By spring of my freshman year my thoughts turned not to love but west, to Los Angeles. We had done just about everything we could do in Arizona. We played every city, school, and dive with a stage. We were, in fact, famous in Phoenix, which to me was the worst kind of compliment. College was boring, and rock and roll was fun. In order to go one step further we needed a record deal, and we knew that the only way to get one was in LA.
Armed with a few dozen posters of the Spiders (in which we looked like five hungry, hairy orphans) and some “Don’t Blow Your Mind” singles, Dick Christian went off to the glittery city on the sea to get us auditions with record companies.
He never quite made it to the record companies. As soon as he got to LA he stopped into a bar on Sunset Boulevard to have a beer. A tall, blond woman shuffled up next to him. Dick swore she was as exact ringer for Kim Novak. Dick had been a Novak freak ever since he saw her in Bell, Book and Candle. He fantasized when he was fifteen about being a warlock to Novak’s witch while he jerked off.
She took Dick home with her. There was a lot of heavy tongues and feels, with “Kim Novak” keeping Dick’s hands away from the secret thatch. After forty minutes of trying, Dick got her dress off and found that his cock wasn’t the only hard one in the room.
“Kim Novak” explained that she (he) often picked up young guys in bars, took them home and made out with them for a while, and when the guys were hot enough so it didn’t matter, she (he) let them in on the joke. She (he) insisted that all of the guys were horny enough at that point to fuck her (him) anyway, and that Dick should go right ahead with what he was doing. But Dick didn’t have the heart, or the hard-on, and thanked her and left.
It was the craziest thing I had ever heard! And I thought I was weird! LA sounded so crazy, so otherworldly. I couldn’t wait to go! It wasn’t that I wanted to meet a drag queen — it was that I wanted to live in a society where one could exist.
CHAPTER 4
The year 1967 was the year of the follicle. Hair. Hippies.
Boy, what a strange movement that was. I never understood the hippies at all. Communes? Drugs? Sharing everything? How dumb. I thought the American Way was to want to be rich and famous. I never understood people who dedicated their lives to causes, like politics. The only politics I knew about was Mr. Buckley and the draft board. What did I know from free love? I still got excited if Mimi Hicki let me feel her up!
But that’s all there was in Los Angeles in 1967 — hippies — and you had to learn to deal with it. The first time the band ever went there was on Easter Sunday to play at a hippie free concert in Griffith Park. We drove straight to Sunset Boulevard and couldn’t believe our eyes. There must have been 10,000 hairy, barefoot, stoned flower children, listlessly gliding along Sunset Strip. And all the girls had hair under their arms. They lived up to ever cliche I had ever heard about them in Phoenix. They threw flowers in the open windows of the car and waved Easter Sunday palm branches at us. We hung out of the car and shook hands with them and kissed the girls. One girl ran alongside the car and fed me half and egg roll in little bites. Somebody in the backseat dropped down his pants and stuck his cock out the rear window of the station wagon which the girl managed to kiss as the car picked up speed. It was astounding that all this energy existed in Los Angeles when Phoenix was so low key. And it was even more shocking to me that I had little in common with all those kids, even though our hair was the same length.
Later that afternoon I stood on a food line in the park for two hours and watched 15,000 people sway in unison to Iron Butterfly playing “Ina Gadda Vida.” I had smelled grass backstage at gigs and in open cars and houses, but I’d never been in a huge open park where there was literally a pot stench. When I got up to the line a fat slob with a hairy belly dished a spoonful of watery stew on my plate and said, “Peace, Brother.” I couldn’t believe he was serious. I was afraid to eat anything. I figured that anything anybody gave me for free had to have LSD in it.
I took my plate over to a tree behind the stage where Glen and Dick were talking to a hippie with daisies stuck in his furry hair.
“It’s true man,” he was saying. “They come in off the freeway. They use the freeway as a landing strip, see? And then they steal people out of their houses for experimentation.”
Dick said, “This is Sergeant Garcia, and he knows a lot about flying saucers.”
“Don’t they land on any cars when they hit the freeway?” Glen asked him.
“That’s the thing man!” Garcia said, his face suddenly contracted into a ripple of nervous twitches. “They crush dozens of cars every night, and the government tries to cover it up so the people won’t panic. It’s our job, man, to spread the word.”
I learned from Dick that Sergeant Garcia had just been released from a psychiatric hospital and felt attracted to us because we were crazy, too. He gave us his address and phone number if we ever needed a place to sleep and even helped us load the equipment into the station wagon when the gig was over.
The next day we walked into a club on the Strip cold and asked if we could audition. The owner, who wore beads around his neck and smoked cigars, was surprisingly pleasant and told us to come back the next night at seven. Just as we set up our equipment he opened the doors to the club. He said he wanted to see what the public thought of us. This was the first of many scams we were to have perpetrated on us in LA. We “auditioned” for three hours that night, to a fairly crowded club, and when it was over he told us we didn’t sound just right but thanks anyway.
We went back to Phoenix and finished up some jobs; a prom in Gallup, New Mexico, one in Albuquerque, a rock concert in Riverside, California. But we couldn’t stay home another week after that. We decided to change out name to the Nazz, one of those arbitrary decisions that seemed very practical at the time. We were each able to save up forty dollars from our salaries and again we piled into the station wagon and headed for LA.
We checked into six-dollar-a-night cubicles at the Sunset Motor Inn and set off for the Hullabaloo Club. In 1967 the Hullabaloo was one of the most important clubs in the country. It was a showcase for new talent that spawned hundreds of rock musicians. Like the Scene and Max’s Kansas City and many other famous clubs, the Hullabaloo provided the space, setting and ambience for rock people to meet and make deals. The Hullabaloo worked an after-hours policy, running live acts from midnight to dawn. While Los Angeles withdrew, another world was just beginning to buzz at the Hullabaloo. The place was filled to capacity every night with record company A&R men, managers, groupies, publicists, and the whole rainbow of drug dealers, con artists and homosexuals that appear wherever rock and roll is.
If you were a known group with a record label, you were paid one hundred dollars to play. The Doors played the Hullabaloo often, even after their hit single, just to get off playing for a hip crowd. But most groups played for free, and we were lucky to get the chance. Being seen at the Hullabaloo was a ticket to heaven. We signed up for two nights and lucked out with a good time — four A.M.
I guess we expected a talent scout to come running out of the audience and offer us a million-dollar contract. We didn’t even get applause. By the end of our second show we were thoroughly depressed. The audience was completely indifferent to us. The speakers might as well have been turned off. All our money was gone and we couldn’t even afford the six-dollar-a-night motel. We had to leave Los Angeles again the next morning after only a five-day stay, and I couldn’t believe we had been devoured so quickly. We hadn’t.