The Users

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My pal Bob Lee went so deep on YouTube he accidentally uncovered one of my favorite ever punk rock records. I had the single at one point but I sold it, since I had it on a comp and needed money for heroin. Now it’s on YouTube. Try scoring heroin with youtube. The internet has wrecked everything.

If I remember these kids were students from Cambridge. Or was that Oxford. Whatever, it’s fraffly good. Now they are all knighted and partying with Sir Mick and Sir Elton won’t even talk to a punter like Keef.

Road to Singapore

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Road to Singapore. Too many ad libs and not enough sub plots. You can actually tell what’s going on. Plus no CGI. And the jokes work. All these extras could have been perfectly good minor characters within a miasma of irritating subplots. What a waste.

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KISS

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I was a couple years too old back in the seventies to think they were any good. All the junior high and freshmen kids in my neighborhood loved them though. We juniors and seniors were way too hip. KISS were just stupid. Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, however, had depth and meaning. Purple even had classical parts. Though listening recently to Made In Japan, I couldn’t tell where the classical parts were. In any case, I soon heard the Ramones and the Pistols, and KISS seemed more bogus than ever. And the Ramones didn’t even have any classical parts.

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Wicked Lester–Gene Simmons (standing on left) and Paul Stanley (seated in center)–in their folk rocking hippie pad, 1971. 

John Halsey

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I remember meeting drummer John Halsey, of Patto and the Rutles, at the world famous Rutles secret three song reunion concert at the Pig and Whistle in Hollywood. Told him a pal had given me a one of a kind Patto tee shirt. Which is true, the first album cover emblazoned on a tee shirt about five sizes too small. John looked at me, sighed, and said why? One of my favorite rock’n’roll memories.

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John Halsey, Rikki Fataar, Neil Innes and Eric Idle not long before I told John Halsey about the tee shirt.

Mike Kellie

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Just saw that Mike Kellie died. He was the drummer for Spooky Tooth and then transitioned to the Only Ones like it was the most natural thing in the world, which I guess it was. Listen to him here, so loose limbed and swinging, fills flying and an almost shambolic explosion of freedom on the drum kit. Don’t be fooled, though, he nails it. His playing just drives this thing ecstatically, and Peter Perrett’s vocals glide over and around it, and when John Perry launches into probably the best guitar solo that the whole scene came up with in 1978, Kellie is urging it on, almost a Jim Gordon thing, and if that ain’t a compliment nothing is.

Here ’tis, all three minutes worth. I’ve only listened to this a thousand times in my life this past 39 years, bopping and air drumming and twitching, never thinking that anybody would ever die.

Joan Marshall

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(New Year’s Eve, 2016)

Fyl decided her husband is still too sick to be life of the party on a wet, cold night and so we’re sitting home on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t argue. Besides, there’s a Jack Benny marathon on Antenna TV. When the pizza came It was guest star Frankie Avalon singing, so I joined Fyl in front of her TV watching old Sid Caesar shows and munching on a Palermo’s special, thin crust, crispy, anchovies on half. Taking my empty plate into the kitchen later the Benny marathon was still on in the living room and I could hear Robert Goulet. Even an hour apart the difference in timbre, phrasing, range–hell, in sheer quality of everything–with Frankie Avalon was beyond glaring. Plus Goulet was much, much funnier in the follow up bit, a natural. Funniest of all, though, was Joan Marshall, the woman in the sketch and one of the great undiscovered comic talents of the sixties. Alas, she was gorgeous, and in that decade gorgeous and funny were not allowed to mix. In the thirties she might have been a screwball superstar, another Carole Lombard; in the fifties she could have been the female lead in a sophisticated comedy. But in the sixties only Jack Benny recognized how funny she was and let her run riot in a couple sketches. They said it really bothered Joan that she never got choice comedy roles, and she never seemed happy in her career being beautiful. Hollywood is full of beautiful women. It’s not full of naturally funny people. But sometimes what you are really good at and the times you live in don’t coincide. If only you’d been born twenty years earlier.

Coffee

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That free coffee at the Silver Lake Trader Joes. The one hipster complains it’s too hot. The other hipster says it’s too strong. I said it’s too wet. Both look at me, then at each other, then back at me. It’s funnier if you’re stoned, I said. Oh wow, the one said. The other nodded, sagely. Truth.

Albanian amateur porn

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A clip of Albanian amateur porn in my email. That’s what it said: Albanian amateur porn. I have no idea how one tells the difference between it and any other Indo-European porn. How the world has changed, I thought. During the Cold War it was at its very coldest in Albania. They didn’t shoot porn there. They shot Albanians, mostly, or anyone unlucky enough to stumble across the border. Albanians also built bunkers and pillboxes by the hundreds of thousands, till they littered the countryside like mushrooms, completely useless. Now they house chickens and sheep and their kid’s heavy metal band. No one did ever invade Albania, though. Maybe the useless things actually were a deterrent somehow, scattered helter skelter across field and beach, city and mountainside. Apparently when America or Italy or Yugoslavia or the USSR or whoever invaded, all Albanians and their sheep were to take to the bunkers and defend the Revolution to the death. It never happened. Instead, Albania’s own Stalin (or was it Mao), Enver Hoxha, finally died and was forgotten. I thought of him as I deleted the video unwatched. I can’t imagine Albanian amateur porn is any less clumsy or badly filmed than any other. People of all nations are busily humping away in front of their iPhones anymore, millions of them, thunder thighed and shaven all over, to the intense embarrassment of all their children not yet even born. Though maybe they were born nine months later. Oh no, look, it’s Mom and Dad. The things those of us old enough never had to worry about, let alone imagine.

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Before they made amateur porn, Albanians built 700,000 bunkers like these.

Man in the Middle

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I give up. I saw that Man In the Middle was on again last night, so I watched it. My fourth attempt. It’s not the greatest flick, but it’s a Robert Mitchum movie, so it’s obligatory alpha male viewing. Trevor Howard just ups the ante. Mitchum plays an army lawyer defending American soldier Keenan Wynn (another manly man) who murdered a British officer, apparently a crime. It’s in India, far from the front, and everything is tropical and sticky and noir. Fraffly hot. At some point Mitchum winds up at France Nuyen’s pad in the middle of the night. She comes to the door in a negligee. (It’s opaque, settle down.) They talk in abstractions. Mitchum, torn between moral dilemma and tough guy not giving a fuck, smokes his eight hundredth cigarette of the film. France Nuyen wafts about in the hot night air, her accent oozing impropriety. If you want to rest your conscience on my pillow, she purrs, that is alright too. Her clipped francophone Vietnamese pronunciation hints at a zillion vowels and tones missing in English. Mitchum digs it and almost emotes. They are all over each other and the scene fades to morning. Or it does here, in our living room, since invariably about this time in the movie I fall asleep and wake up on the couch hours later with the sun peeking through the curtains. In four tries I have never gotten past the scene where Mitchum beds France Nuyen. This morning I woke up and instead of France Nuyen and Robert Mitchum or even Trevor Howard and Keenan Wynn there was George Peppard in a German uniform. I stared, bewildered. Frühstück im Tiffany’s? No, that’s not Holly Golightly, that’s Ursula Andress. George clicks his heels and salutes. The Blue Max. That one can put anyone to sleep. So I turned off the TV and went to bed.

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Jerry Garcia

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I remember when Jerry Garcia died and the sidewalk in front of Ben and Jerry’s on Haight Street became a shrine. Candles and crying kids and Friend of the Devil played over and over. A punk rock friend of mine lived next door. After the umpteenth Ripple singalong he couldn’t take it anymore and stormed outside. It’s a fucking ice cream parlor, you idiots! Two hundred red eyed Deadheads looked up at him. It’s OK dude, one said, we’re all upset too, and passed him a joint. He took a hit and relaxed. Someone began singing Friend of Devil. Teary eyed teenage girls asked him if they could stay at his pad. He was a punk rocker in a sea of Deadheads right outside his front door. He fled inside and blasted the U-Men and Mudhoney and the Stooges. Between tracks an endless, droning Sugaree came through the windows. Shake it, shake it, Sugaree they chanted. He finally dozed off as a dozen hippie guitar players on the sidewalk massacred Uncle John’s Band. Sleep was fitful and dreaming. Woke up to teenaged girls knocking on his door. He screamed he wasn’t home.