had asked for money. I toss in fifty bucks with a note that says, “Thanks for nuthin’.” Signed it, “Your useless son.” My bastid father writes back, “Figures, he don’t hardly mention you except when you kissed a nigger. You always was a nigger lover.” I wish I could’ve beat the fuckin’ crap outta him. I settle for ripping the note into a thousand fuckin’ pieces.)
Sue and Andrew had strategerized right. Lotta the big company dudes showed up. During “Face Time Is the Right Time,” Absurda skanked into the audience and pretended to give head to half the old fart execs. She spread her legs like she wanted them to suck her pussy, and poor Randy Sheik, no fuckin’ lie, spurted in his pants!
Man, the Sheiks, they were real beauties. Their rep is as bit players and hustlers with second-rate acts who had finally hit it big with the rapper MC Kreep, and Samureye, four nerds from Brooklyn whose gimmick was dressing up as the heavy metal band Samurais. They made a star outta Viviana Kerry, this teenage lollipop music slut queen, who was doing Buddy.
You had to love the Sheik’s chutzpah. They went from the Sheicksteins of Bayonne to the Sheiks of Venice, CA. Their offices was like Leonard’s of Great Neck meets an Arab oasis. Splashed out all blingy lamé and shiny shit and fake palm trees and stuffed camels. The waiting area was designed in the shape and dirty brown color of a chopped-liver camel.
They was three brothers. Randy, who thinks he is a Jew Luca Brassi but he’s only the family water boy. Absurda used to jive him that if he lost fifty pounds and cut his ’stache she’d give him the best blow job in the world. Walter was maybe forty and stooped over like a Jewy bookkeeper with his black-rimmed glasses, short and skinny. I use to peek down and tickle his bald spot and tease him, “Walter, you forgot your pope’s cap.”