He walked into our hotel room and I saw panic on his face, as if he had just opened a surprise package and found a box full of maggots. Not only was it bad enough we were lousy musicians, but we were gay too! I was wearing skintight pants with seductive splits up the side and when I saw Ezrin look away in disgust I goaded him by asking him if he liked the belt I was wearing, a three-year-old painted leather strap, curled over from rain and perspiration. I thought he would vomit. Talk about bad first impressions, wait until he told Richardson what we were really like!
It really didn’t matter to Leo Fenn what Ezrin told Richardson. Leo wouldn’t let him alone. He just wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not for a minute. The phone calls continued to come into Nimbus 9 by the hundreds.
Ezrin: “No. Jack Richardson is not interested. No body is interested. I told you yesterday, Leo. Please stop calling here. It’s no dice.”
Leo: “But just come and see them in person. See them do one live show. That’s all I’m asking you. One live show. What can you tell from meeting them in a hotel room? If you see them live you’ll understand what they re getting at.”
Ezrin: “I heard all about the chickens and watermelon and it’s just not good enough. Chickens and watermelon can’t be put on an album. They just don’t have the sound or talent.”
It went on that way right through the rest of the summer and fall of 1970. We played twelve dates in the midwest in September, which included the last of the outdoor festivals, before the season was over. In October Shep booked us into Max’s Kansas City in New York to see if there was a producer or a record company — anybody at all — who was interested in us.
Max’s Kansas City is gone now. And it’s good and it’s a shame. In its last few years it turned into a depressing glitter groupie hangout, filled with everybody who had the carfare from Brooklyn. But years ago, in the late sixties and early seventies, it was a haven of decadence, of the unreal, theater of the absurd becoming life of the absurd. At the time the infamous back room at Max’s was restricted: freaks only. Mickey Ruskin, who owned Max’s, didn’t care if the place was empty. If you weren’t hip enough to belong there, you had to sit up front with the tourists. It was the Algonquin of its day.
This was a topsy-turvy world where drag queens and leather boys were held in esteem. There was no other single place that you could be accepted, even lauded, for being different. To the people in Max’s being different was a creative effort all in itself. Bob Ezrin, who was trying to give Leo Fenn the slip every day, was in New York on business the night we played Max’s. He dropped in there on his way home from Hair (which Ezrin thought was progressive theater at the time). I looked very rodentlike that night. My hair was unwashed and stringy. I wore enormous high heels and thick black mascara. I carried on no end. I shredded newspaper and spit at the audience and rubbed my crotch and smelled my hands. Fifteen minutes into the set a policeman rushed into the club. That was unheard of at Max’s. The police coming in! With all the strange things that had happened there nobody ever got the police there! He had received a complaint about the noise and had come by, politely enough, to ask us to turn down the volume. When he got there and saw me sashaying around the stage spitting at people and rubbing myself he thought the show ought to be stopped. The cop pushed his way down the middle of the room, asking people to stand up so he could get by. Leo followed him shouting, “You have no right to stop this show! This show is not obscene! Stay off the stage!”
Nothing more perfect could have happened. Not even if the cop had been hired. Maybe he was.
Ezrin was vibrating in the audience. He didn’t know what he felt. He saw us as a walking identity crisis. All the sexual ambiguity that was beginning to peak in the seventies, all the confusion and pain. We were powerful and we were weak. He was frightened and attracted. It was dangerous, and it was exhilarating. We were all the mixed-up, terrible things that this bright, middle-class boy was feeling himself, what millions of teenagers were feeling, a confusion that had been summed up in a million eloquent words before but never presented in one frightening performance.
Jack Richardson couldn’t believe Ezrin’s turnabout after he saw the show. There was no way after all the negative feedback Ezrin had been giving him that Richardson would touch the project. But if Ezrin was suddenly so excited about us Richardson would let him produce us.
With Richardson’s blessings Ezrin moved into the farm in Pontiac with us. He arrived at three one afternoon, walked through the kitchen where empty tuna-noodle casserole dishes had sprouted mold and through the dining room with the monkey that had turned a slimy green color. He wandered all through the house and found it unbelievable that we were still fast asleep in mid-afternoon. But as he wandered from room to room, watching us in drunken slumber, he was filled with joy. All of us were sleeping with girls!
CHAPTER 12
Success happened almost brutally, with a suddenness that sucked me into it without a moment of preparation. It was like somebody had grabbed me by the shoulder and started shaking me, but the shaking wouldn’t stop. Maybe there isn’t any kind of preparation, no way to brace yourself. Once it starts happening everything goes so quickly you’re too stunned to stop and think. Not even the experience of four years on the road was any good with what happened next.
I spent December of 1970 commuting between the RCA Mid-Recording Center in Chicago, where Ezrin and the group were trying to piece together four songs for Warner Brothers, and a little trailer on a Detroit street where Cindy was selling Christmas trees so we could eat. Each night I found her sitting in‘ a folding chair wrapped in blankets under a row of bar light bulbs, watching her trees. We ate beans from a can half warmed over a Sterno stove inside the unheated trailer. The farm in Pontiac had been quickly defeated by winter. The pipes burst, the heat went and the toothpaste froze. Eventually the electricity was turned off because Shep couldn’t afford to pay the bill and each of us was off on our own to scrape up whatever housing we could find. Cindy and I hoped we could sleep in the trailer but it seemed colder in there than it did in Pontiac and by the time Christmas Eve came we both had fever and the flu.
It was the hardest the band ever worked. We did preproduction with Ezrin for two months, rehearsing ten to twelve hours a day. The recording sessions were painfully slow in the way that all growing experiences are. Ezrin really had his hands full. He was completely inexperienced and there was lots of pressure from Warner Brothers, who had finally agreed to pay for four songs but nothing more. If they heard anything commercial on a single then maybe they would spring for an album, and we all wanted a shot at another album badly. We were so tight by the time we went into the studios we surprised everyone. Still, we took it slow, recording only seconds of music at a time, literally piecing together the very best, few notes. He pulled the melody out of the songs and strengthened them. He invented riffs and bridges and hooks. He ironed the songs out note by note, giving them coloring, personality. We never played so well or sounded so good. Glen Buxton actually turned out to be a distinctive and talented guitarist. With just a little bit of inspiration from Ezrin he developed a style that would set him apart in his field. Michael Bruce, although he resented Ezrin’s broad creative power, wrote the first of some million-selling records he was to compose.