by John Doe
It was like a drumbeat constantly in my head during all of 1976. Finally, the day after Halloween, I packed my 1970 International Travelall & headed toward California. The Doors said, “The West is the best, get here & we’ll do the rest.” Yeah. The idea & reality of California, Los Angeles & the West always had a mythic hold on me & I still believe it is the place of dreams. Nathanael West and Charles Bukowski captured the decaying, film noir quality of Los Angeles that I longed for & I was so desperate to leave the East Coast’s chokehold.
In the early ’70s John Waters was the closest thing Baltimore had to a celebrity. I’ll admit that celebrity & fame was something I desired back then. All John’s actors had the kind of fame & notoriety that seemed attainable. They hung out in the same bars we did. John could be found having an afternoon cocktail at Bertha’s, a Fell’s Point dive where I played for tips on Thursday nights. At the time I reasoned that if I could hang out w/ John Waters & see his actors in many of the same places where we hung out, then fame may not be as elusive as all that. John was a more focused & better filmmaker than Andy Warhol & David Bowie wrote songs & hung out w/ him. We were just this close, but I was done with the East Coast.
By 1975 my parents lived in Brooklyn, so CBGBs & Max’s Kansas City were available w/ a free place to stay. It was there I saw Talking Heads, The Heartbreakers, and flyers pasted on telephone poles for Blondie & Television. I saw a particularly memorable Talking Heads performance in which they finished the set w/ “Psycho Killer”; David B. tossed the guitar over his head & w/ a singularly, crazed glare, walked straight out of the bar, perhaps never to be seen again. That was another moment when I thought, I can do that, and I want to do that. Patti Smith’s Horses had been out for a year, and it was clear that some great change in the stagnant music world was happening. It was equally clear that NYC was already locked up. The East Coast was cold, full of ghosts & people who said, “You’ll never make it, so why try?”
By this point I had dropped out of George Washington University in 1972, installed aluminum siding, gutters & roofing for two years, played in a band that rarely got gigs, smoked a huge amount of weed & drank too much peppermint schnapps w/ beer chasers. Downtown Baltimore had an avant-garde theater called the Theater Project. Through a few live performances there, I was introduced to Antioch College and eventually Grace Cavaleri, a teacher who changed my life. Grace was a petite, dark-haired woman w/ a teenager’s eyes & the most open smile I’d ever had directed toward me. Clearly my parents didn’t want me to spend my life as a roofer, so they paid for me to enroll in Antioch College. Now I was living w/ a childhood friend and bandmate Jack Chipman in a rural black community outside Baltimore, named Simpsonville. I was learning about modern poets & becoming a part of an incredibly vibrant poetry community in the Baltimore/DC area. During the private weekly poetry tutorials w/ Grace she always found the best passages or fragments of writing and showed us how truthful & possibly transcendent they were. She would often say, “I wish I had written that.” At the same time she would gently & lovingly point out the sections that were “not so good,” which, w/ some more thought & editing, could complement the beautiful breakthroughs of the better lines. It was here I first believed I could write something worth more than shoving in the bottom drawer of a hand-me-down dresser.
In April of 1976 Jack Chipman & I flew to Los Angeles, rented an AMC station wagon & stayed at a rundown motel near Vermont Ave. The minute I stepped out of the terminal into the jet-fueled air by LAX, the light & a sense of wellbeing came over me like a déjà vu homecoming. Jack & I had written some songs that we naively believed were good enough for someone to buy & record. We tore the page for music publishers from the Yellow Pages & began cold calling them from a phone booth outside our shitty motel. I guess the room didn’t come w/ a phone. It’s incredible to think that we got through to someone who allowed us to drop off a cassette tape w/ four of what we thought were our best songs. After a couple of days one rather elegant black producer/publisher met w/ us in person. We played Mr.—oh, I wish I could remember his name—our tape & a couple of more songs live, with Jack on piano & me singing. He told us that he would “buy” two of our songs for $500 apiece. We knew nothing about publishing but had copyrighted our songs w/ lead sheets through the Library of Congress. Naturally we were ecstatic & figured that if we sold two or three songs a month, we’d have it made! I don’t believe we ever signed or sealed that deal—the producer’s phone was always mysteriously busy—but when we left California ten days later, we were certain we could “make it” in LA.
Six months later Jack & I were living in a two-bedroom house at Pacific & Dudley Court in Venice, Cal. It was two blocks from the beach. I think we paid a whopping $800 a month rent & the proximity to the water was comfortingly like Baltimore. Because I had run a mildly successful poetry reading series in Baltimore, I figured the quickest way to meet kindred spirits was to drop into the poetry world. Beyond Baroque, home of the venerated Venice Poetry Workshop, was a 20 min. walk through a not-so-dangerous part of Venice. They offered a workshop w/ Bill Mohr, Jack Grapes, Kate Braverman & James Krusoe. Later someone told me that Tom Waits and Bukowski had attended. A great person & poet Frances Smith, who was the mother of Buk’s only kid, was a regular.
I believe the first Tuesday I went was also the first time a strange beauty w/ dark lipstick, bleach-splattered jeans, and dark red Egyptian-styled hair attended. This was the night Exene & I met. We were asked to make a list of poets/writers we admired. She asked to look at my list because she didn’t have many names on hers. When she did, she pointed out that I had written John Ashbery’s name twice. I thanked my good luck that someone who cut such an eccentric figure wanted to hang out w/ poets and—holy shit—she was a poet too!
She worked at Beyond Baroque on a government jobs program teaching her a skill as a typesetter. Naturally I went to the poetry workshop every Tuesday night until I asked her to go next door to the Comeback Inn for a drink. They featured bad, soft jazz before it was even a genre, and I found out her real name was Christine & she had changed it to a phonetic version of Xmas. We were both born in February & had Czech last names. So here I was, in a place where the beatniks first hung out in Calif., hanging out w/ a woman named Exene. Of course neither of us was aware how fateful this meeting was.
Quickly I found that she had recently moved here from Tallahassee, Florida, by selling her prized mint-green 1950 Cadillac. She had lived in Illinois, where I was born, had three sisters, and her mother had died when she was fourteen. She was just the kind of person I had moved to LA to meet. Exene was hanging out w/ scary Vietnam vets who would twirl her over their head at other dive bars while alternately calling her Mary Magdalene or the Easter Bunny. The first time I thought I had fallen in love w/ her, we were in her apt. above Beyond Baroque, sitting together in a broken-down chair, watching the street life on Venice Blvd. In that apt. there was a big old console TV that only got sound. One night we carried it down the stairs to the vacant lot next door. We threw bricks at the picture tube until it burst, which was much more difficult than we had thought it would be & only gave an unsatisfying, low-pitched thuuunk when it finally broke. It took another year of wooing & cajoling for her to agree to be my romantic partner as well as a lifelong friend, songwriting partner & often times soul mate.
In 1976 the place everyone looked to find a car, refrigerator, cat, room to rent, boyfriend, or musician was the Recycler. It came out every Thursday and was oftentimes sold out at the liquor store by Friday afternoon. How I wish someone had saved the want ad that Billy Zoom & I placed that same week late in 1976.
Billy Zoom had his own rockabilly band & had worked w/ Gene Vincent & dozens of other bands. I knew “Be-Bop-A-Lula” & that was legit. He was tall & thin, with straw-blond hair & he spoke deliberately & had a 1953 Hudson Hornet in his driveway. Billy had fashioned a somewhat soundproof rehearsal room in the garage at his house on 6th & Van Ness. The house resembled the Munsters’. It was a once-grand, two-story Victorian in Hancock Park w/ mahogany wainscoting, built-in glass cabinets in the dining room, a study—which would become Exene & my bedroom—& three other bedrooms upstairs.
Billy lived there w/ his girlfriend, Kittra, who broke an acoustic guitar over his head just before he moved out. But Billy was able to keep the rehearsal space & his Hudson Hornet in the drive. This is where we first got to know each other by playing songs like “Honey Don’t,” “Bring It on Home,” & “Promised Land.” At first we played w/ Steve Allen, who later formed 20/20; Jimmy Nanos & drummer Blaze Henry. Billy had had some success w/ the Billy Zoom Band & there was a small but hearty rockabilly scene. For a number of reasons, mostly the coming wave of new music like The Ramones, etc., Billy was disillusioned w/ that scene. We learned that we were both born in February, grew up in the Midwest & hated jamming. We both loved rock ‘n’ roll songs & old R & B. Strange as it may sound, back then he was almost reticent to play leads. So after our first or second meeting, this prompted me to ask him & Kittra if we needed to look for a “lead guitarist.” When I asked that at the Carl’s Jr. around the corner, I remember Billy giving me the iciest, almost quizzical look & Kittra saying, “Oh no, you don’t understand—Billy is the lead guitarist.” OK then, that’s settled. Leaving one of our rehearsal sessions, I remember getting pulled over by LAPD & asked what I had been doing that night. After telling them that I had been playing music, they asked what kind, to which I responded, “You know, old stuff like Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent.” They replied, “Like what?” Me: “‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’?” They: “How about singing some of that for us?” So I start singing, and they: “Come over here to the squad car.” Me: crapping my pants because everyone knew what bullies LAPD were. I walk over to the car & they thrust the loudspeaker mic into my hands & the next thing I knew I’m singing “Be-Bop-A-Lula” over the black & white’s bullhorn. That must’ve been late Nov of ’76. It’s remarkable to think that within a few weeks of moving to LA, I had met someone I’d play music w/ for the next 37 years.
By mid-November my roommate Jack had returned to Balto several weeks beforehand to see his girlfriend & came back just to get his instruments but never again to live there. This was sad but ultimately extremely liberating. I was finally living on my own. I hadn’t realized how much baggage the relationship contained, that I was shedding another layer of East Coast doubt & I began to move from one beach apartment to another (“every other week I need a new address”). I had a day job working at Brentano’s bookstore at the corner of Wilshire & Rodeo (which is pronounced like the Spanish rodéo & I pronounced like a cowboy for the first week) on the bottom floor of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, still the grande dame of LA hotels. There I saw Farrah Fawcett, Helen Reddy & actually helped Gloria Swanson find nutrition books—wow, a real movie star!
Christmas that year was very lonely. I was living hand-to-mouth, didn’t have enough money to fly home & decided that if I’d moved to California, then I would stay through the holidays. This was certainly a stubborn, self-sacrificing move, but it allowed me to be sad & feel put upon. Because I had met Exene in December & she didn’t have a phone, I thought I’d walk to her apartment above Beyond Baroque on New Year’s Eve. A block or two after I had turned onto W. Washington Blvd (now Abbott Kinney), four kids between 10–13 yrs old clustered around me w/ a cup & asked if I wanted a drink. As I bent my neck to sniff, a sharp thwack hit the top of my head & two of them grabbed me. They only weighed 85–100 lbs each, so I was able to shake one free, grab the other & begin punching. The third or fourth kid kept swinging his belt, buckle first, at my head as we all collapsed onto the sidewalk. I was reaching for another’s leg when they all sort of disappeared or ran away. I suppose it was just too much trouble. Pulling myself to my feet, picking up a bracelet, I felt the top of my head & came back w/ a hand slick w/ blood. There was a bar a few doors down, so I made my way there. I came in the door & headed straight for the bathroom. There was my face in the mirror, w/ streams of blood coming down it. I remembered the woozy, bent faces of the drunken NYE patrons & their looks of horror as I passed by. Looking in the mirror, wet paper towels in my hand, I figured I was really on my own, living the bohemian life that I thought I would find in the land of dreams.