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 me.
I was sick to my stomach with anxiety. I couldn’t face Phoenix like that, finished, defeated. When I woke in the mornings I locked the bedroom door and got drunk so I could go back to sleep. I locked out my parents and Cindy and Phoenix. I wanted to die. I tried to figure out how to kill myself, but the thought was preposterous. I wasn’t about to give anybody the satisfaction. Nothing more could have been wrong.
I didn’t even have the pleasure of sleeping with Cindy in my parents’ house. They never would have put up with it under their roof, so Cindy slept on the sofa in the living room, and we had four-in-the-morning trysts in the guest bathroom.
P.S. Cindy got pregnant.
Where was I going to get the money for an abortion? Think of it. An alcoholic son of a minister who everybody thinks is a sex-change is having suicidal fantasies because his girl friend got pregnant in the bathtub.
It was the ultimate soap opera. Rodney in Peyton Place couldn’t have gotten into so much trouble. Life in a low-budget movie, I tell you!
Dick Christian talked his sister Bonnie into driving Cindy to Detroit where she knew an abortionist and could borrow money from friends. I felt like a real shit.
Believe me, I didn’t feel bad about the abortion itself; a situation like that is exactly why abortions are so important. Having a child at that moment would have been the worst thing in the world for all of us. I felt bad because she had to drive cross-country with no money, and I was no support at all. Cindy took off to Detroit with Bonnie, and I laid in my bed fantasizing they would be killed in a car crash. I was so down it was disgusting and I hated myself for it. I thought everything was my fault.
Soon I couldn’t afford to get drunk. One evening I was lying in bed waiting for the inevitable phone call that Cindy had been killed in a car crash at an intersection in Kansas when my mother came into my room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s wrapped in a paper bag. She placed it on top of my dresser like it was poison and she said that if I told my father she gave it to me he would kill her. It was the saddest, sweetest thing she ever did. She couldn’t bear to see me that way and she didn’t know what else to do to help me.
I dreamed of car accidents, Cindy’s and my own. I woke up sweating and vomiting and got drunk again. I tried to stop breathing, hold my breath and cease to exist. I got angry. I wanted to destroy the world. I wanted to make them wish they had never heard of me. I knew I couldn’t go any lower than what I already had become laying in that bed, so it didn’t matter what I did. I had been through hell. People laughed at me. I ruined my health. I lived through a thousand backstage backstabbing scenes. I shared my life and love and laundry with seven other people in three years.
I thought, Fuck you all. You will not stop me. You want to see me dead? Would I sell any albums if the next time I got a chance I hung myself by the neck and choked to death in front of 50,000 people? Is that what it would take to make it? If so, the hell with you. I’ll do it.
CHAPTER 11
It was heaven. It was bliss. It was only $250 a month. It was a white, five-bedroom farmhouse in the lush green countryside of Michigan, and it was all ours. Not even the state penal camp, which was across the road, or the roadie who OD’d the day we moved in there could dampen our enthusiasm for our new home. We had been on the road for eight months by the time we settled at the Pontiac farm that August, and it was a miracle we were still together at all.
The day before New Year’s Eve in Phoenix, visions of suicide dancing in my head, we got a job. New Year’s Eve is the hardest time to book a band because every two-bit club in the country wants live entertainment for New Year’s. If a club owner waits as long as Thanksgiving to book he’ll be stuck with whatever’s left over. If you wait long enough, let’s say until Christmas, you might even have to hire the Alice Cooper group. Good old Ziggy came up with $2,700 worth of plane tickets, and on New Year’s Eve we flew off to Toronto for a job at a place called the Rock Pile.
Once we were back on the road we managed to keep rolling, first to Detroit, where I was able to pick up Cindy. We spent January in a series of flophouses, February in Canada, shivering under mounds of blankets and catching a million colds, and March in the back seat of a ‘65 Chevy station wagon zigzagging around the countyside, playing $500 jobs. In Cincinnati, at a club called the Black Dome, we heard about a vacant fraternity house for rent from the club’s manager, Ronnie Volz. He introduced us to one of the fraternity brothers, Buff, who rented us the top two floors of the building, including six bedrooms and two dormitory-style bathrooms for $150 a month.
We spent what seemed like all summer, painting, building and patching, clearing out trash and old books. It wasn’t the same as the John Phillip Law house in LA but at least we had a permanent home. One night we were writing music in the attic when a kid in cutoff Bermuda shorts and a Phi-Ep T-shirt came stumbling into the room with two suitcases. He was so upset to find us living there, in the redecorated house, we had to give him a warm Pabst Blue Ribbon and a heat massage to calm him down.
Like Jack Crow, Buff had no authority to rent us the house. But unlike Jack, who kept the money for himself, Buff had been saving the rent for the brotherhood. That didn’t mean they were happy to have us there. As more of them returned to the house from vacations we handed out more warm Pabst.