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Authors: Pamela Des Barres

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BOOK: Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon
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Dennis bought himself a beautiful Japanese sailing ship, calling it the
Harmony,
and the world seemed good for the couple. “Dennis didn’t do drugs when we were first married, he was the best guy. He’d get up in the morning and catch halibut for our breakfast, he’d go out and dive and surf, we’d run on the beach every morning. It was so good, he didn’t think he deserved it. He was an angel, he didn’t mess around. I had a great three-year stint. The other five years I got my butt kicked!!”
Karen seemed to be able to accept the rock-and-roll infidelities after her singing stint on the road with the Beach Boys. “I know Dennis loved me with all his heart. Guys will be guys, boys will be boys. It’s all about the male ego and has nothing to do with the woman in their life. I’m not saying I applauded it, but I understood it. When you perform in front of two hundred and fifty thousand people, you get it. When you come offstage, you think you can go to the hotel, call your wife, and go to bed? The energy, the adrenaline is pumpin’, people are telling you how great you are, and it’s lonely on tour. But he was jealous—when I’d say hello to someone on the street, it was, ‘Did you fuck him? Did you fuck him?’” But Dennis’s drug taking threatened the marriage. Once Karen found a bottle of cocaine at the studio and spilled it all over the carpet. Upon returning the next day and finding the locks had been changed, she hurled a brick through the front window. Another time she shot up the Mercedes 450SL Dennis bought her. “We were both dynamos. When you put two dynamos together, you get dynamite!” she said with a wicked smile. “It was as tempestuous as it gets.” During this turbulent period Dennis recorded a solo album,
Pacific Ocean Blue,
which sold a respectable two hundred thousand copies, earned excellent reviews, and created jealous resentment within the band. Despite the beautiful music they made together, Dennis and Karen got their first divorce in 1976—but didn’t stop seeing each other.
For fifteen years the Beach Boys had remained a viable, money-making band, and after some very controversial therapy with Dr. Eugene Landy, Brian resumed touring in the summer of 1976. In spite of serious inner turmoil, road-stoned madness, and backstabbing, the Beach Boy machine continued to make millions.
Though Dennis had beaten Karen up pretty brutally on a road trip to New Zealand, fracturing her sternum in three places, and had been caught with a sixteen-year-old girl in Arizona and arrested for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” Karen Lamm remarried Dennis in Las Vegas in the summer of 1978. “When I tell you he was the greatest man I’ve ever known, I don’t say it lightly,” Karen told me. “I say it with all my heart.” Dennis went into a detox center, and the two dynamos hoped for another new start. A few months later, however, while recording songs at Village Studios for his second solo album, Dennis met Christine McVie, keyboardist and singer for Fleetwood Mac. Just before Christmas 1978, Dennis moved into Christine’s house, where he lived for two years, driving her mad with his severe drug and alcohol addiction and vast array of personal problems.
Brian had been fairly drug-free since his therapy with Dr. Landy, but after he did some heroin on a tour of Australia, Dennis was blamed for the incident, and the internal rift between band members escalated to the breaking point. In front of a sold-out crowd at the Universal Amphitheater, Dennis mumbled into the microphone something about “cocaine and Quaaludes,” knocked his drums over, and leapt ferociously at Mike Love. Eventually a mutual restraining order was obtained to keep Dennis and Mike apart. So much for the Maharishi. Then Dennis was asked to leave the band “for his own good.” “The band kicked him out when they threw up their hands and said, ‘We can’t do anything’” Karen told me. “They got all this advice, tough-love shit.” By this time Dennis was so heavily in debt that he was forced to sell his beloved sailing ship, the
Harmony.
Dennis almost destroyed Christine McVie’s life before he finally moved out and got his own place in Venice, which was soon filled up with vagrants, pushers, and hangers-on. One day a blond teenage girl showed up with a friend. Sixteen-year-old Shawn was Mike Love’s shunned illegitimate daughter, and Dennis set out to make her his own. “Mike Love was a total asshole,” Karen Lamm said. “Dennis came offstage one night, and the light was in his eyes and Mike kicked him square in the balls. Dennis stole shows. He was a heartthrob. He married Shawn as a “fuck you” to Mike.” Shawn became one of the many people who crashed at Dennis’s pad, and when their son, Gage, was born, Dennis married her. Shawn had hoped that her close proximity to the Beach Boys would endear her to her father, but the ploy didn’t work. Neither did the marriage. Less than four months after the wedding, Shawn drove her silver BMW right into the front door of Dennis’s rented Trancas beach house, scrawling “No love” and “No respect” on the walls with crayons. Dennis filed for divorce, and Shawn moved into the Santa Monica Bay Inn with baby Gage.
When the lease was up on the beach house, Dennis’s manager, Bob Levine, made him an offer—Dennis could spend some time in rehab, and when he finished the program Bob would get him a new home. Dennis was half a million
dollars in debt, with no real place to live and no money in his pockets. He was overweight and bloated, his bearded faced heavily lined, his eyes bloodshot. He spoke in a hard, rasping voice, made worse by several operations to remove polyps from his vocal cords, and still smoked two packs of unfiltered Camels a day. Over the past few years many people who cared for Dennis had tried to get him some help. At one point the Beach Boys put a private jet at his disposal to take him to the rehab center of his choice, but Dennis never set foot on the plane. They offered to pay him one-fifth of the touring money—even though he wasn’t on tour—as long as he was in a clinic. He had tremors and had started to have seizures, but Dennis always had an excuse not to go to rehab, and his latest excuse was Gage.
On December 4, 1983, his thirty-ninth birthday, Dennis went to Room 353 at the Bay Inn to pick up his son Gage, and found Shawn asleep in bed with two men (all of them fully clothed), his son wandering around the room unattended. He went wild, screaming and ripping the room apart. Threatening to call police and have them all arrested for drugs, Dennis suddenly bolted with the baby and wandered into traffic on Ocean Avenue. When he saw the BMW he had bought for Shawn in the parking lot, he smashed the windows in with a baseball bat. Eventually Dennis dropped Gage off with friends and resumed his frenzied downhill roaming.
During the month of December, Dennis was adrift and disoriented, crashing in cheap motels and at friends’ apartments. Two days before Christmas, Bob Levine drove Dennis to St. John’s Hospital for a twenty-one-day detox program. He was given Librium to relieve the wretched withdrawal symptoms and, though he tried to reach Carl and Brian several times, seemed determined to stick out the three-week program. Then Shawn called to tell him that she and Gage were being thrown out of the Bay Inn for nonpayment of rent. Determined to help, Dennis left the clinic on Christmas Day and, arriving at the Bay Inn, found Shawn with a boyfriend. A shoving match ensued, and Dennis, doped up with Librium, got beaten very badly. St. John’s Hospital refused to readmit him, so Dennis checked into Marina Hospital, where he spent one night before making yet another escape. A sometime girlfriend, former Playboy Bunny Crystal McGovern, picked him up and they went to see an old friend of Dennis’s, Bill Oster, on his boat, the
Emerald,
right next to the empty slip where the
Harmony
had been docked. Bill and his girlfriend, Brenda, were happy to see Dennis but were concerned about the condition he was in, hiding his bottle of vodka several times. Oster told Dennis, “It wasn’t six months ago that I said to Brenda, ‘I hope the next time we see Dennis it’s not at his funeral.’” To which Dennis replied, “Don’t you worry about that.” The foursome slept that night on the
Emerald,
and Dennis was up at nine A.M. drinking screwdrivers. He called Bob Levine and agreed to spend thirty days in a detox program in New Mexico if Levine would buy back the
Harmony
for
him, swearing over and over that he would complete the program—for Gage’s sake. He would pull his life together for Gage.
After lunch Dennis decided to take a swim in the icy water, diving down thirteen feet where the
Harmony
had been berthed, recovering small pieces of metal fittings, an old rotted piece of rope. After about twenty minutes he came in for another turkey sandwich and his friends tried to convince him to stay out of the freezing water. He got the shivers, his teeth were chattering, and he was knocking back the screwdrivers. Swearing there was a treasure chest below, Dennis insisted on diving again, this time returning with a large rectangular object covered with mud that turned out to be a wedding picture of Dennis and Karen Lamm in a sterling silver frame. The glass was shattered, but the water-bleached photo showed the confident young couple, laughing at the world. Then Dennis went down into the dark waters again, and never came up.
Dennis was found forty-five minutes later. A four-man team located his body on the muddy floor of the marina, directly under the spot where his precious
Harmony
had been berthed. The only surfer in the Beach Boys had drowned.
Since the divorce hadn’t come through, Shawn was still legally Dennis’s widow, and the family had to go along with her wishes that Dennis be buried at sea. It turned out that there was a federal law prohibiting burial at sea, but a personal request was made to President Reagan, and special permission was granted. Dennis’s body was put in a body bag and dropped into the ocean.
“I’ve always had this deep-seated thing in me that I’ve never talked about,” Karen Lamm later told me. “I know he was on one hundred milligrams of Librium a day to get off alcohol, he was in rehab at St. John’s, and within forty-eight hours he was dead. He had a huge gash in his head, and they called it hypothermia, and I’ve talked to several detectives and doctors—the water temperature was fifty-eight degrees, and his body was not even near that, so it wasn’t hypothermia.” Karen says she’s not convinced by any of the explanations of how Dennis died.
“The killer for me was he had just found our wedding frame. He’d pitched it over the boat when he was mad at me. The last words he spoke were about that picture.” Karen’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Dennis had the deepest, most caring heart. He was in a lot of pain because he was so supersensitive. There’s a medical terminology for someone who is so hypersensitive. I can find it out for you.”
Said big brother Brian Wilson in his heartfelt book,
Wouldn’t It Be Nice:
I thought of the last time I’d seen him. Where? A concert. He’d stumbled out from behind his drums and wobbled to the microphone. He smiled. That never changed. Then, in a voice ruined by cigarettes and alcohol, he sang, “You Are So Beautiful.” As he sang, tears ran down his face as if he was singing for the last time. After the show, I’d stood backstage and watched Dennis sip from a can of soda. He wasn’t much different from when we were kids, still angry and restless … . I was riveted in the front of the [television] set through the five, six and seven o’clock local broadcasts. They provided me with a glimpse of my middle brother. They showed Dennis lying on the cement, covered by a large body sack. His arm and leg stuck out. I knew the picture was real, but I still hoped, expected, Dennis to get up and yell “Surprise!” He didn’t. He couldn’t. I thought, My God, that’s the last time I’ll ever see Dennis.
JIM GORDON
A
s one of the finest drummers in rock and roll, Jim Gordon played with John Lennon, George Harrison, the Beach Boys, and Frank Zappa, and was a member of Eric Clapton’s Derek and the Dominoes, Traffic, and one of my faves, the Souther, Hillman, Furay Band. Brought up in the San Fernando Valley by hardworking parents who appreciated his musical talent, by the age of twelve Jim had his own drums and a music room to practice in. Jim’s dad coached his Little League team, and even though Jim was a shy teenager, he was voted class president in junior high. But something was wrong. As a little
boy, Jim felt isolated and alone, turning at first to food for solace, until his weight became a problem, and then to the voices. Inside his head the voices cheered Jim, made him feel worthwhile. But in high school, the voices gradually took a backseat to his music, which had become all-important.
His first band, Frankie and the Jesters, played Hollywood clubs, and when UCLA offered Jim a music scholarship, he turned it down, ready to pursue a career in rock and roll. Spotted by the Everly Brothers’ bass player, Jim landed a gig touring Europe, which led to more gigs, and pretty soon he was an in-demand session drummer, charging double time for his services. In 1964 Jim married a lively go-go dancer, and the couple both worked on the TV show “Shindig,” buying themselves a house near Jim’s parents. Jim continued to do well as a session drummer, briefly forming his own band before joining the bluesy duo Delaney and Bonnie in 1969, which led to a stoned-out stint with Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen. He had only piddled around with pot, but on the road Jim discovered psychedelics and found he had a huge appetite for all kinds of drugs. Having divorced his wife, Jim took up with singer Rita Coolidge—also on the Cocker tour—but the romance ended when, for no apparent reason, Jim gave Rita a black eye. Called to England by George Harrison, who wanted him to play on
All Things Must Pass,
Jim was asked to become a part of Eric Clapton’s Derek and the Dominoes. Jim’s creativity was at full force when he cowrote “Layla” with Eric, but the group broke up in 1972. “The producers wouldn’t pay me for ‘Layla,’” Jim told
Rolling Stone,
“because they said I would be dead in six months anyway.” Despite the warning, Jim went from heavy cocaine use to shooting heroin, continuing to play drums behind the greats.
After working on John Lennon’s
Imagine
album, Jim recorded and toured with Traffic, and back in L.A., he was more in demand than ever. He bought a house, a new Mercedes, and got married again. His reputation was solid, and Jim thought he was happy. The voices had all but faded, kept at bay by his addiction to speedballs (cocaine mixed with heroin). But out of the black they started coming back. Jim’s pleasant, outgoing manner was replaced by a brewing paranoia. Even as a new member of Souther, Hillman, Furay, he hid out in hotels, worried about younger drummers stealing his place. Arriving home from the market one afternoon, his wife, Renée, was confronted by a wild-eyed Jim who pointed at the floor, saying “the magic triangle.” He then accused her of bringing evil spirits into the house before knocking her down and cracking her ribs. After six months of marriage, Renée left him, but Jim’s voices—an entire family of them, including his mother—were there to keep him company.
“The voices started out friendly,” Jim told
Rolling Stone.
“They were giving me little pointers. How to take care of myself and the house. How to shop. I was glad for the help … . They said I had some kind of responsibility to God and country. I was king of the universe, they said. I had to make sacrifices, and
I had to do what they said. That’s when my mother started making me eat half my food.” Jim may have eaten only half the food on his plate, but his alcohol consumption quadrupled. He still managed to play drums. Barely. When Jim accused session guitarist Dean Parks of “moving his hands,” word got out that Jim Gordon had become a liability. One after another, women came and went, frightened by Jim’s uncontrollable violent streak, and the voices, especially the voice of his mother, tormented him night and day, demanding the impossible.
In the real world, Jim’s mother was very concerned, insisting that Jim seek help. He checked into a psychiatric hospital for the first of fourteen times, but the voices continued and he attempted suicide. Ironically, his mother saved his life. Encouraged by an offer from Jackson Browne to tour, Jim made an attempt to bring his life into some kind of order, but was thwarted by the imagined voice of his mother. Dylan asked him to go on the road, but Mother said no. In the middle of a Vegas gig with Paul Anka, Mother made Jim go back to L.A., where he checked back into the hospital and threatened to kill a nurse. By 1980 Jim had given up his music and started moving from place to place, uncomfortable wherever he went. His mother’s voice had become the voice of evil, and his mother had
become
that voice. He believed she had killed Karen Carpenter and wanted him to die, too. In October 1982 Jim checked himself into the hospital again, claiming that he was “dying of hate.” On June 1, 1983, Jim called his mother, telling her that she was “bugging” him again, threatening to kill her. When Mrs. Gordon called the police, they told her to leave her lights on. She tried to get a restraining order against her son, but got no help and finally had to give up.
The voices told Jim how to silence his mother’s voice. He was to hit her with the hammer first, so that she wouldn’t suffer when he began stabbing. When Mrs. Gordon opened the door to her son at eleven-thirty the night of June 3, that’s exactly what he did, leaving the knife in the seventy-two-year-old woman’s chest before heading to a bar and getting beyond blitzed. When the police arrived at his door to tell Jim of his mother’s death, he calmly confessed. In the police car Jim sobbed, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but she’s tortured me for years.” Later he said, “I had no interest in killing her, I wanted to stay away from her. I had no choice. It was so matter-of-fact, like I was being guided like a zombie. She wanted me to kill her, and good riddance to her.”
James Beck Gordon was found guilty of second-degree murder and given sixteen years to life, even though five psychiatrists testified that he was an acute paranoid schizophrenic. Even after Mother was gone, the voices didn’t stop. In his head Jim was forced to obey his attorney and his brother, who wouldn’t let him eat desserts. Jim has served fourteen years and, despite being heavily medicated, has a dim hope of release. In a recent interview with the
Washington Post,
Jim wasn’t able to admit to the crime, believing that it just “happened.” But he no longer hears the voices. “My mother, she persecuted me a great
deal, I felt. And it finally got so bad that I just gave up and got a condominium and just stayed indoors. I didn’t ever go anyplace. That’s when I started hearing voices and having delusional thoughts and hallucinations, and all of a sudden the crime occurred.”
I wrote to Jim in jail, sending him my first book, and received a letter many months later, which began: “You may not remember who I am. I am Jim Gordon the drummer from Hollywood and Sherman Oaks.” In closing he told me that he was still playing drums, “and keeping my music up … .”
KURT STRUEBING
O
n April 7, 1986, a Seattle 911 operator received a call regarding a “problem.” When asked the nature of the problem, the caller referred to it as a “God job.” Asked what a “God job” was, the caller replied “insanity,” adding that he had just killed his mother with a pair of scissors and a hatchet. When the police arrived on the scene, they discovered a young nude male standing in the parking lot. Kurt Struebing, age twenty, approached the officer, saying, “I killed my mother and then I killed myself.” The officer then went inside the house and made a report: “I took a preliminary walk through the apartment, a white victim approximately fifty years is naked on her back in the master bedroom … partially clothed with her nightclothes pulled up above her hips … . The victim’s head has numerous hatchet-type wounds. There are numerous stab wounds to the left breast and neck as well as defense type wounds to both arms. There is a bloodied hatchet and a pair of scissors on a wall chest of drawers … . The walls are bloodspattered.” A search warrant revealed various books on “the occult and Satan,” as well as photos of Kurt in “staged death scenes.”
N.M.E. (spelled with swastikas instead of periods) were/are a doomy death-metal band from Federal Way, Washington, and guitarist Kurt Struebing was/is the driving force. Their first album,
Unholy Death,
came out on a small label, Pentagram Records. In a 1985 blurb in
Subway
magazine, N.M.E. placed an ad that read:
N.M.E. are of Hell—or is it more? We, young as we may be, have taken a responsibility … have declared war on the world, be it a peaceful or violent war. I, Kurt have taken the responsibility of New Messiah Emerging. Spewing forth from the New Metal Energy capitol
[sic] of Seattle, we N.M.E. are very intent on getting our message across … . If doubt is evil, then evil we are. Take this only as serious as it is meant, but don’t bet against us … . respectively, N.M.E.—Kurt Struebing—The New Messiah.
In the police car, Kurt said that his mother, Darlene Struebing, was a data processor for Pacific Northwest Bell, and when asked to describe events leading to the murder, Kurt replied, “It’s been a long night, I just got off from reality, can I still be an artist?” The police wondered why Kurt felt his mother had to die and he answered, “I just got caught up in everything, I couldn’t cry. I learned too late that I could be whatever I want to be.”
According to Kurt’s friends, although he didn’t get along with his father, his relationship with his mother was one of mutual respect and support. (His parents were divorced.) They also said that Kurt was not a heavy drug user but had gotten “weird” right before committing the heinous crime, cutting off his waist-length hair and admitting to one friend that he had recently realized he was gay. The day before the murder Kurt had been practicing with N.M.E. and acting strangely, saying that he was reading people’s minds and felt “psychotic.” The band rented a rug shampooer to clean the rugs, and unbeknownst to the rest of N.M.E., Kurt drank an entire bottle of rug shampoo, later telling police he had wanted to “clean himself out.” He became violently ill and stripped naked before heading back home.
“Kurt says that during this confusing time he was thinking that all people were robots,” his psychiatric evaluation reveals. “He had paranoid thoughts such as that people were stealing things from him. He was unable to sleep and very hyperactive. He felt his friends were going to kill him when they took him home. He grabbed a baseball bat … and hit one of his friends in the chin. He indicated that his mind was ‘racing’ … . He kept having recurring thoughts that he was really an alien cleaning up after humans. He felt that he was a robot placed here in order to build up the planet for some other force. He remembers killing his mother with the ax and scissors, but denies any sexual activity of any kind. However, at Western State Hospital he did tell one orderly attendant that something sexual had gone on. Apparently he felt that if he killed himself and his mother, he would be killing robots who would be replaced by the other force … . This was an experiment for him to determine whether or not they were actually robots.”
Kurt Struebing was charged with first-degree murder as well as rape and sent to Western State Hospital for evaluation, where he tried to kill himself by leaping from his bed and landing on his head on the cement floor. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder when several mental-health experts found that he was psychotic at the time of the crime. He was then sentenced to twelve years in the mentally ill offenders’ unit of the reformatory at Monroe,
Washington. The prosecutor’s office recommended that Kurt serve eight years, and the judge agreed. “We believe that at the time of the crime Struebing suffered from mental disability. His capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law was significantly impaired.” When Kurt was released in April 1994, he got himself a job making pizzas, re-formed N.M.E. with most of the original members, and started playing clubs and looking for a record deal. N.M.E.’s album,
Unholy Death,
has recently been rereleased.
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