Dark Screams: Volume Two (13 page)

J
ULY 1974

Dear Yourself,

A jotting from the disjointed and convex.

Thanks for the letter. We’re actually okay to do the interview with you in Miami. Only possible snag is we’re doing
Midnight Special
remote feed from the Cameo Theater. We’re in town to do a Bobby Seale rally, or raise money to get Joan Baez some tits or some damn thing.

Crosby, Stills & Nash (the fucking tumbleweed sleeping pills) are support. We need an afternoon to sound-check. How about we do the interview the next day so we can rest? Otherwise we’re distant signals.

We’ll be at the Bel Aire. We like it because, as narcissistic plunderers, we can push them around and demand a full-time nanny to attend to our impossible demands. Particularly of a sordid, crotchy sort.

Tutt wants to buy an overcoat in Miami. His was grilled to a sickly mound by his latest coin-operated woman while tramping around Lennon’s estate. Something about someone starting a fire and needing wood. She thought they said wool.

Do you suppose John actually mows the place himself? Probably forces Ringo to do it in exchange for being allowed into Apple offices to drain his snout.

We don’t know Miami well and are easily manipulated into believing anything, the dream tourists. We’re really quite happy to be led about like odd species on loan from a West Coast zoo and would love to check out whatever is fascinating, utterly debasing, or easy to dance to.

Wrote four new songs last night with Tutt. He must’ve swallowed a piano. No matter where you touch him, you get music.

See you in Miami.

MAGURK

J
ANUARY 1975

“I hated the war. Hated the weapons. You know what napalm does? You know how long it takes to burn right through to the fucking bone? Cooks the marrow. I know about U.S. guys who ate the cooked marrow of Vietnamese children like it was Colonel Sanders. Guys in…Thin Lizzy or Ginger Baker’s Air Force had pictures. I forget which one.”

Stomp paradiddles Lucchese cowboy boots, leather pants scabbed with stains of unknown origin; scuffed rock-gladiator wear. The helicopter angles over the stage on the Scottish island where twenty-five superstar rock acts will perform this weekend and raise money for handicapped orphans of the war.

“Calley’s kids, we call them. Think he’d mind? Get pissed, put us in a trench?”

He manages to get a hit of hash. Cannons it out.

“We bought a cathouse in Saigon. Sent all the girls to another one in Gia Dinh. We turned it into a hospital. Give these kids a place. They got no arms. No legs. Pizza where they had eyes. It’s horrible. Really.”

He solos fingers on leather, legs crossed, staring down at the mossy island, sprouted from the sea—a giant shamrock. Tutt and Magurk are coming in from London, later. They were up all night at Abbey Road studios doing a mix. G. G. Wall is finishing a two-day vacation in Moscow with latest girlfriend, Vera, a Russian spy type. There is talk he’s also dating Goldie Hawn, one of Donovan’s ex-girlfriends, and a nun. Stomp grins, disavows nothing. Wants to get back to his version of politics.

“Fucking Kissinger. Fucking military industrial complex. Fucking John Wayne.” It’s a comprehensive dismissal from the quiet one of the group. Perhaps naïve; a jumble of anger and buzzwords. Perhaps something more personal.

His own brother, Steven, flew in Vietnam, pouring Orange Julius from death choppers, killing trees, stunting limbs.

“John Wayne…another asshole. Take his legs and arms. What does he need ’em for? Turn him into an organ bank. Help the kids. Just shoot him in close-up. He’ll still work.”

He smiles, but means every word, a hopeless fluid in this particular syringe. “These guys are killing America. When you’re old and mean and can’t get it up, war is the best fuck around. You can bet they’re looking for the next one, right now.”

The helicopter gets smacked in the head by Atlantic wind. Stomp bites a snack-sized bit of lip. Closes his eyes.

“God, I hate flying.”

J
ANUARY 1979

Blowtorch moon.

The crazies are out; waxed Kraut cars valet park before a Frank Lloyd Wright mansion. Rock gushes from inside, kicking hard from deco arches.

Inside, the place is crawling with rock ’n’ roll lemmings, golden arms. Thrashed glitter faces laugh and vacuum psyches over white lines. Perfect, naked bodies slip into churning tubs. Loud music peels us alive as L.A. twinkles and speedballs, far below. Somewhere out there, Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend, and pimply goons line up to see
Grease.

The freak who leased the place for the month snorts with the group’s soundman, Feeder. They talk about the tour, cranked. Seahorse cleaned plate through Europe. The new album,
High Horse,
shipped gold.

“They’re leaving bands like Whatever in the dust,” says Snuffy Hawkins, music editor of
Whirl,
the fastest-growing music magazine since
Rolling Stone.
Even though the backup singers and occasional musicians who’ve played on Whatever albums have enjoyed malarial perks of that association, such days are over.

Other Seahorse members pass, glazy, berserko. The fifteen-country tour burned them into their boots; they need this blowout. Four of them: drummer, two guitars, lead singer. Zep rip-off. Heavy, waste-the-pussies hostility. Bad-boy snits under plague eyes. Guttural secrets passed with knowing smirks, word codes.

Girls everywhere. Willing, eyes wide. They watch in needful silence, a harem of casualties, taking a number, hoping to win a member of the band.

Seahorse is laughing, drinking around the gelato-bright pool with their friend from Whatever, G. G. Wall. They all just finished an interview with me for
Rolling Stone
and trashed everybody. The band’s lead roadie, Dino, tells them they fucked up. Nobody gives Jann Wenner shit, not even cut-edge crotch royalty like Seahorse.

Seahorse bass player, Lick Clean, spreads something new around. Heroin. Brown. Chinese. Calls it Rocky Road. Stuff plays with chemical matrices like they were soup recipes.

G.G. takes the bad dessert into his arm. Wanders into the cavernous party palace, starting to ride what Feeder promises is Elvis, blow jobs, and mercy spit from one needle. He immediately starts to convulse.

Twenty minutes later, he’s pale and cold.

The morgue wagon got lost, trying to find the place.

“He had leukemia. I’m sure that was it,” says Whatever manager Lenny Lupo. “Living with a death sentence was too hard for him. Stuff coulda flared anytime. He was a take-charge guy. He took charge.”

“Bullshit,” says Seahorse lead singer Vinnie Perito. “I saw him that night. He looked good. He was digging it. Maybe he got out before Etcetera or Noteven or Whatever-the-Fuck became the fucking Monkees, okay? No disrespect intended. I liked to party with the guy. And I used to dig them, when they mattered. But then again, am I lying? Message shit is yesterday. I say he knew it.”

Perito is currently in rehabilitation at Synanon after surviving a second OD. Rikki Tutt, reached in Aspen on a skiing trip, said Wall was a brilliant musician and “…an old soul.”

D
ECEMBER 1977

“I got caught.” No expression. “Life.”

Inga is in the visitor’s area. She’s smoking. Smirking. Can’t believe she’s here, especially with Christmas coming.

“Look, I can’t say anything about the case, all right?”

Word is she was framed. Bringing a few kilos into Rio for the big Whatever concert on Copacabana.

She’d managed to get off with community service for the dope buy in L.A. But this was different. South America is a bad place to smuggle or score. They cut off hands; cut off lives.

Word coming from the Whatever camp is that Magurk and his legal team are trying to meet with Rio police officials again. Work some kind of appeal. Maybe buy a deal. But it doesn’t look good.

“If you see him, tell him I love him. They won’t let me get mail or send it.”

I’m told visiting time is over by a tough-looking, dark-skinned matron. Inga shows no fear, upset.

“I’ll get out of here. Just watch. Magurk isn’t gonna let me die in here.”

I promise to tell Magurk she loves him.

S
EPTEMBER 1974

For the new Whatever album on VOICE Records,
Just Forget It,
music retailers around the globe are going to highly unusual lengths to associate with the supergroup. Several major music chains have announced plans to give all their display space to
Just Forget It,
and embossed T-shirts and sweatshirts will be given to buyers.

Wallach’s Music City in L.A. will also have Whatever displays taking up the entire side of the store facing Sunset Boulevard. On the roof, the album cover, a two-story brain with a red diagonal line through it, will be flanked by twenty-foot reproductions of the recently reissued Whatever debut album.

On the night of the release, VOICE Records will hold an invitation-only party at L.A.’s elite Kaleidoscope Club featuring members of the band. Among events on the East Coast will be a caravan of VOICE party trolleys transporting customers from Central Park to Manhattan record stores until the wee hours.

Other “Midnight Madness” parties scheduled internationally will include laser shows, giant listening sessions, and a live concert screened in movie theaters via satellite.

Asked about the promotional blitz, Rikki Tutt and Greg Magurk of Whatever shrug. “Images in search of meaning.”

J
ULY 1977

Stomp is acting.

Dressed like Jesse James and sweating under that prop hat. The twenty-five-year-old director, Mitch Meyer, is right out of UCLA film school and cattle-prodding an exhausted crew through this five-and-dime Peckinpah spur opera. It’s called
Blood of Earth
and the plot has something to do with: (A) a whorehouse that’s hiding the gold from a train robbery (and Buffy Sainte-Marie is the madam…hey, you got to love this country), (B) a schizophrenic outlaw who shaves badly and consorts with grinning sadists, and (C) a sheriff who sings.

Are you happy yet?

Where exactly the blood or earth part fits in, or where the earth might be bleeding, is not clear. I guess if you’re deep enough, it adds up.

Meanwhile, you could say things haven’t been going so well on the set.

The production is running so far over budget they may have to just draw the rest of it with crayons. Two producers have quit, the unit production manager lost an important finger in a local bar fight (word is the finger started it), numerous crew members have gotten dysentery from traveling to Mexico for a night of fun and admitting sombrero bugs into their colons. And while the film is being touted as a Jungian tale of cowardice and primal truths, rumor is, from those who’ve seen dailies, it looks like bad dinner theater
Oklahoma!

It’s currently so hot in New Mexico, flies roll onto their sides, begging for a Corona. Location trailer tires are going Wrigley. Gaffers are hosing down the horses so they don’t faint, and everything around this set has a tortured, dehydrated look. It had to have been cooler when they shot
Lawrence of Arabia.

Even
Our Mr. Sun.

To complicate the less than thrifty morass, the studio, back in L.A., hates the rushes. The look, the lighting, the performances. They like Stomp. Think he has a moody, erogenous ease. A natural.

Lenny Lupo, manager for Whatever, agreed to let Stomp take this part after costar Lenda Bruxton saw the band in concert and thought Stomp had just the right look. Half ugly, a little sexy, engagingly hairy.

The director wrote the script and demanded he direct or he wasn’t selling. Beatty wanted to do it. Newman. Burt Reynolds fought to get it, couldn’t, and is now trying to get into a project called
The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing.
Do people really want to see cats dance with Burt?

The director is losing a pound a day to heat, lack of appetite, and terror; the guy looks like a roller-coaster car is loose in his digestive tract. He knows his neck has a very expensive dotted line across it right now, and the short subject he won first place for in Cannes doesn’t mean Dick York.

He’s dining on peeled cuticles as he huddles with the cameraman and the director of photography, trying to get a shot that seems impossible; make points with the hundred-dollar haircuts in L.A. who are threatening to gas the shoot. One of the crew said growing gospel is, Mitch is lost in the frosting, and “there ain’t no cake.”

The studio has already brought a new writer aboard; a hundred-grand-a-week gunslinger who’s in a trailer right now, restructuring and doctoring, neck-deep in fresher verbs. But this is no punch-up. It’s a quadruple bypass.

Stomp has had his own off-camera problems.

He left his girlfriend, Jane, for one of the extras in the film, a Hawaiian beauty-contest winner with breasts so impressive she’s actually named them after American presidents. But set rumor is that Jane found them naked in Stomp’s hotel room and heaved 110 pounds of stacked aloha out the second-story window. The breasts survived, Jane split, and Stomp refocused on his work.

Right now, he’s in his folding director’s chair, writing lyrics for a song called “Floozy Woozy.” A book of William Blake’s poems and Daniel Berrigan’s speeches ride sidesaddle in his script pouch. He’s anxious to finish production, get back to L.A. and work on Whatever’s new double album,
Skin and Bones.
And he’s anxious to be taken seriously as a songwriter.

More and more, he feels Tutt and Magurk have that monopoly, and it’s his time to put up hotels on Park Place. He’s gotten a new personal manager, Karen Dellinger, who has guided Illinois Speed Press, Peaches and Herb, Livingston Taylor, and Eric Carmen. Thus far, he’s written a jingle for a toothpaste company and an album of children’s songs that’s ready to be recorded called
The Big Stinky Ape.
And he thinks there’s more nifty manna where that came from. He’s also engaged to Dellinger, a former bookkeeper, who says Stomp is every bit the talent Magurk and Tutt are. While he plans to continue as the drummer for Whatever, he’s also taking guitar lessons.

Stomp fingers his Martin, customized with his name in pearl. Wants to share.

“Just messing with it…you know. Wanna hear some?” He erases a word, blows red rubber shavings away—bouncy confetti.

“Very rough. Something like…‘Sitting in the cheap seats…sleeping on the torn sheets…listening to her thoughts…my attention drifts and rots.’ ” He tries to decide if he likes it. Wrestling with what he’s scribbled.

“Anyway…it goes on: ‘She’s there for me…she’s there for you…she’s a bleak reminder…that some things never grew / She makes me feel off-center…not a buyer…just a renter.’ ” He grins. Likes that part. Takes a sip of iced coffee, under the beating sun. Chomps a cube. Reads on.

“ ‘Floozy Woozy…I’m sick of her face. Floozy Woozy…she’s a mind without a trace.’ ” He rubs his unshaven jaw—part of the role’s look, a widowed sheriff, hollowed by grief; nightmare shakes. And evidently left unable to shave. Did I mention he sings, too? Maybe in the rewrite he’ll tap like Sammy.

“Rest is…bit vague. Playing with: ‘She thinks I like her…she thinks she’s intriguing…to me she’s proof of inbreeding.’ ” He wipes sweat. It could be flop sweat if we were anywhere but this kiln that’s firing us like cowboy raku.

The stunt coordinator, a polite Stockholmer with a name too hard to spell, is passing by, and Stomp reads the lyrics again. Wants to know how the stunt Swede likes them. The S.S. smiles, politely.

“Maybe Magurk and Tutt can fix it,” he says under his breath, clogging away.