“I’ll give you a chance to prove it. You come by my room tonight and I’ll give you a chance to prove it.”
I never got to sleep with Janis, but along with Jim Morrison, Janis had one of the greatest influences on my drinking habits. She got me off wine and onto Southern Comfort, which was eventually to lead to Seagram’s VO, my constant friend and traveling companion. I did go to Janis’ room that night and many other nights, but all we ever did was polish off bottles of Southern Comfort and laugh. Then in the midst of a drunken slur she’d excuse herself and ask me to leave. I always left right away, without much questioning, because I sensed some sort of panic settling over her at those times. (Anyway, she could beat me up — she was a lot bigger than me.)
I would run into her sometimes when she was stoned on heroin, her eyes dull mirrors, her body limp and ashen white. She’d be stumbling down the hallway being held up by a friend and I would rush off in the other direction, too depressed by the sight to face her.
One night I was in her room while Janis pretended to read my tarot cards, impishly predicting a tragic future “for a strange boy with a girl’s name,” and I saw a suitcase sail by her second-storey window. When I told her, she laughed and said I was drunk. Ten minutes further into my murky future there were two feet dangling outside the window and we both jumped us as the feet kicked in a pane of glass. Janis ran up to the window and started tugging on the feet, yelling, “Oh, you fucking bastard, get out of here!”
I ran up the firesteps and banged on the door to the apartment above Janis’. Three guys from the Ohio State football team opened the door, dressed in their underwear. The room behind them was a mess. One bruiser immediately pushed down very hard on my right shoulder with his hand and said, “Whataya want?” I told him somebody was dangling out a window, but I must have had the wrong room. He slammed the door on my face.
I rushed back down to Janis’ where I was going to look out the window expecting to see somebody lying dead on the pavement. Instead Janis and the dangler were sitting on the bed swigging Southern Comfort. Four other panes of glass had been kicked in and Janis pulled him through the window. He was holding a dirty, bloody towel to one foot which was leaking blood into the Landmark’s wafer-thin blue carpeting.
I don’t know how or why that scene occurred at the Landmark. An evening at the Landmark was filled with chaotic segments of wonder: a girl giving birth on the sofa in the lobby, drowning in the pool, rape, sodomy demonstrations. All of this, for me, was pervaded with the presence of Susan Starfucker and her daughter Eva. Eva, the child of the nameless rock musician, was a dolt. I usually get along well with children — we have the same sensitivity — but I couldn’t warm up to Eva. She was a red-faced, cranky four-year-old, who had the misfortune of 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.