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.