We Got the Neutron Bomb Read online

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: Morrison was obviously much more rebellious and outrageous and more chemically induced and alcohol driven than Spector was. There was Jim the poet and artist and then there was li’l ol’ Jimbo… and ol’ Jimbo drank way too much. I thought it was extremely rebellious during Doors concerts to tell everybody to shut up or to scream “Fuck you!” from the stage… even to ask “Anybody got a cigarette?” And somebody would come up to the stage and give him one. I always saw that as a major rebellious thing, the leering drunken swagger, the sheer whimsical insolence of asking for a cigarette from a seated audience while they’re yelling for “Light My Fire.”

  DANNY SUGERMAN: Jim certainly was the first rock singer to front off an audience, to tell them to go get fucked… that’s what happened at Cobo Hall when Iggy saw Jim for the first time and decided to be a singer instead of a drummer. He loved what he saw Morrison doing, flipping the audience the finger for screaming out “Light My Fire” while the band was going off into “Celebration of the Lizard” instead.

  RAY MANZAREK: Iggy Pop, whom many consider the godfather of punk, loved the Doors, especially Morrison. When Iggy was still Jim Osterberg he checked us out when we played at the University of Michigan. We didn’t know till we got there that it was homecoming weekend. We thought, “This is entirely wrong, this is going to be such a disaster.” The audience was thick-necked young men in tuxedos with their girls in ball gowns. We’re playing in their gymnasium and Morrison is drunk as a skunk, knowing full well what we had gotten ourselves into, and he was just gonna obliterate himself. We played the worst fucking show ever. John and Robbie were so fed up. Finally John tossed his sticks into the audience and walked offstage. We tried to do a simple blues, but Jim was all over the place. Then Robbie left the stage, too. All they wanted to hear was “Light My Fire,” but Jim kept on hollering freeform, so I picked up the guitar and played a slow blues and the audience started booing. He was shouting, “Hey, this is what we play, man. This is the fucking blues. Keep on, Ray. Hey, fuck you! Fuck you!” Huge refrigerator-sized football players began lunging toward us. Then the dean came out and said, “That’s it, that’s it… show’s over. Would you boys leave the stage? Just leave the stage.” And Morrison’s screaming, “Fuck, we don’t wanna leave the stage. You people wanna hear more music, dontcha?” And they’re going, “Boo! Boo!” We got paid and got out of there by the skin of our teeth before they pulverized us. Afterward Iggy said: “Holy fuck, true anarchy prevailed. You guys were great. I loved it.” Who knows what that night did to Iggy Pop’s head, ’cause he’s been doing that show ever since. Soon the Stooges were brought to Elektra, the Doors’ label, with the thinking: “The Doors are a band with a wild-man singer that has pop hits, let’s get another hit with these guys.”

  RON ASHETON: Iggy watched Morrison and learned how to use and abuse the audience and get them into the act. Morrison wore a pair of brown leather pants, so Iggy had a pair of brown vinyl pants made ’cause he couldn’t quite afford the leather, you know.

  DANNY SUGERMAN: Morrison had no interest in the Stooges. They were playing the Whisky and I wanted him to take me to see them, but he said: “No, Bo Diddley’s going to be there next month, I’ll take you to see him instead.”

  JOHN DOE: Jim Morrison had to be one of the first punks because he was just as shit-faced as the rest of us and alcohol has a way of loosening your tongue—and the same thing about demons, having all these personal problems and working them out. I was attracted to the Doors as a teen because of the dark imagery.

  EXENE CERVENKA: I liked the Doors’ version of the ocean, which was dark and scary. It wasn’t the sunny beach that the other people liked, especially those who liked roller skating.

  JIM MORRISON (FIRST ELEKTRA BIO): We are from the West/The whole thing is like an invitation to the West. The world we suggest is of a new wild west. A sensuous evil world.

  DANNY SUGERMAN: The Velvet Underground get more credit than the Doors for dark and somber themes. The Doors’ being from the Sunshine State didn’t help, but certainly songs like “End of the Night,” “You’re Lost Little Girl,” and “The End,” are as dark and foreboding as anything the Velvets did. I’m a fan of both bands, but the darkness seemed to be the Velvets’ entire raison d’être. New York street poets writing about the dark side of life, whereas the Doors did that, too, but they had a greater, wider range, emotionally and musically. Lou was more street than Jim. Jim never sang about putting a spike into his vein but he did sing “Father, I want to kill you.” I’d say the Velvets had the street sewn up but the Doors have forever staked out the domain around the abyss.

  DON WALLER: It’s pretty hard to top the Velvets’ “Heroin”—although the Doors’ “The End” comes close. I think the Doors don’t get some of the credit for being a voice of darkness in a world of flower power that the Velvets do because the Doors sold a lot more records and the Velvets came from New York. New York is a parochial town run by a publishing media that likes to think it invented everything.

  SKY SAXON: L.A. was very groovy in the ’60s. I believed that flower power was the way, although the record industry completely destroyed the message of love and peace. The ’70s should have been a rebirth of spirit for all; instead there was a war.

  RAY MANZAREK: At some point white men took over, the impulse to whiteness took over in L.A. Black jazz and black soul were taken out of rock music. It went country, a shift in radio programming which represented the triumph of country music over psychedelic hippie rock. The country rock of Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and the Eagles reigned supreme. It was nice enough radio music, nice tunesmithing and all that, but the whole country rock period was all a little too mellow for me. No runaway passion. No Dionysian impulse. If the Doors had still been active, would the country rock stuff have happened? Depends on who you talk to. There’s always something to fill a vacuum; usually it’s the lowest common denominator.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: By ’71, the Elektra/Asylum Records singer songwriter type music was all that this town was offering. They were social climbers, very locked into the traditional Brill Building verse/chorus/verse style. They wore flannel shirts, long hair, beards. When Morrison died, I said to Manzarek, ‘Well, maybe Jim wasn’t supposed to see all this singer-songwriter shit take over his label.’

  GREG SHAW: The lull in pop culture in 1970–71 was maddening. The decline in radio play from the likes of the Yardbirds to someone like Gordon Lightfoot was ghastly, and it drove me and a lot of my friends into oldies. I started listening to practically nothing but rockabilly, doo-wop, old country, bluegrass, and jazz. There was no college radio, no fanzines, no indie record labels, and no local bands, for the most part. There was nothing! It was very depressing. There were few if any local bands. Nothing amounting to a scene. There was Christopher Milk. And Sparks.

  HEATHER HARRIS: Doug Weston banned Christopher Milk for life in 1970 after lead singer Mr. Twister [aka Kurt Ingham] wreaked havoc during the Troubadour’s Monday “Hoot Night.” Kurt wrecked a bunch of microphones and was pouring hot wax all over himself and running out into the audience and biting people…. he was overturning tables and spilling drinks into customers’ laps… before Iggy Pop ever got to L.A., and don’t forget… this was right at the beginning of the mellow solo singer-songwriter era… the audience gawked in horror.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: If that wasn’t punk rock personified, who or what was?

  KURT INGHAM: Christopher Milk stood for theater and drama as opposed to droning introspection, and sure enough, our hideous platform boots and make-up clashed with denim and fringe buckskin jackets. We were 86’d from the Troub for life.

  RUSSELL MAEL: Sparks was not involved in any particular music scene in L.A. pre-glam since we were living in England through the early ’70s and saw it all from a more British perspective. We felt alienated from L.A. since what we were doing had more in common with what was going on in Europe. Most people assumed that Sparks was from some unspecified European nation. We got no
local support at first. We’d play the Whisky for the four waitresses who worked there. We didn’t recognize the apparently extreme nature of our band’s music at the time. We thought we were kind of like the Rolling Stones live, but I think we missed the mark in that respect and didn’t know how pretty quirky and offbeat we really were for a pop band. Listen to A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing today and imagine what the audience would think if you were playing those songs on the same bill as Little Feat!

  ZORY ZENITH: Shady Lady was the beginning of the L.A. underground—well, not the beginning, but the beginning of the glam part of it. I was like this 19-year-old Keith Moon prodigy drummer, the first to play clear plastic drums, and I’d just answered a musician wanted ad and found these very weird guys who lived about a half a block from me. They had super long scraggly Alice Cooper–Rod Stewart cropped hair and they were wearing skintight satin pants with snakeskin boots. I thought, “Wow, this is pretty cool.” I thought they might have been from England or something, so we started rehearsing. After we signed with Robert Fitzpatrick we lived all over the fuckin’ hills. We got signed by Sceptre Records, but Sceptre didn’t come through on their part of the deal. We rented three or four houses during a coupla years that Shady Lady was happening. There were lots of parties there. That’s when I first met Rodney. Shady Lady ended because John Christian, our guitar player, was on too many drugs, but by that time I’d already met Zany and Y-Garr and we got the Zolar-X concept up and running.

  GREG SHAW: Rodney Bingenheimer was practically the first person I met when I arrived in L.A. He was enthusiastic, friendly, full of news and gossip, and he knew everybody. He also had very good taste; the bands he liked tended to be the best ones. Though inarticulate and not well educated, Rodney is in fact a lot sharper than he gets credit for.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: My mother worked for Raybert Productions, which did the Monkees. I met Rodney Bingenheimer at the Monkees’ press conference when they made their world debut in ’66. He was short, with a bowl cut like Davy Jones—in fact he was once a stand-in for Davy Jones. At the time he had a column for Go magazine, but he couldn’t type. To this day he doesn’t type. We’ve all had stints being Rodney’s typist.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: Before Go magazine, I had a column in What’s Happening magazine, called “It’s All Happening.” I always used those phrases: “What’s happening?” “It’s all happening!” I had another column called “If It’s Trendy, I’ll Print It.” When I wrote the Go column, I couldn’t type, so Edie Sedgwick did it for me. She was working at Charlie Green and Brian Stone’s office. They managed Sonny and Cher and Iron Butterfly and Buffalo Springfield.

  PAMELA DES BARRES: Rodney Bingenheimer was my peer. He was one of the first guys I met when I hitchhiked over the hill to Hollywood in 1966. And he hit on me, of course, but we actually wound up just being friends. He helped me out of my Valley-ness. Took me all over the place and introduced me to everyone. There was certainly no one like him at Cleveland High in Reseda.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: A guy named Al Hernandez had the first copy of Space Oddity on the West Coast. And believe me, you went to somebody’s house if they had that album.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: Al Hernandez was totally into Bowie real early and had turned me on to the Space Oddity record. He had pictures of Bowie all over the walls of his house. He was probably already the biggest Bowie fan in the U.S. at the time.

  PAMELA DES BARRES: Rodney got into Bowie very early, before almost anybody else in this country.

  ANGELA BOWIE: The first time David met Rodney was on his radio tour of the U.S.—pre–Ziggy Stardust—the first tour when he just took his acoustic guitars and entertained key people as a solo folk singer in a dress and sang songs from Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold the World.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: In 1971 I was working FM promotion at Mercury Records doing stuff for Uriah Heep, Rod Stewart, and the Sir Douglas Quintet. The Man Who Sold the World was out, and so Bowie came over here to promote it. He was unknown. He had very long hair and he was wearing a dress.

  RICHARD CROMELIN: I interviewed Bowie on The Man Who Sold the World promotional tour. I think the piece ran in the L.A. Free Press. There was no doubt in my mind that it was just a matter of time before he’d be recognized as a major rock artist. Bowie was extremely charismatic, and musically I thought it was a strong album.

  DAVID BOWIE: Alone in L.A., Rodney seemed like myself, an island of Anglo “nowness.” He even knew British singles and bands that I wasn’t aware of. Rodney single-handedly cut a path through the treacle of the 1960s, allowing all us “avants” to parade the sounds of tomorrow dressed in our clothes of derision.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: When I took David around to radio stations, they were put off. These stations in Santa Ana and Long Beach didn’t know what to make of this British guy in a dress.

  MICHAEL DES BARRES: Nobody had seen that shit before… boys dressed as girls. It really was absolutely shocking.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: Everybody had a beard and they gave Rodney and Bowie shit. Bowie showed up in a dress, and in a Nixon world that didn’t go down very well. It was analagous to the way some people react to gangsta rap today. U.K. glitter rock hits like T. Rex’s “Hot Love” weren’t gonna get heavy rotation next to “Suite Judy Blue Eyes” by Crosby Stills and Nash on this station’s playlist. After a few awkwardly polite handshakes, Bowie and Rodney were aggressively vibed out of the building.

  LISA FANCHER: Bowie and Marc Bolan had it easy. Jobriath was the real thing. He really was gay. He wasn’t just wearing the clothes. When English glam started gathering steam, Elektra Records signed him for around $300,000, which was a lot of money in those days. Jobriath had some kind of career in New York, but he started out in Los Angeles. He was a fabulous dancer and singer who wrote his own material. He was going to be the next big thing. The American Bowie.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: Jobriath was supposed to be the rock and roll Judy Garland. I saw Judy Garland with my mother when I was a teenager. Jobriath was no Judy Garland.

  ZORY ZENITH: Elektra Records signed this new artist who was pretty much on the same wavelength as my band Zolar-X were. He snatched a lot of stuff from Bowie, but he was an incredible classical piano player and a decent singer and his whole on-stage thing was a pink skin-tight suit with a bubble helmet and Zolar-X eyebrows like Spock. He had a pompadour thing and makeup and he came out with a clear plastic bubble on his head and then he’d pull a pin out of the top and the thing would fall apart and rose petals came out. It was very bizarre. Musically we were in awe of Jobriath. We did a two-week run at the Troubadour with Zolar-X and him. About the second or third night into it I stopped by his dressing room and he was wearing this black tuxedo-cut satin suit and a red shirt. I said, “Jo, where’s your suit?” and he said, “I just really want to concentrate on the album and the music right now, and we’re sounding good, and you guys have the space thing wrapped up and it’s ridiculous for us both to do that.”

  LISA FANCHER: There was this unbelievable hype around him. He was on the sides of buses, full-page ads in Rolling Stone. But he was just so flamboyantly gay, and rock fans just weren’t really digging it, so Jobriath was just wiped off the face of the earth. He was just stunned and depressed to be rejected like that. He died of AIDS in 1983.

  KIM FOWLEY: England dictated glam rock. England invented glam rock. If you weren’t English, you were dog shit.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: In America it was called glitter rock. It wasn’t “glam.”

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: Rodney had the records that you would read about in Melody Maker. He had stacks of the stuff. He’d play this music and you’d wonder, “Who is this Eno guy? Who’s this Bryan Ferry guy?”

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: After Bowie left L.A., I went to London to meet this girl named Melanie McDonald who was gonna be my girlfriend. By now David was recording the Hunky Dory album, so we’d hang out. We went to see the Warhol play Pork. During the sessions my girlfriend got chummy with David’s manager Tony DeFries and they
ended up going off and getting married! During that same trip I stayed in Ealing and there was a little club there called the Cellar. It was like a pub with lots of teens. You could legally drink at eighteen in England. Downstairs there was amazing music: T. Rex, Slade, and the Sweet. I told Bowie about it, and he said, “You should open a place like that in L.A.” And I said, “That’s a good idea,” so I bought up a lot of the 45’s. When I came back to L.A., I was staying at Tom Ayres’ house and we’d go driving around late at night in Hollywood and I’d tell him these fantastic stories about Bowie and London. And Tom said, “We should open up a club.”

  TOM AYRES: Rodney and I opened our first club in Hollywood in a building that had formerly been a peep show. It was October of ’72 and we called it the E Club. Bowie was one of our first customers.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: E stood for English, I guess.

  PAMELA DES BARRES: At Rodney’s E Club patrons could hear the latest glam pop sounds from England and catch a glimpse of real-life rock stars. Rodney had found his niche. It was like being in a small English pub, masked by mirrors and Hollywood artifice.

  TERRY ATKINSON: I was DJ’ing the night Bowie first came by the E Club. I knew he liked Elvis, so I put on the King doing “If you’re looking for trouble, you’re in the right place …” and the dance floor emptied. All of a sudden Bowie jumped up and did this incredible dance—striking all these poses alone on the dance floor, watching his reflection in the mirrors on the back wall. If they’d had a name for what he was doing back then it would have been voguing. The crowd was blown away.

  TOM AYRES: Later Bowie took me and Rodney into the men’s room and said “You guys have done so much for me, what can I do for you?” Rodney pulls out this piece of paper and says “Be a member of the board of this club.” While he was standing at the urinal taking a piss, Bowie signed it. Then he told us to put lots more mirrors around the dance floor. Things went real well at the E Club those first couple of months—except for one thing—the owner failed to come up with any money for us. So one night I said to Rodney “Let’s get out!”