Los Angeles, part III

Seventeen years ago I played in a Los Angeles band called Dicktit. Thinking about it now, I don’t even remember exactly when I joined. I was either 20 or 21. Alex Konya and Peter Fullerton, Dicktit’s guitarist and drummer, had written a set’s worth of tunes in their previous band, but it fell apart. These songs became Dicktit’s early set. Alex and Peter originally invited me to sing, and I did a rehearsal with them which I thought went alright, but they didn’t seem to dig it. I was invited back for another practice, but got cold feet and stood Alex, Peter, and bassist Tracy Colby up. None of the three went to Cal State Northridge, where I was trying to get a B.A. in English, so I figured I wouldn’t be running into them again anytime soon anyway. I was young and insecure and it didn’t seem like a good fit anyway.

Carlos Nuñez, one of the first people I met at CSUN as a fresh-faced, green, small-town kid, then became the band’s vocalist. (At this point, Peter and Alex still didn’t have a name for their new band. They were literally starting from scratch: bassist first, vocalist second, then name.) “Cake,” as Carlos demanded we call him, had known Alex and Peter for some time, and was the archetypal music nerd who owned 1,000+ albums, plus dozens and dozens of singles and videos - a logical choice to front the band. A couple of months after my tryout for Alex and Peter, Cake came to me saying they wondered if I would play guitar for their band instead of sing. I was shocked they wanted to have anything to do with me after bailing out on them, but what the fuck – I was a guitarist by trade, and this was an excuse to get a real guitar and at least be playing.

I say “real” guitar, because at that point I had been playing for five years on a black Electra with fucked-up frets that weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 pounds. It was a rotten piece of junk, so I decided that now was the time, by God, to get a bona-fide guitar and play in a bona-fide band. I quickly hit up a good friend who actually worked a real job and had real money, asking him to buy me a guitar and I’d pay him back. Kindhearted, genuine soul that he is, he agreed without any complaints, and before I knew it, I was sitting in a certifiably insane man’s house in Canoga Park looking at a beautiful, woodgrain 1972 Gibson SG. I found the certifiably insane man through an ad in the classifieds that promised a near-perfect SG for $300. An old-time Angus Young fan (it helped too that Captain Sensible used an SG during The Damned’s Machine Gun Etiquette era), I was hell-bent on securing an SG to the exclusion of every other guitar on the planet. I called the number in the ad, got the address, and discovered that the seller of this incredible guitar lived with a huge tank of piranhas, spoke loudly, and loved Led Zeppelin. “DO YOU KNOW HOW TO PLAY “OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY?” he thundered. “Uh, I know some Zep, but not that one-” He turned the volume and gain on his Marshall half-stack up to way-uncool deafening levels and cranked it out. He could barely play. No wonder he was getting rid of the guitar. My ears hurt when he finally stopped. “THIS IS A BEAUTIFUL GUITAR,” he continued. “YOU DON’T SEE SGS IN THIS GOODA’ SHAPE ANYMORE THAT ARE THIS OLD.” He never explained it, but the neck on this guitar was really wide – a huge plus for me, as I originally learned to play on a classical guitar. Someone had customized this guitar at some point (although it probably wasn’t Piranha Man) and it was just what I was looking for. I paid him $300 of Chris Jung’s cash, drove back to Northridge, called Alex and told him I was in.

The memories are fading, but it seems like we practiced in Studio City, in one of those rehearsal-only studios. Alex, Peter, Tracy, Cake and I learned all of Alex and Peter’s old songs there, and added some new ones. Alex and Peter graciously made the let’s-come-up-with-a-band-name process completely democratic; each one of us came up with three band names, and everyone voted for them. The only one of mine I remember is Richard Cheese. My favorite of Alex’s was Fliegenklatsche (“Flyswatter” in German). Cake, however, overheard his Rock God Gibby Haynes discussing band names in an interview a few months earlier, one of which was “Dicktit.” He duly threw this into the mix, and even though I hated the fucking thing, Dicktit secured enough votes to become our new name. Before too long we played our first show on Friday, April 19th, 1991 at the late Jabberjaw on Pico.

Although I had been playing guitar for seven years at that point, I was a late-bloomer with respect to song writing. I helped write music for a couple of tunes in my high school band, The Floors, but in 1991 I had yet to write a song entirely on my own. Dicktit afforded me the opportunity to pen my own songs, and I responded by taking a song title my friend Dax Riner came up with years earlier – “Can You Stand the Frat” – and writing music that was unconsciously lifted directly from The Professionals’ “Join the Professionals.” No matter; I wrote the song and it was a catharsis. (In the song's defense, the parts of the song not stolen from Steve Jones weren’t bad at all.) My bandmates even allowed me to sing it myself, as I was constantly carping about Cake’s laissez faire attitude towards singing on key.

All of this is an incredibly long-winded way of saying that “Can You Stand the Frat,” the first song I ever wrote by myself, was the first song of mine ever to be properly recorded in an actual recording studio. After recording two songs (“Fixxed Bayonettes” and “Marc Stengel”) at Studio Dee on Glendale in late 1991, a dumbass classmate of mine at CSUN offered to fund our first EP, saying he was starting his own record label (“Atomic Industries”), and wanted Dicktit to launch it. Not entirely thrilled with the production at Studio Dee, we recorded our next two songs – “Frat,” and a new Alex tune, “Rocket Scientist” – in downtown L.A. at Biff Sanders’ loft-studio, Motiv Communications.

At that point, my only experiences with downtown Los Angeles were through Dicktit, and then only because we played a bunch of shows downtown, and recorded half of our EP downtown. I drove to the clubs, played, and drove home, never once stopping for a look around. Same thing when we recorded “Frat” and “Scientist.” Motiv Communications was at 1324 South Figueroa in an old, three-story brick building with the fire escape on the outside. I never saw buildings like this growing up in New Mexico, and it didn’t make much of an impression back then; my love affair with downtown Los Angeles’ historic core wouldn’t start for another six years, when I bought a copy of Kenneth Schessler’s This Is Hollywood at Larry Edmunds Bookseller on Hollywood. Back in 1991, we hauled our gear up two short stairways at 1324 South Fig, took the elevator to the third floor, and recorded our songs.

Years later, after moving back to NM in 1993, I was going through some crap in an old box and found the sheet of paper, the same sheet of scrap paper I had with me in 1991 when I called Pete on the phone and jotted down the address for Motiv Communications. There were various notes written all over the paper, but smack in the middle in huge letters it read: “1324 SOUTH FIGUEROA – BIFF SANDERS.” It had been so long I didn’t even remember where the studio had been. I took the paper with me on my next trip out to Los Angeles and found the building. It was still there, across Fig from the Convention Center. I snooped around inside and saw the hallway I dragged my amp down years before. The little convenience store was still on the first floor.


***

I don’t suppose anyone gives a shit that the three-story brick building once standing at 1324 South Fig is gone, obliterated to make way for another Convention Center parking lot. I found out it was gone back in September while visiting my friend Chris Jung. We went wandering around downtown for a couple of hours, made our way to Fig, and found nothing at 1324 South Fig but parking spaces. You never would’ve known anything else had ever been there. I guess if Angelinos are happy to see the legendary Ambassador Hotel get demolished, then probably a far less-famous building now dwarfed by the ugly Convention Center doesn’t figure on any preservation group’s top-ten list. It’s easy to argue that I’m bitter about this particular building getting torn down because a pivotal moment of my life occurred at 1324 South Fig. That’s exactly right – in fact, the couple of days I spent in Biff Sanders’ loft in May of 1992 recording and mixing “Frat” and “Scientist” were two of the coolest days of my life. The band played well, I got to record vocals for the first time, and I felt like I actually did something with my life for the first time. I even got to sing backup with Alex’s girlfriend Melanie Bruck on “Scientist.” Dicktit’s Fonzie Loves Chachie EP came out later that year, and after nearly a decade of playing guitar, I finally had something to show for it.

And it’s conceited and simplistic to say that the building meant a great deal to me and for that reason, shouldn’t have been torn down. Why should one building in a city of millions be left alone just because one person had fond memories there? Dang, I'm not sure how to respond to that; it should mean something that a life changed for the better in that building, that – for a change – something truly positive happened there, and maybe the building should be left alone. Pick any old building in downtown Los Angeles, and people worked there, ate there, fucked there. They lived entire lives there.

But more than that, people should give a shit that there's a physical, tangible link to our past in buildings like the one that once stood at 1324 South Fig. But no one really does. Bless the good folks at the L.A. Conservancy, doing the thankless work of trying to preserve historic structures instead of letting greedy developers tear them down for parking lots or strip malls or ugly-ass apartments. Even they can only do so much, tho. Where they fail, the rest of us are left with photographs and memories. And more parking, I guess.

Grumpy Old Men

Despite the fact that their mythic status rests on the foundation of merely one album, plus various other outtakes/demos/live cuts/and general fuck-offs, The Sex Pistols unquestionably deserve said status. There’s been a bit of revisionist history about the band in the last ten years or so, especially in light of their controversial (and utterly pathetic) reunion tour in 1996 and various one-off shows since then. An acquaintance of mine once shook her head at the Pistols always being the most prominently-mentioned band in any magazine article celebrating the halcyon days of 1977, saying, “What’s the big deal?” But no, even with all that crap, the Pistols really are one of the great bands.

It’s easy writing off Never Mind the Bollocks… because it was the one and only LP the band managed committing to vinyl before grinding to a halt in January of 1978. By the time of its release it was, as many cynics complain, more like a greatest hits album than a proper debut; all four of the band’s singles up until that point were included, along with a re-recording of No Feelings, already familiar to fans as the B-side of God Save the Queen. Really, the only songs on the album that could actually be considered new were Bodies and Holidays in the Sun, the latter lifting its main riff from The Jam’s In the City (which itself was derivative of The Kinks’ One of the Survivors).

I’ll give that much to the cynics. In the final analysis, however, there’s simply no denying the songs themselves, and the effect the songs and the band had on the late 70s. The “big deal” my acquaintance wondered about was the band’s capacity, sometimes accidental, sometimes not, to blaze the trail so many bands scrambled to travel in the following months and years. They had memorable made-up names, they died their hair and flaunted shabby, often offensive clothing, they swore on live television, their music was loud and raw, and their lyrics savaged the status-quo, from the government’s figure-head, to the government itself. And the songs themselves were incendiary. God Save the Queen still pulverizes, Liar’s minimalist guitar solo is beautifully and searingly serendipitous, and Holidays in the Sun/Bodies may be the most dramatic one-two punch in rock history. Jaded American consumers, in this day and age of EVERYTHING being co-opted by the world’s major corporations, forget what Bollocks sounded like for many years after its release. I was 14 years-old in May of 1984 when I pedaled my bicycle through gawdawful Santa Fe spring winds to Hastings at DeVargas Mall and threw down eight bucks for Bollocks on vinyl. The bag with the album whipped and snapped in the wind all the way home, where I locked myself in my room and lowered the needle on side one. For a kid who’d been listening to top-40 radio, Queen, and AC/DC up until then, the sounds blasting from my speakers for the next few minutes were almost incomprehensible. I made it through Holidays and got to the ultra-profane part of Bodies (“Fuck this and fuck that…”), whereupon I lifted the needle off the vinyl, placed the arm in its cradle, and called my best friend. I told him I had bought Bollocks. "How is it?" he asked. “You should probably come over here and hear this…” I didn’t know what else to say.

So, having been in that kind of band, the kind that almost single-handedly changed everything, it is, I suppose, somewhat understandable that John Lydon continues being one of the most obdurately and cantankerously opinionated blokes in the music industry. Which is a diplomatic way of saying the guy is a total dumb-ass. I just re-read Lydon’s interview with The Orange County Register’s Ben Wener from last year, and was struck by how whiny and judgmental Lydon has grown now that he’s had 30 years to reflect on the Pistols’ legacy and let it swell his head up. Yeah, I know – he was always whiny and judgemental, right? But at least Rotten's rancor, ca. 1977, was aimed squarely at the status quo. Nowadays his tirades are the pathetic ravings of a chubby 51 year-old reduced to singing Anarchy in the U.K. – as irrelevant a lyric as there could be to a man living a comfortable middle class existence, courtesy the money still rolling in from Sex Pistols paraphernalia – on the Jay Leno show, of all things.

Among the idiotic things flowing from his mouth in the Wener interview:

1) “…I’m rather fond of the royal family… There’s an invigorating pulse to a British heartbeat to have something so ancestral as a royal family. It means your roots go back way into the centuries, and that’s an important thing.” Uh… doesn’t the fact that ANY of us are here, whether we’re British, American, Chinese, black, white, yellow, red, mean that our roots go back “way into the centuries”?

2) (On identifying with his working-class roots): “We’re working class and that means something in England. It means you have no hope, no future. Every line in every (Pistols) song is about that… (Editor’s note: The following Sex Pistols songs have nothing to do with being working-class: Submission, New York, EMI, Belsen Was a Gas.) …You can never take it out of you… I don’t need the lying nonsense of the wealthy, the powers-that-be… they cheated me out of my childhood and out of my life.” Jesus, I had no idea that the “powers-that-be” cheated poor John Lydon out of his entire life. Poor dude. Seriously, tho – how is it that a guy who has fronted not one, but two iconic bands, toured the entire globe, recorded dozens and dozens of songs, written a book, and made a million dollars feels he has been cheated out of his life? Goddamn, I’m sick of losers like John Lydon deploying their rough childhoods as this untouchable virtue that makes only their art valid. Gimme a fuckin’ break. Art is art, whether you’re poor or wealthy. Gram Parsons was a trust fund baby alright, but he wrote some great songs, and that he didn’t have to worry about paying the bills doesn’t make The Gilded Palace of Sin any less artistically valid than PiL’s Flowers of Romance. Trotting out your hard-fought roots as an irrefutable proof of your artistic purity, even after shamelessly pocketing tons of dough on the aptly-named “Filthy Lucre” tour, is ignorant, self-pitying, and fucking pathetic.

3) “Everybody’s trying to claim the credit for inventing punk… And that Ramones nonsense going on and on – how on Earth are the Ramones anything at all like the Sex Pistols? We came from a culture facing some serious challenges when we were young. We were the complete bottom line – the poorest of the poor. We come from squalor and fought our way up tooth and claw. Mommy and Daddy didn’t buy us no guitars… I have no begrudging of what the Ramones do or any of them bands. But they did not come from harsh realities – and therefore (are) incomparable.” This is more or less like the last quote: asinine, self-pitying bullshit from a feeble old man who hasn’t written a decent song for 30 years. I get the sense that it’s this self-judgmental desperation that drives Lydon to say such mind-bogglingly stupid crap. Nevermind the fact that the Ramones were, indisputably, a huge influence on the Pistols and England’s burgeoning punk scene in 1976; here’s a guy who between 1976 and 1980 recorded songs and albums that are the bedrock of punk and everything it spawned, yet when the amps are turned on in 2007 and Jay Leno introduces him, it’s still as a band that broke up 29 years ago, and he’s still singing (badly, I might add) songs that were written 30, 31 years ago. No one remembers or cares about anything Lydon has written since 1979’s Metal Box. He hasn’t written anything good since then.

At least the Ramones recorded three phenomenal albums, two great albums, and two more decent albums, which is a shitload more than John Lydon can take credit for. I don’t care if you’re main source of income derives from something you did three decades ago. And I have no problem with anyone being proud of their roots; I’m proud of being from a ranching family in Roswell, NM that never had any money. But watching Lydon’s once energizing young-man energy devolve over the years into two-dimensional maudlin annoyance is sad indeed. Buck up, dude. You’re doing just fine.

Chris Berry

I was driving on I25 northbound last week, curving around La Bajada’s peak where your field of vision gets lit up by the lights of Santa Fe, when Two Step by The Throwing Muses started through my speakers. I’ve always loved this song, but it was all the more crushing hearing it on my mix because it was ten years since Chris Berry died. Chris loved the song, too. Maybe more than I did.

It blew my mind after I moved back from California in 1993 when Chris told me his band used to cover Two Step. How the hell do you pull something like that off, I wondered? Two guitars often playing different time signatures, and a female vocalist? Impossible for me. Yet, I never doubted he did it justice. Chris, for all of you that never heard him, was the most brilliant musician that ever lived in Santa Fe. This is not hyperbole; this is not the raving of someone still smarting from his friend’s death ten years ago – it’s simply the truth. With all due respect to the multitudes of bassists who attempted filling Chris’ shoes in The Floors in the last 15 years – and I’ve played with some great guys – Chris’ shoes are impossible to fill. No one, and I mean NO ONE, ever played bass like Chris Berry. The bass was an extension of his body, and Chris was its master. His picking was so flawless and smooth, his tempos so metronome-like, and his understanding of the neck so absolute… there were many times when I felt embarrassed having him play my songs. He was light years ahead of anything I had to offer.

Chris was also the most prolific musician I ever knew. Whereas I would be busting my balls trying to write even ten songs a year I could live with, Chris routinely wrote an album’s worth of songs every month. He was unstoppable. He would play bass in Monkeyshines, bass in The Floors, and then write and record a dozen songs with Daniel Ellis-Green in Billow. Then he’d come back next week and we’d start all over again. He’d been operating like that for years. Before he got sick in August of ’97, we had agreed to start our own record label to record our bands. Here was life as I always imagined it – neither one of us cared about getting married, or raising kids, or career, or any of that bull shit. We were going to record CDs and tour.

After Chris died, I managed to buy a van, put out a crappy Floors CD, and book some gawdawful tours, but it was two and a half years of heartbreak; I was playing with people who didn’t give a shit and didn’t ever help out. It was a miracle I single-handedly got us on the road at all. I still find myself wondering how different life would’ve been with Chris and I doing it together.

But that’s all bullshit, really. I can live without the band, and I can live without touring. I miss playing with Chris, but much more than that, I just miss my friend. I miss talking about movies with him, I miss watching Baseball Tonight with him, and I miss eating dinner with him. There’s no telling what Chris would have accomplished with his life, and how many people he would have touched and inspired.

Of all the lessons I’ve received in my 38 years that life is unfair, this was the most unnecessary. Thank you for the refresher course Mother Nature, God, The Fates, or whatever force (if any) controls the universe, but I read my history books about World War II and The Black Plague – you didn’t need to do this. There's been enough unfairness, enough misery, on the planet already. You could’ve left Chris here. I suppose that’s just selfishness on my part, but I don’t see the logic in robbing one of the most wonderful, beautiful, talented people any of us ever knew of his life.

Of course, there is no logic. And I’ve found you will drive yourself crazy trying to find any. Charles Bukowski once wrote, “the gods play no favorities.” So I, and the Berrys, and the rest of Chris’ friends, are left with just the memories now. Memories of Chris that come up frequently for me – his laugh, his company, listening to him talk about his love of The Cure, his love of Mozart, his love of playing bass, and his love of us.

Last week I tried writing a poem about Chris, but I’ve never been a poet. As with all the poetry I attempt, it was crap. Only the last couple of lines don’t embarrass me; they’re maudlin, but they sum up what I felt rounding the top of La Bajada last week:

now

the only way I can see my friend

is to turn the light

off

and fall

asleep.

Los Angeles, Part II

Maila Nurmi died on January 10th of this year.

If you’re one of the vast multitudes who doesn’t recognize her name, it is my condescending, snobbish contention that you are not making the best of your time here on Earth, and really ought to make a bigger effort to find out what life actually has to offer, beyond talking on your cell phone about the dumbest crap imaginable, and shitty, corporate-manicured top-40 music.

So here’s a chance to learn: Maila Nurmi came very close to not having anyone remember who she was, but for a fateful decision to dress up like Charles Addams’ femme fatale character from his New Yorker cartoons, and attend choreographer Lester Horton's annual Bal Caribe Masquerade in 1953. It was here that TV producer Hunt Stromberg, Jr. saw the Finland-born beauty, and got the idea of having her host a late-night horror movie program. Maila (or her writer-husband Dean Riesner, depending on whose story you believe) christened the character Vampira, and the first episode of The Vampira Show aired on May 1st, 1954.

It is an accident of history that Maila Nurmi and Vampira will forever be associated with Ed Wood and 1959’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. Acting as one of TV's first horror hosts, and pioneering the sex-and-death look that is ubiquitous today, The Vampira Show actually brought Maila a lot of attention: Life, Newsweek, and TV Guide ran articles about her (despite the show only being aired in the Los Angeles area), and she was nominated for the Most Outstanding Female Personality emmy in 1954. This is what she should be remembered for, but the plug was pulled on The Vampira Show after barely a year because the fiercely independent Nurmi refused to sell the rights to her character to ABC.

Somewhat adrift in Hollywood, Nurmi got parts in other movies during her short stint as a movie actress (Sex Kittens go to College and The Magic Sword, among others), but it was her decision to accept 300 one dollar bills from Ed Wood, and dust off her Vampira costume for his tour de force Plan Nine From Outer Space, for which she’ll always be fondly remembered. Nurmi worked for one day only, refusing to utter one word of the dialog Wood had written for her (“I can’t say these words. It’s too moronic. Can I do it as a mute?”), and went on with her life. Twenty years later Wood became the apotheosis of Cult, Plan 9 became the darling of the cult crowd, and Vampira was suddenly a worldwide phenomenon.

The wonder of Maila Nurmi isn’t that she gave us Vampira, and appeared in Ed Wood’s most famous movie. It isn’t that she worked with Lili St. Cyr, or that she dated James Dean. And it isn’t that she was a beautiful woman. The wonder of Maila Nurmi is that she survived it all – she didn’t burn out on drugs and become a raving lunatic, dying young, a la Dean, Marilyn, and hell, even Ed Wood, for that matter. She was a genuine Hollywood survivor who stayed creative, making her own jewelry and clothing, and painting until late in life. And instead of becoming a jaded old crank (Night of the Living Dead’s Duane Jones), refusing to talk about Vampira and Ed Wood, she happily related tales about Ed, and Plan 9, and everything else fanboys like me asked her about for the last 20 years of her life. And she did it with grace and happiness and a calming bliss that she exuded up to the end.

In a world where senseless war, selfishness, avarice, and thoughtlessness overwhelm us from day to day, even hour to hour, I ask you to check out what Maila had to say about life, and see if any of us measures up:

“I used to wake up in the morning, every morning for years and years and years and years. I’d wake up with the first gleam of consciousness from sleep, and – beginning to come awake – I would leap out of bed, leap out of bed and say, ‘Good morning Mary Sunshine!’ To nobody in particular. But no – to the world. If I had a roommate, (she would say) ‘Shut up! Do you have to do that?’ But I had to do it. Every morning: ‘Good morning!’ I had to say, ‘hello world!’ It’s the world, and it’s me in it! It’s the whole miracle of day waiting for me in this world!”

It was the Best of Times

I don't know how you feel about the spectacle of Tim Curry dressed up in drag, loudly professing his strong desire to bed Peter Hinwood in Rocky Horror Picture Show. The picture is the very definition of Cult Movie, but there are plenty who don't dig it. I'm told that former MST3K cast member Kevin Murphy savages Rocky Horror in his book A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey. I myself have always been ambivalent about it; I had a good time seeing a few showings of it in high school, but haven't felt the urge to see it since then.

At any rate, here's some truth, whether we want to admit it or not:

For those of us who had the sense to grow up on GOOD movies; for those of us fortunate enough to be knocked on our asses at a young age by the ART of Willis O'Brien, Ray Harryhausen, Val Lewton, Jack Arnold, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Curt Siodmak, and even Ib Melchior; for those of us who like music, and I mean really LOVE the stuff, and don't just use it as background noise for our boring lives:

We owe Richard O'Brien a debt of gratitude. Rocky Horror's opening tune, Science Fiction/Double Feature, is cool beyond words. Not only is it a heartfelt homage to the greatest movies in cinema history - no hyperbole here, I assure all of you movie snobs - but the names of Fay Wray, Leo G. Carroll, Michael Rennie, Claude Raines and Anne Francis are celebrated throughout. Names that most of you fools don't even know. Even the great Buddy Holly is invoked in Meatloaf's showcase, Hot Patootie.

The man understands. He is one of us. Beats me if the movie deserves classic status, but if you ever read this, Richard, It means something that you acknowledged these geniuses, knowing full well that most of the folks listening to the soundtrack would have no idea what you're talking about. At least someone's paying attention.

Hammer Studios' Dracula Tote Board

I’m going to seize the opportunity here and shamelessly rip off Phil Farrand and his Star Trek Nitpicker’s Guides. If you missed them back in the early-mid 90s, Farrand is a serious-ass Jesus freak who wrote books about the original Star Trek series, and the pathetic Next Generation, wherein he humorously, and entertainingly (despite being a nerd-boy who doesn’t know, and doesn’t care to know, anything about the actors, writers, and directors who worked on the shows) pointed out all the bloopers, plot oversights, and continuity problems in Star Trek. Geeked-out Trekkies from all over the globe responded enthusiastically, and Farrand now maintains www.nitcentral.com, carrying on the tradition begun in his now out-of-print books.

Despite Farrand’s annoying lack of knowledge about anything not associated with computer programming or Jesus, the books were pretty damn funny. What caught my eye more than going episode by episode and rattling off the bloopers were Phil’s Tote Boards, lists of seemingly mundane events in the Star Trek universe that reoccurred so many times in the course of the series that they became clichés. E.g., “Number of times Spock says ‘fascinating’: 49”; “Number of episodes in which Scotty worries over the Enterprise’s engines: 19”; “Number of times Kirk’s shirt is torn: 7.” Each tote board then sites the exact episodes and moments where the events took place. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure for me, but damned if I didn’t read and re-read the tote boards, chuckling all the while.

I try not to do shit like this too often, but a few years back whilst watching every Dracula movie Christopher Lee made for Hammer Studios in England, I inexplicably morphed into Phil Farrand and drew up my own Hammer Dracula Tote Board. Seemed a pity to not inflict on the world, so here ‘tis.

ABBREVIATIONS FOR THE SEVEN CHRISTOPHER LEE HAMMER DRACULA MOVIES:
Horror of Dracula (1958): Horror
Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1965): Prince
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968): Risen
Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970): Taste
Scars of Dracula (1970): Scars
Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972): A.D.
The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974): Satanic
(Note to Hammer nerds: 1960’s Brides of Dracula isn’t included here, as Christopher Lee sat that one out.)

1) Total number of victims Dracula bites onscreen: 11

2) Number of times Dracula is about to bite a victim when someone, or something, thwarts him at the last second: 7

3) Number of times Dracula is killed: 8

4) Number of times Dracula is miraculously resurrected: 6

5) Number of times the fearful, tight-lipped locals offer no help whatsoever: 7

6) Number of times characters approach creepy looking carriages, only to be shanghaied to Dracula’s castle: 6

7) Number of faithful lackeys Dracula brings under his spell, only to treat with utter contempt: 12

8) Number of characters named "Paul": 3

9) Number of girls Paul Carlson makes time with in Scars of Dracula: 3

10) Consecutive movies in which Hammer character actor Michael Ripper appears: 3

11) Number of times a victim’s blood looks suspiciously unlike blood: 10

12) Number of times the hipster kids in A.D. 1972 engage in embarrassingly dated hipster lingo: too many times to count

13) Number of times in Scars of Dracula when Christopher Lee is about to explain “the fire” before inexplicably trailing off: 2

14) Number of movies Christopher Lee publicly griped about: at least 4

15) Number of moments of sheer poetic beauty: 1

***

1) Violates Lucy and Mina in their bedrooms in Horror. Corners Helen, after she discovers her dead husband, in Prince. Surprises Zena in the forest in Risen. Defiles Maria in her bed in Risen. Does away with Zena in the bakery cellar in Risen. Lures Lucy into the old church in Taste. Debases Julie in Scars. Mauls Tania in Scars. Feasts on Laura after being resurrected in A.D. Finishes off a drugged Gaynor in A.D. Appears out of the mist for a kidnapped Jane in Satanic.

2) Flees after Charles and Father Sander barge through Diana’s door in Prince. Shrinks away after Paul frustrates his efforts in the bakery cellar with Maria in Risen. Smashes through Maria’s window after Paul and the Monsignor foil him in Risen. Slips into the dark after Alice’s drunken father (“Alice! You’re gonna be whipped!”) spoils the garden setting in Taste. Concentration is broken by a rooster in Taste. Recoils in horror seeing Sarah’s crucifix necklace in Scars. Gives up on Jessica after Van Helsing invades the church in A.D.

3) Burns to ashes by sunlight in Horror. Drowns in running water in Prince. Impaled on a large metal cross in Risen. Caught in the light of a stained glass window, and falls onto an alter cross in Taste. Electrocuted and set on fire in Scars. Skewered on a carriage wheel’s spoke at the beginning of A.D.; takes holy water in the face and falls on a stake at the end. Entangled by a Hawthorne tree and then driven through by Van Helsing in Satanic.

4) Alan’s blood is poured into his ashes in Prince. A priest’s blood trickles into his mouth in Risen. Lord Courtney drinks his blood, transmogrifying into Dracula in Taste. A giant rubber bat vomits blood on his ashes in Scars. Resurrected by hippies via black magic ritual in A.D. Reincarnated by a Chinese woman in Satanic.

5) Van Helsing butts heads with the innkeeper (“Look sir, you’re a stranger here in Klaussenberg – some things are best left alone.") in Horror. The carriage driver abandons Charles and his three companions, refusing to go any further at night, in Prince. Resigned patrons at the tavern watch the despondent priest get loaded in Risen. Local pub-crawlers duke it with Paul rather than help him storm the castle in Risen. Julie plays dumb about why Paul can’t go to the castle in Scars. Another boorish carriage driver strands Sarah and Simon (“I wouldn’t advise you to stay here much longer, anyway.”) in Scars. The landlord and his blue-collar buddies forcibly eject Sarah and Simon from the inn (not once, but twice) in Scars.

6) Charles and his companions board a driverless carriage in Prince. Klove takes naïve Diana back to the castle in Prince. Maria follows the drunken priest to Dracula’s carriage in Risen. Hypnotized Alice leads Lucy to the driverless carriage that takes them both on a joyride to the dilapidated church in Taste (the church in this movie is, for intents and purposes, Dracula’s castle). Paul falls asleep in Klove’s carriage after being given the heave-ho from the inn in Scars. Klove chucks Julie into his carriage in Scars.

7) Growls at and then shoves the vampire woman in Horror. Hisses at Helen and manhandles her (twice) in Prince. Slaps Zena to the ground in Risen. Throws Maria at the castle doors in Risen. Gives Alice the cold shoulder ("I have no further use for you.”) in Taste. Ditches Lucy in a pond in Taste. Repeatedly stabs Tania with a knife in Scars. Whips Klove and later brands him with an antique sword in Scars. Verbally berates Johnny Alucard (“I promised you nothing.”) in A.D. Shackles Jane to the basement wall in Satanic. Reveals to his three partners he’s going to infect them with the plague in Satanic.

8) Barry Andrews plays the atheist Paul (“I don’t deny his existence, I just don’t believe it.”) in Risen. Anthony Corlan plays the love-struck Paul Paxton in Taste. Christopher Matthews plays the ladies’ man Paul Carlson in Scars.

9) Wakes up in bed with the Burgomaster’s daughter; makes out with the inn’s waitress mere seconds after meeting her in the dead of night; hops into bed with Tania in Dracula’s castle.

10) As the lovable innkeeper Max in Risen. As the no-nonsense, alcoholic Detective Cobb in Taste. As the paranoid, broken-spirited landlord in Scars.

11) Red water paint stains the dress of the Vampire Woman after Harker stakes her in Horror. Cherry soda gushes out of Alan’s neck after Klove slits it in Prince. Unidentifiable light red liquid discolors Helen’s dress in Prince. Halloween blood bubbles out of Dracula’s chest after Paul stakes him in Risen. Cups of blood look like cherry slushies in Taste; ditto for Lord Courtley’s blood when he cuts himself. Red food coloring is smeared on Joanna’s neck in Scars; the same food coloring appears later on the floor of the church. Red ink spills out of Alucard during the ritual in A.D., and then again from Dracula after he falls on the stake.

12) This being Hammer’s ill-advised attempt to “update” the series, all the kids naturally talk like a bunch of groovy 70s swingers throughout the movie, man. However, the four main offenders are: Jessica explaining to Van Helsing why she’s reading his book Treatise on the Black Mass (“Just a quiet bit of mind blowing.”); Johnny Alucard setting the mood at the black magic ritual (“Dig the music, kids!”); Alucard’s goofy crony who dresses like a monk (“Hey, you’re a sight for sore eyes, man!” and “It was too way out for it to be real, wasn’t it?”)

13) In front of Paul, and then later in front of Sarah and Simon.

14) On Risen: “…Made with a complete absence of style, taste, and production quality.” On Prince: “… The dialog Dracula was to speak was so appalling that I said, ‘Look, if we can’t do better than this, let’s have him not speak at all.’” On A.D.: “All I get to do is stand around on unhallowed ground, sweep down corridors and make the odd pounce or two.” On Satanic: “…fatuous, pointless, absurd.”

15) Whether you dig ‘em or not, the movies had, by virtue of sheer numbers, built up a unique momentum by the series’ swansong, The Satanic Rites of Dracula. In the last third of that movie, to the strains of an ominous, beautiful score, Lorimer Van Helsing (Peter Cushing, as always), the great grandson of the original Doctor Van Helsing, fashions a silver bullet out of a small cross as prepares for the final showdown with millionaire recluse D.D. Denham, whom he suspects is actually Dracula. The gorgeous music and Cushing’s typically – and brilliantly – understated performance lend the scene a poignant air of destiny and finality, whether intentional or not.