Red Rockers Roll

 

For their 2007 Special Collector’s Edition DVD release of Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, Paramount recorded a commentary track with director Lou Adler and star Cheech Marin. This is a tricky proposition with any movie. A good commentary track can be gripping, but lousy commentary tracks hurt me. Badly. Why squander an opportunity to bring some history to the masses? Damned if I know. Here, though, the opportunity is not squandered. Adler's and Marin's track isn't the best commentary track in the world, but what the crap, it’s a long way from the worst. (See Top Secret or any Star Trek DVD for good examples of how not to do a commentary track.) It’s a lot like the movie itself, actually – spontaneous, meandering, pointless, and frequently hilarious. Very entertaining stuff. Adler and Marin don’t even bother introducing themselves to kick the whole thing off. They just start talking.

The two men’s memories acquit themselves admirably, considering they’re recalling events two decades old at the time of taping. They remember what parts of L.A. they filmed in. Adler points out that backstage scenes in the club at movie’s end were split between The Roxy and The Whiskey on L.A’s Sunset Strip. They point out Ellen Barkin’s uncredited appearance as a guitar-playing girl prior to Cheech and Chong’s set.

For the discerning viewer, however, the most telling moment – the moment that elevates this particular commentary from amusing-on-a-Saturday-afternoon-whilst-drinking-domestic-beer/swill to cultural signifier – comes at the one hour twelve minute mark. While Zane Buzby walks Tommy Chong around and through the Roxy in a feeble attempt to wake him up (Buzby accidentally gave the hapless Chong Quaaludes before Cheech & Chong’s crucial set at Battle of the Bands), we cut to a shot of a three-piece punk band. The band appears on screen for only 33 seconds, and are clearly not lip synching (as Cheech & Chong are during their performance); the drummer doesn’t seem to be following the bassist and guitarist. He looks very confused. Something is terribly wrong. The playing is sloppy and all over the place. Twice the guitarist glances at the drummer, clearly wondering what the hell he’s doing back there.

For the first time, Adler’s and Marin’s memories fail them.

“What band was this?” Marin asks. “Do you remember, Lou?”

“No,” Adler answers, “but I’m trying – The Puke? Or The Heebie Jeebies? Or…”

Grasping at straws, Adler throws out the name of the one punk band he remembers.

“You know – but The Germs are in here – ”

“This might be The Germs,” Marin answers. “…Is it…?”

“No,” Adler says, baffled. “The guy with the flag… Uh, Darby… Pretty… really responsible for a lot of L.A. punk.”

            The drummer stops playing. “I can’t hear shit,” he tells the guitarist and bassist. The shot ends, and the badly misidentified band are never mentioned again.

***

            And there, my friends, you have it.

            Lou Adler’s and Cheech Marin’s befuddled inability to remember the name of this band in a movie they themselves wrote and filmed – while almost effortlessly remembering everyone else in the picture – sums up, in just a few seconds, the legacy of The Dils.

            The Dils should be the one band you know. Their entire recorded output consists only of two singles and an EP, none of which anyone even owns, yet their tiny oeuvre shames the catalogs of the vast majority of bands that hung around for years, even decades. Their fusion of pop melody and punk chaos can only be described as cathartic, and should be the yardstick by which all other bands are measured, but finding anyone that can name even one of their songs is nearly impossible. They should be mentioned in the same breath as The Stooges, The Ramones, The Damned, and The ‘Mats, but instead are recalled only by stodgy historians, or elder statesmen and women who were actually in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late 70s.

            Maybe it was the band’s lack of a bona-fide home base that made them impossible to peg? James Hicks and David Ferguson, in their liner notes for the CD release of Rat Music for Rat People, Vol. 1, write: “(The Dils) came out of the little known but vibrant San Diego punk scene…” This is more or less accurate, but less, really. Brothers Chip (guitar) and Tony (bass) Kinman, with a revolving-door cast of drummers, grew up in Carlsbad, a suburb north of San Diego, but quickly went north to San Francisco, wound up back in Carlsbad, then moved for real to San Francisco, playing tons in the Bay City and Los Angeles. I’ve found that people familiar with The Dils often can’t tell you where they were from. They were west coast, sure, but from what city? L.A? San Francisco? Both, somehow?

            Beyond their three official releases, there were even more songs – two that were demo’d and never released, others that were played live but never demo’d. And all of them are so sublimely transcending, somehow simultaneously musically gorgeous and primal, violent, that you walk the streets, at night, in the winter with no jacket, freezing but not caring, wondering over and over: how did one of the world’s greatest bands never get their due? Sure, Ed Wood died broke and forgotten, but at least in death he was reborn, achieving an immortality of sorts. The circle was closed.

Whither The Dils…?

***

            Rat Music for Rat People Volume 1 was originally released in 1982 by CD Presents as a sort of Punk Rock primer. Kurt Cobain later cited it as a major influence: “…I was completely blown away,” he recalled to Guitar Magazine. “I’d finally found my calling.”

            There were fourteen songs, mostly live, by all the current punk rock heavyweights: Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Flipper, The Circle Jerks and TSOL, among others. Three of the songs were studio recordings: Steel Case Enclosure by Crucifix, Cheap Tragedies by The Avengers, and the last song on side two, tucked away almost like a bonus track, maybe even an afterthought: Blow Up, by The Dils.

At that point, in 1982, if you were sitting in your room, bored shitless, and Blow Up’s descending guitar line and sloppy segue into the song proper (was this for real, you wondered? It sounded like someone surreptitiously taped these guys working the bugs out at a rehearsal) grabbed your attention; if you listened intently as Chip Kinman sang Blow Up’s delirious melody and realized then and there you had to go see them lay it down live, had to get to know them because they understood perfectly your frustration with your current state of affairs, what with all your pent-up energy and emotions, but no proper avenue to manifest them (“There’s something on my mind,” Chip sang to you, “words are coming fast”); if Blow Up’s final 48 seconds, where the repetitive two-chord progression playing behind Chip and Brother Tony singing repeatedly “In this world of mine, nothing ever lasts…” finally – inevitably – erupts with the drummer zealously bashing his crappy drumkit in Satisfaction-like mockery, and Tony’s crazy, hyperactive descending bass line (was he using an effect? Could anyone really play that fast?) transported you to a better place as the band sprinted all-out for the finish line – if all of this made you grab the local weekly and scan the club listings for The Dils, you were out of luck. In 1980, fully two years before Rat Music, and to zero notice in the music press, The Dils broke up.

Their appearance on Rat Music was probably the most exposure they ever got, more than any of their three seven inchers got while they were still playing and touring, and it was all for naught. Sundown, the first album by Rank and File, Chip and Tony’s new country outfit (featuring former Nun Alejandro Escoveda) came out the same year. The Dils were already ancient history. Chip Kinman, for one, had washed his hands of punk at that point, saying that by 1980, “punk rock was dead. The local California scene devolved into hard core and mall punk.”

No jury would convict you for taking issue with this point of view. By 1980, there were still plenty of forthcoming highlights proving that rumors of punk’s death were greatly exaggerated: Flag’s Damaged, The Replacements’ Stink, The Hüsker’s Zen Arcade and New Day Rising, DK’s Plastic Surgery Disasters, The Dickies’ Stukas Over Disneyland, Fear’s The Record, and Ramones’ Subterranean Jungle, to name but a few.

But Chip Kinman is allowed to say whatever the fuck he wants about punk. Because at the end of the day, he and The Dils recorded and released – in a short span of just three years, with no money or major label support – nine of the greatest punk songs ever written. And you don’t even fucking know about them.

#s 2 & 3: I Hate the Rich/You’re Not Blank (What? Records, 1977)

            “The first ten seconds or so of ‘You’re Not Blank’ are like total war, and the first image you have is of the flames and fire and blood from Apocalypse Now,” writes Nicholas Rombes. And that’s just the first ten seconds. Behold, the apotheosis of punk rock: One minute and 37 seconds of unbridled, fevered musical chaos where every second sounds like the very last second the band can possibly hold it together before collapsing in a puddle of sweat and beer. But instead, the flailing drums, tidal-wave guitars and careening bass keep going, like some huge-ass snowball rolling faster and bigger down a 20% grade, staying within close enough range of each other to allow Chip Kinman to lambast the hippies (give ‘em a break; it was 1977) and throw down a frenzied, wholly unexpected lead at the 1:08 mark which is deliciously melodic, but it’s over in a heartbeat, and 20 seconds later You’re Not Blank crashes to an exuberant halt.

            So consider this: that’s the b-side. The main attraction is I Hate the Rich, pre-dating Motörhead’s Eat the Rich by ten years. Unlike You’re Not Blank, I Hate the Rich starts nice and easy, chords descending pleasantly enough, until second twelve when Tony Kinman’s bass teases its way in, and the whole thing explodes all around you, out of your speakers, into your room, all over your cranium. To compliment the basic, primal chord progressions, we have basic, borderline simplistic lyrics – an affirmation that there would be no incongruously mucking up the song’s (or even the band’s) aesthetic in the name of appeasing those who turned their noses up at anything that didn’t meet their incredibly high standards. “I hate the rich, they should dig the ditch,” Chip sings over two simple chords that for a moment appear to be changing keys before settling down again. “I hate the rich – gotta life without a hitch.” Perhaps anticipating criticism of his simple philosophy, Chip preemptively addresses music snobs writing The Dils off as a joke during the chorus, wherein Andre Algover doesn’t play the drums so much as he recklessly beats the shit out of them as fast as his arms allow: “I hate the rich, I don’t want their money; I hate the rich and it ain’t so funny.” And then right on cue, right when we need it, Chip lets loose with another perfectly laid out lead. He's got an uncanny knack, Chip does, for playing leads that conflate with the lyrics, that convey in notes what he or Tony have been on about during the rest of the song. This particular lead is the aural equivalent of being bombed by napalm. And then one more frantically explosive chorus before a breakneck cut-off at the 1.39 mark.

            One of the great punk rock singles, from any era, any country. And The Dils were just warming up.

#s 4 & 5: Class War/Mr. Big (198 Seconds of The Dils, Dangerhouse Records, 1977)

            Class War is The Dils’ best-known song by virtue of its being covered by DOA on their 1982 War on 45 EP. Whereas Chip Kinman was happy to vent his spleen about society’s well-to-do on I Hate the Rich, brother Tony ups the ante on their one and only Dangerhouse release, calling for all out war: “I wanna war, between the rich and the poor,” Tony sings, and his bass is LOUD in the mix this time, sounding almost John Entwistle-esque; “I wanna fight & know what I’m fighting for.” It’s two chords repeated over and over again, pummeling you, nay, bludgeoning you into submission until a typically short-but-sublime Chip solo, a siren announcing a call to arms, rips across the chords, and then the song unexpectedly – and completely brilliantly, you might say – changes key, setting up the final warning: “If I’m told to kill a Cuban or African, there’ll be a class war right here in America.” Without warning the song lurches back to its original key, the brothers yell the final chorus in unison, and everything ends abruptly under Chip’s feedback.

You’re saying it sounds trite. Until it’s filling your ears and brain, it’s hard, if not impossible, to convey how powerful something so seemingly crude became in the The Dils’ hands. Class War is musical war too; remove the vocals from the mix, and there’s still no mistaking The Dils’ intent. The brothers Kinman really believed what they were singing – Chip even wore a hammer & sickle shirt. For a time, anyway. “At the time, it was something we believed in…” Chip recalled. “After a couple years went by and we started reading more and more about this whole Communist and left-wing strata… then we realized really just kind of how awful Communists really were, what a terrible system it is, how many millions have died under that system and all that kind of stuff. And we decided, well, perhaps that's not such a good idea after all.”

            With 198 Seconds of The Dils’ B-side, however, the band pulls resolutely away from the rest of the pack. If you haven’t heard Mr. Big, Chip Kinman’s dig at society’s well-to-do, then I envy you. Truly. You have waiting for you one of those experiences in life, one of those grand, grand times when you’re hearing for the first time something so miraculous that everything stands still, life’s problems fade into irrelevance, and you’re finally in the moment, endorphins flowing, happy and loving life. Like the first time you heard The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows, or Hendrix’s Bold As Love. One of the Great Lost 70s Punk Songs, Mr. Big doesn’t start so much as it erupts, but by this second single the brothers Kinman were truly flexing their chops, and Chip’s guitar holds the tempo in check, and instead of the barely-controlled mayhem of I Hate the Rich or You’re Not Blank, an astonishingly beautiful chorus anchors a song that veers more towards mid-tempo than blazing fast. But as much as I love hearing Chip sing “when you go downtown, driving in your car, while I take the bus – twice as long to get half as far,” it’s the music here that betrays a hunger on the Kinman’s part for something beyond tried-and-true punk rock. Mr. Big is endlessly tuneful, probably one of the main reasons the tag “punk rock Everly Brothers” was affixed (lovingly and disparagingly) to the band by this point. Whether that label was pejorative or not, Mr. Big was amazingly catchy without being weak or inauthentic. These boys were the real deal, and this still wasn’t their best work.

#6: Century

            Century first emerged from the vaults on the 2009 Rat Music reissue, along with a slower, almost Beatles-esque version of You’re Not Blank. There is, not surprisingly, no drop-off in quality here; even though Century never made it onto any of The Dils’ three official releases, it would’ve made perfect sense on any of them. Maybe this is a bona-fide collaboration for the Kinman brothers? For the first time in a Dils song, Chip sings the verses, and Tony sings the chorus. Wish I were good at deciphering lyrics, but I ain’t, mates, and there is a distinct paucity of Dils lyrics pages online. So you’ll just have to be happy with what we’ve got here: a dazzling melody, another fab Tony bass line, a guitar solo that starts sounding like an engine breaking down, but quickly recovers, transmogrifying before your very ears into something altogether tuneful, and charmingly inept drumming. Hard to believe this was in the can for so long.

#s 7, 8 & 9: Sound of the Rain/Not Worth It/Red Rockers (Made in Canada, Rogelletti Records, 1980)

            A full length LP was not in the offing for The Dils at the dawn of the Reagan era. Perhaps Chip and Tony already realized it was pointless, as their muse was leading them off in a wholly different direction than that of the newer wave of punk bands. As the faceless, generic noise of Hardcore reared up at the decade’s inception (MDC’s 1982 debut album being the best – and only necessary – example), The Dils were looking ahead to a Country/Cow Punk sound, a good ten years ahead of Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression debut.

            Typically the arrival of acoustic guitars and slower tempos incites the wailing of close-minded, orthodox punk rock ideologues, bringing the vague but oft-used (even clichéd) #1 weapon of their arsenal exploding from their slobbering, simplistic mouths: sellout. Happily, this kind of one-dimensional, ignorant drivel resides strictly in the purview of bitter, unhappy pinheads, fearful of what is implied by accepting any modicum of variety or diversity in their lives.

And The Dils were neither bitter nor unhappy. So it is here, on their final official release, that acoustic guitars are heard very clearly in each song. And it is also here, giving the bird to punk rock SOP, that The Dils make it clear in no uncertain terms that they were one of the best bands of that era.

The first thing you notice, slipping the vinyl out of the very odd sleeve (Made in Canada? What were these blokes getting at, anyways?) is the length of each song – far and away longer than anything the band recorded up to this point. For the first time, shockingly, two songs cross the three-minute threshold. Only Mr. Big came anywhere even close to this honor previously, clocking in at 2:17. With three songs totaling a stunning nine minutes, Rogelletti Records, perhaps unsure themselves of what all this meant, helpfully packaged Made in Canada as two 7” singles. The second single boasts only Red Rockers on it’s A-side. There is no B-side.

Chip Kinman sings The Sound of the Rain, the first song on the Made in Canada EP. On the other hand, here’s something about New Mexico if you’ve never been:

Probably fifteen years ago I drove south on highway 285, going to Roswell from Santa Fe to visit family. It was mid-afternoon in July, a lovely time of year to make the drive – cholla blooms dot the landscape with purple magenta, slowly rolling plains draw your eyes out into miles and miles of miles and miles until you see ancient, dilapidated farm houses, or a herd of antelope. I got through Vaughn and gradually an enormous thunderhead filled my line of vision directly ahead. Gray and black, blue and white, it stretched out horizontally and vertically, sending huge lightning bolts down on the horizon, out towards Capitan Mountain, even upwards into the rain. The rain was warm and fierce for about ten minutes, and then it stopped. The sun, low in the sky, crashed through the gray clouds and turned the entire landscape an otherworldly pink and red; the very air itself seemed saturated with it, painting the grass, the mountains, the road, and the cows peacefully eating grass, bemusedly watching me speed by. I cracked the window and that incredible smell you get after it rains filled the car. I sailed along without a care in the world, engulfed by this startling beauty all around me, in a place most people would never expect to find it. The gods smiled on me that day, and I was the only one to see it. I felt like the one truly blessed person on a planet of six billion.

That's The Sound of the Rain.

Not Worth It is, on some levels, The Dils’ finest three minutes. If you listen to all their singles in one sitting, it’s striking how the band makes writing exceptional songs seem like such an ordinary thing, something one simply does as a matter of course every weekday for an hour before dinner. From the opening chorus – the song begins with the chorus, not a verse, in a nice bit of unorthodoxy – the humming tunefulness of the acoustic guitar is dichotomized by Tony Kinman’s gallows-humor lyrics, reminding everyone that, yes indeedy, it really is all a waste of time, and we’re all better off dead. He reminds pretty girls of this ultimate truth, he reminds himself, and even you, the listener. “You’re so stupid,” Tony sings without getting worked up in the slightest – “you put your head through the wall.” Or is he simply addressing himself in the 2^nd person? Part of the beauty of the ambiguous lyrics. The ironically lovely thing about the song is you never sense for a moment that Tony really believes any of it. The song drips with life and the verve of someone who knows he’s actually got something to offer in this otherwise random existence, and Tony even pays a brief homage to Roy Orbison after Chip’s lead. Death never sounded so heavenly.

Red Rockers is wholly amazing. You’ve never heard it? I will suppress the urge to punch you in the face as punishment for your inexcusable ignorance; the truth is, most haven’t heard it. This is one of the sorrier facets of our existence in this little backwater of the Milky Way: the vast majority of damned fools you see walking around out there, making bank deposits, buying shaving cream, fueling their cars, planning pointless vacations with the family, have not heard The Dils’ Red Rockers. Previously, I’ve used words like “dazzling,” “brilliant,” “frenzied,” “melodic,” and even “great” to describe The Dils’ music. These are all perfectly appropriate words to deploy when talking about this band. But Red Rockers is probably better than all of that. I know – I said that about Not Worth It. But Red Rockers is more than just one more fantastically rollicking Dils punk rock song – it’s a celebration of everything that made rock’n’roll such a catharsis in the first place. It moves. It’s got a bluesy walking bass line with just enough funk to get the girls dancing, Chuck Berry-esque guitar licks soaring hither and thither making you grin broadly in the midst of even the shittiest day, and the chorus, wherein Chip hammers away at the open root chord while Tony plays a simple but luring progression, is pure joy, the thing ninety-nine percent of the bands out there desperately wish they could think of, but can’t, because they simply aren’t that good.

The overall effect actually falls somewhere in the neighborhood of anthemic. It is to The Dils what We Are the Champions is to Queen, what Won’t Get Fooled Again is to The Who, but without the cynical chuckleheads behind those songs who were more than happy to offer their work up as a commodity to be sold and bought, instead of bona-fide art. Like the best rock’n’roll, Red Rockers has that intangible quality of pure illumination, imparting the feeling to the listener, if even for just a couple of brief minutes, that, just maybe, life is a gift from the gods and that everything just might be alright.

            There’s an unusual sense of closure here, possibly unintentional: the song’s beautiful outro, commencing at 2:10, almost sounds like The Dils waving goodbye – as though Chip and Tony knew this was the end. The final chorus ends and the Kinman brothers switch it up – Tony now holds the root note with Chip playing the bass line on guitar. Then back to guitar on the root note, bass playing the notes. Four more times they alternate, a beautiful string melody that you think will fade out, you’re waiting for it, but suddenly both guitar and bass play the progression together, abandoning the root note, with a final four punctuating chords on the fifth. Song over.

            No one anywhere ever went out on a higher note: the last song on the last single the band ever released. A more glorious noise I’ve never heard.

            Ladies and gentlemen, The Dils.

***

There were other songs, of course. Many would’ve been right at home on 198 Seconds or Made in Canada, but for varying reasons never got recorded, and exist now only on badly recorded live bootlegs. Citizen, National Guard, and Love House are all A-list songs that deserved their day in a proper studio. But by 1980 the Brothers Kinman were done with it. They’d spoken their piece in the service of punk rock, and sought out what might be looked upon as a higher calling, immersing themselves in the music of their youth, the outlaw country of Cash and Haggard, among others. Unlike the legions of bands that broke up and reformed a decade later to cash in on their legends, now somehow comfortable in their role as de-clawed, harmless relics of a bygone age (The Stooges, The Buzzcocks, The Damned, Dead Kennedys, et al), Chip and Tony never looked back. The Dils were over, and exhuming that corpse years after the fact would be the logical move for mere mortals – flawed, insecure human beings needing the approval of the faceless public at large. Thankfully, Chip and Tony never needed that kind of approval. Jeebus love ‘em for being stronger than everyone else. Citizen, National Guard, and Love House remain lost songs of a lost band.

It doesn’t reflect badly on The Dils that barely anyone knows about them in 2013. They did their part. Now you need to do your part. Their music is still out there. Whaddya' waiting for, simpletons? Go get it, for fuck all's sake.

"a lackluster Hollywood dud"

It is an unfortunate truth that oftentimes the ones we need the most in this life are the most cruel, and the things we love most are the things that turn on us, sometimes hurting us – yea, sometimes even deceiving us – leading us to believe that life is one glorious way, when in fact it is another, wholly dreadful way.

I direct you to Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland, the iconic monster magazine that ran from 1958 to 1983, a veritable bible for so many of us who grew up under the absolutely overpowering influence of horror and sci-fi movies in the far-off days of the 60s and 70s.

This was a monthly ritual, finding FM at our local drugstore, learning about new movies and being taught about old ones, and for those of us growing up in small towns long before the Internet or even home video, the pulpy pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, overflowing with crisp, black and white photos of mind-blowing creatures and thingies were like some crazy door opening into another dimension, a lifeline to a far more exciting world, with Forry as the teacher, we as the students, learning about movies that we’d perhaps distantly heard about from a friend of a relative, but had never seen, and weren’t convinced were actually real; that is, until we saw it in the pages of FM, and then our life’s ambition became, simply: SEEING THE MOVIE. This was far more difficult than it is today, what with our streaming video, Netflix, and all. No, back then, in the days of antiquity, before instant gratification, when you had to hunt your prey for weeks, sometimes months or years, when cable finally made its way to our backwater berg, we consulted our weekly TV Guide, flipping immediately to Friday and Saturday, checking the New York and Chicago stations that faithfully served up at least one old monster movie mid-day, or midnight.

And it is here that the Famous Monsters Paradox manifests itself, that this hallowed magazine, whilst teaching us the names of Chaney, Katzman, Arkoff/Nicholson, Karloff, Lugosi, Atwill, Lee, Cushing, Arnold, Lewton, et al, brought into our bedrooms in glorious black and white so much information about the men and women behind these movies, and so many photographs that drove our imaginations into the stratosphere, that there was no way – no WAY – when we finally saw the movies some time down the road, that they ever had any prayer of living up to the mythical work of art we’d already constructed in our heads.

***

It always seemed like Forry and the FM contributors rarely met a movie they didn’t like. Or perhaps they were so determined to finally unearth these old movies for a new generation of youngins – movies deserving at least a little better than what they got in their own time – that hyperbolic, overblown text making even the worst movies sound like the best kept secret in history was entirely justified. (FM #89: “DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN is a must-see for FM readers and it is packed full of unusual horror oddities.” This is, of course, a movie Forry appeared in and served as “technical consultant,” but Forry also helped out with Steve Barkett’s The Aftermath, which doesn’t make that particular train wreck any better, either.)

At any rate, these movies FM brought home to you became as intimately familiar as your favorite t-shirt or Beatles record, even though you hadn’t seen ten seconds of them yet. Sam Raimi once wrote, “When I read (Famous Monsters), it was like watching all the best parts of the film all over again.”  That’s all well and good if you’re reading about a film you’ve seen before, but oftentimes I hadn’t even heard about the damn film yet, so I sat down and created, in my head, the greatest film ever: endless monsters, relentless action and not two seconds of boring exposition, all based on a couple of photographs from FM. A half-page shot of the alien from It Came from Outer Space mesmerized me; no way any movie with that thing in it is anything but balls-out action. How could it be anything but over-the-top crazed?

Here’s an example: Eric Ashton’s article Invaders From Outer Space ran in FM #139 from late 1977. Nothing at all to it – just Ashton ruminating if life beyond our solar system might look exactly like what we’ve been watching all along in our favorite sci-fi pictures. He runs through a couple dozen movies, writing ALL THEIR TITLES IN CAPS (an FM trademark), barely touching on each movie with the briefest of plot synopses. A whopping nine pages of silly, gratuitous filler with no discernible purpose from the latter days of FM, when Forry Ackerman often never even made it into the office, and publisher James Warren, in failing health, still reprinted articles from years ago whenever he needed to fill space.

But never did we mind, we devotees of FM, the very reason for our soft, middle-American existence, because the photographs were the thing. It never got old, running home from school, staring at the same pictures we’d already looked at for months, the magazine dog-eared by now. Here, in particular, Ashton’s article began with a picture of the alien from The Beast with a Million Eyes. And not just any token picture taking up one-fifth of the page; this was a splash, taking up two full pages, this crazy, evil-looking thing, with huge cat-eyes, antennae, fangs, a gruesome, oversized head not unlike Marvel Comics’ The Leader, and some funky outfit made of exotic space-age materials. (Curiously, he was also handcuffed.) Ashton’s text gave no indication of what the movie was actually about, instead simply name-dropping it, along with The Astounding She-Monster, Night of the Blood Beast, and Phantom From Space, all in one very long sentence.

But never did we mind. The movie's plot? A superfluous thing, at best. A mere distraction. We didn’t need to be sold on some high-concept sci-fi premise; we just wanted to watch the movie and SEE THE DAMN MONSTER. You already knew it had to be the most mind-blowing movie anywhere by virtue of the fact that it was in the damn magazine to begin with. And whenever you hit the jackpot, whenever a New York or Chicago station was showing old sci-fi movies, for two hours the horrible pain of being brought back down to reality commenced. It was painful discovering that in fact the first 45 minutes of many of these films were plodding (at least to a ten year-old), full of unsolved murders and endlessly blathering scientists before finally, finally, the monster made an appearance, the one thing you'd been waiting for, for days, weeks, months, sometimes years: that treasured photograph from FM coming to life and doing its thing.

In the event, the wait for The Beast with a Million Eyes was, sadly, not justified. It is a sadly amateurish movie, poorly written and slow-moving. The stock footage at the beginning and the end is grainy and obvious. The scenes of animals running amok and attacking people were clearly shot in a different location, probably on a different day from the rest of the cast, and spliced in during post-production with unpersuasive reaction shots from the actors, trying to make you believe they were somehow in mortal danger. The performances are painfully stilted. The space ship is wildly unimpressive. (American International Pictures producer Alex Gordon said it was made from a customized teakettle; AIP vice-president Samuel Z. Arkoff said it was a coffee percolator.) The last scene makes no sense whatsoever. And the Beast, who only appears briefly – and unconvincingly – with three minutes and 34 seconds to go before the end credits roll, has but two eyes.

Why, then, is Roger Corman’s The Beast with a Million Eyes worthy of your attention? Why should you, an upstanding citizen who already has enough to worry about, raising a family and working a job, earning money to barely pay the bills, take 75 minutes out of an evening and watch this movie?

Because Lorna Thayer, who will be remembered as long as humans walk this earth for tormenting Jack Nicholson and his sandwich order in Five Easy Pieces, appears here as Paul Birch’s long-suffering wife, exactly where you wouldn't expect to find her. Because even though he was well beyond his prime in 1955, former Keystone Kop Chester Conklin, a legend who worked with Chaplin and W.C. Fields, takes a final bow in one of the last movies he ever made, a little low-budget monster movie that never had any historic pretenses.

Because the name of Leonard Tarver, who only appeared in this and one other movie his whole life, would have been forgotten by history but is now remembered as “Him,” the mute WWII vet-cum-farmhand. Because the scene where Him leers out of the darkness of Deputy Brewster’s back seat is genuinely creepy. Because even the worst films are still fascinating as time capsules, capturing actors and locations at a point in their existence that we’ll never see again, like Dick Sargent, appearing here as Deputy Brewster, a pointless character if there ever was one, preserved for posterity at a ridiculously young and skinny 25 years of age, fourteen years before his turn as Darrin Stephens on Bewitched. Because even though producer David Kramarsky is credited as director, Roger Corman gave an invaluable assist, only the second time in the director’s seat for the man who went on to give us Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Hill and It Conquered the World.

Because the phantasmagorical-looking monster on the movie poster was the product of AIP co-founder James H. Nicholson’s fevered imagination, certainly not of anything in the real world in which AIP and everyone else operated, and he ordered it onto the poster before the actual monster had been designed – before, even, the movie began shooting – in an effort to lure potential exhibitors, which was extremely ballsy, or totally insane, or a little bit of both. Because this is where the brilliant Paul Blaisdell got his start, called in at the 11^th hour, the 12^th hour, really, directly after distributors who eagerly settled in to their seats for an advance screening of The Beast with a Million Eyes sat dumbfounded through the closing credits, jaws agape, having seen no monster at all, because there was no monster, feeling had by AIP’s aforementioned poster, screaming at Arkoff and Nicholson that the people paying to see this movie would openly revolt if there were no monster in the final reel, so Blaisdell constructed an 18” hand puppet of the Beast’s slave (the actual beast “was a mind with no substance, a being composed of pure energy”) that appeared in the final couple of minutes, the aforementioned alien with cat eyes and a funky space-age outfit, and it appeared with a huge eyeball superimposed over it and then dropped inexplicably dead for no apparent reason, but what the fuck, it was Blaisdell’s first paying job in the industry, and he went on to better things with Invasion of the Saucer Men, It! The Terror from Beyond Space and The She Creature.

Because these men and women, most of whom had no chits to play in Hollywood to begin with, threw the dice. They drove through the desert to Indio, California in crazy heat and almost no budget to make a movie. They could have played it safe and gotten jobs in the straight world, but instead they gambled. Maybe it was a rush, maybe they had no other choice. I don't know. I know, however, that it should be enough to earn your undying respect.

Because even though it may have been ineffectual in the movie, Blaisdell’s eighteen inch hand puppet crashed into my brain through the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland #139 like a tidal wave, leaving an impression that has lingered for a lifetime. Because a single image in FM could fire the imagination so. And in the final analysis, in a life where ignorance is championed and conformity encouraged, it’s enough to carry me through.

all our times have come

It was fucking awful; we'd all just gone through this dreadful thing. It was 2004. What would come to pass in March of 2012 would've been a loser joke. I mean, if you'd told me about it back then.

     I picked up the phone and called Robert. "It's too much," I told him. "I don't even know what to fucking think."
     "This is a rough one," he said.
     "I don't think I can do it," I said, with a dramatic flourish. I really felt it, though. "Really no reason to carry on with these losers."
     "Oh no, you don't," he said. "Guys like you and me have to get each other's backs."

Well Robert, that was eight years ago, and it meant something. Truly. You had my back, I realized, and so I redoubled my efforts to get yours. And now there's no one to cover. The most frustrating thing is, there's no understanding what happened. I'm sure if I was able to talk to you about it, you'd have your typical cerebral explanation. But no, just questions, lots of questions. Endless questions. And no answers. No way to ask the fucking questions. Just the Ides of March, as you wanted it, your last artistic statement. I never had the guts to tell you while you were still here:

I'm not impressed.

ten second buzz

We walked out of the bank, into the light and the dryness. It had been a dry, mild winter, and summer stepped right in. Spring simply didn't happen. Warm all the time. This all pointed in a bad direction: fires, low reservoir levels, municipalities instructing their citizens on how to save water. And then the water runs out: rioting in the streets, murder, devastation...

I hope to be gone by then.

All the papers were signed. I was now the Personal Representative. The lawyer and I said our goodbyes. "You are Robert now," he said. I watched him walk through the parking lot. He didn't stop, and I thought, where the hell did he park? I briefly thought about offering him a ride, then walked to the car, got inside, put the keys in, got it started, drove out of the parking lot. At the stop light I noticed how dry my hands were, the hands of an 80 year-old.

There were a lot of lessons over the years, Robert. Most of them intentional, some by accident. In the beginning, because of the wide-eyed awe you inspired in me, they were all-consuming, laying the foundation for my own aesthetic. I went back later and questioned them, realizing a lot of them were truth, and a lot of them had to be taken with a large grain of salt. At any rate, they all made me think, which isn't a bad thing by any stretch. In fact, pretty damn important, I reckon. But, my friend, this one I don't need just now. This is one that could have waited: how to open a probate.

I could have waited another 20 years before figuring the ins and outs of settling an estate. If only
you were here
so I could
tell you
how pissed off
I am
about this
one.

goodbye, goodbye...

My grandfather was dead at 76, he died on the table while they tried getting the cancer out. It was the first real funeral I ever attended. We stood in line with the rest of the family at the funeral home, waiting to view the body. My mother walked my brother and me past the casket,

and there was this strange moment: they’d done such a perfect job with the body, my grandfather lay there, serene, looking just as I remembered him a month ago. He looked so normal, so much like Grandpa, that ever so briefly – two seconds, maybe – I imagined his eyes squinting, his brow furrowing momentarily, his hand coming up and rubbing his face, turning to us, happy to see us: “Hello…!” As the image played out I knew it wasn’t happening, yet it was happening, I watched it happen, it was so real, and was so happy to get him out of there and back home. But two seconds later it was over, he was just lying there, the three of us bawling. It seemed so real, I wanted it to be real, but I knew it wasn’t, and we went outside.

After they searched the house, the officer told me they’d look outside with the dog. “Is there anywhere you think he’d go?” “The park, or the arroyo. There’s a path down to the arroyo…” I told them I’d already been to the park and was sure Robert wasn’t there, but it was so overgrown and dark near the arroyo, and my flashlight was so tiny, I couldn't be sure about the arroyo. “We’ll start there,” the officer said. “Wait here, and I’ll talk to you when we’re back…”

I stood in his study, looking at the Segovia poster I’d looked at a million times before in the last 28 years. Files, computer, music stand, Ramos picture, chair, desk, everything was there. It all looked so incongruously normal, like he'd walk in momentarily and we'd listen to Beethoven. I didn’t know what to do. The phone rang; who the fuck was calling? I picked it up. “Hello…?”

I was outside and saw the officer and the dog come up from the arroyo. I took a step towards them. “Wait there until I get him back in the vehicle.” The dog was worked up, but he got it back in the truck, and walked over to me. “He’s down there,” he said. “He’s still breathing." I was aware of the sobbing, the hysterical questions coming one after another. “The ambulance is on the way, but please stay back. They need room to get down here and bring him up.” I heard the sirens getting closer, and two vehicles came down the hill. Red lights were flashing everywhere. They got the stretcher out, rolled it to the trailhead and realized they couldn’t get it down the narrow path, so they removed the top and took it down the path. I kept thinking: hurry up, boys. The quicker you get him to the hospital, the quicker you can pump his stomach. Come on, come on… Less than ten minutes later I saw flashlights coming up the path and they had him there and attached him to the rest of the stretcher and there was this strange moment: they wheeled the body past and Robert’s left arm was bent and sticking up in the air and his head was turned towards me and ever so briefly – two seconds maybe – as the whole area was bathed in flashing red lights I imagined his eyes were open and he saw me and smiled embarrassedly and his arm was sticking up because he was trying to wave at me somehow as if to tell me “everything’s ok you got me in time I’ll see you in a few…” but two seconds later it was over I realized there was blood on his face and his eyes were not open and his arm hung in the air in this horrible manner as though rigor mortis had set in and one of the neighbors came out having not seen Robert and walked over to me:

            “What’s going on?”

            There's not much to say at such a time. “Robert attempted suicide again…”

His mouth opened in shock and he watched for a moment and the rest of the officers came up the trail and I heard one walk over to the neighbor: “Did you hear a gunshot?” and everything sort of fell apart around me and seemed incomprehensible and the officer who had been so nice with the dog came back over: “He shot himself, but he’s still breathing…” and I wanted to get my car the fuck out of there and over to the hospital but I couldn’t because of all the police cars and an ambulance and I realized that it was pointless anyway; what did it matter how quickly I got to the hospital now? I wanted to be anywhere but there, anytime but then, doing anything else but this, and the air was a lot thinner than usual and so heavy now, so unbearably heavy, and I wondered if maybe there was a way to rewind the tape now, please, can we rewind the tape, just this once, I don’t ask for riches or fame and fortune, just to rewind the tape this one time, and do this over again.

turn of the screw

Rain - rain where there should have been snow, but we need it, so you accept it. Shouldn't be drinking so much, but the car turns over, and the music plays on the way to the liquor store. It's just enough rain that the low setting doesn't get it off quickly enough, but the high setting is too fast, and the wipers make a horrible noise. A small parking space, but mercifully there's no one else inside.
     "You want a bag for that?"
     "No thanks," I say.
     A ten dollar bill, and 27 cents change.
     "You're all set..."
On Anna Jean, a dog runs in front of the next car up. It looks like about two inches saves it from death. The owner wears a wife-beater, looks unconcerned. Annoyed, even. The whole thing is too ugly to even think about. The wipers make a horrible noise.

Pull up in the drive way, get out, go in, find the corkscrew. Dinner, TV. There's no point in it, but there's no point not in it. All in all, a normal string of events. Forgettably normal, even, but for the horror of the last three weeks.

Robert, I thought of 100 questions to ask you today. Nothing about what happened, nothing like that. Just run of the mill stuff, the stuff we used to bounce around when we hung out. Some were old, going back months, even years. Some came to me just hours ago. Everything from Keith's rhythm track on Live With Me, to appropriating Beethoven for The Black Cat, to hair on the ears, to concentric circles, to flying over Alaska in a prop plane, to the nature of evil. The sound of your voice still comes easily, but I can't answer the questions for you. The clock stubbornly refuses to tick if I stop and wait for an answer, everything just hangs in the air, so I orient myself back to reality, back to a rainy day in spring of 2012, with you gone, with no answers. And the awful weight of it all hits me again: for 28 years, the questions were always answered, even when I didn't like what I heard. Now there's nothing. Just the questions themselves, with no closure, with this jigsaw puzzle in front of me; there are supposed to be 150 pieces, but over 40 are missing, all in crucial spots, and I can sit here at the table, cursing the fates for selfishly keeping these pieces out of reach, or I can get up and walk away, content that I was able to piece together what I did. How fucked up can you get? This one's a no-brainer.

high or low

Did you ever have a moment like this?: I stood up, looked down in the toilet and thought, holy shit, I've got to start taking better care of myself. It was because of all the drink; we'd gone over to the neighbors' for dinner, and drank all manner of stuff. Way too much, so much that I can't remember if I said anything totally inappropriate. They're good people, the best I know, and their daughter is one of those you can see already has endless potential. The son is a hoot, but the daughter is so sharp - she's like a confident 24 year-old in a 10 year-old body, ready for anything, just waiting to take the reins... Here I am in a 42 year-old body, hung over, already feeling somewhat burned out, wondering if I ever had any potential, barely able to make it to 10pm on any given night.

Robert said: "What'll really be something is your 50s. That's when you're firing on all cylinders..." He was 65 when he said this. A week later he was gone. I was certain all his cylinders still had plenty of miles left in them, and told him as much, but he felt there was nothing left; no potential, no meaning, the reins in tatters, the narrative played out. There had been chaos and tumult for over two years, and he never breathed a word of it. We'd listen to Beethoven's 9th and talk for the bazillionth time about Taylor's Sympathy solo, and all the while little pieces of him secretly fell off into the darkness, and he turned onto a dead-end, reached the end of the road, and stopped there, obdurately refusing to turn around and look for something else. And I wake up at 5am, dogs already restless, lying in the dark, wondering why he couldn't just turn around. I tried to bring him back. Many of us did. I turn it over and over in my mind, hour after hour: why couldn't he turn around? And there's the awful kicker: I'll never know. I'm left with this terrible emptiness, this wound that may scab up in a few years, but may just remain open forever. And five days a week I drive to work, playing nice to the losers of the world, the dregs, the tirelessly bitter who offload their empty, meaningless rancor on perfect strangers, deflecting their vitriol while remembering a hike on Tsankawi, a lunch in Playa del Rey, a Redwood in the desert, an annoying prank call, an egg over easy, a turkey enchilada with red chile, a lesson in tone, a picture of Robert Johnson, a shelf of frogs, a handshake with Lily Tomlin, and 28 years of laughter, trying to make sense out of what's left, this impossible emptiness.