We Got the Neutron Bomb Read online

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: We did the E Club for a few months and then Barry Barnholtz said, “Why don’t you do your own club?” And that’s when we moved it. The E Club was a lot smaller. We had lines. People couldn’t get in. Bowie came, Roxy Music came by. These amazing girls like Lori Lightning and Sabel Star made the scene.

  BARRY BARNHOLTZ: Rodney’s vision foresaw this entire new wave of music that was picking up on and continuing that Anglophilic direction which had begun here in the ’60s with the first British Invasion groups. Music had been a big part of my past. I had been involved in promoting concerts and bands at frat parties out in Victorville and Barstow. Now I saw an opportunity to get together with Rodney to open a club. I formed a business partnership with Rodney as the front man and Tom Ayres, the record producer, to help oversee the day-to-day operation of this new club, which I would finance. The new place would pick up where the E Club left off. We found the real estate together.

  TOM AYRES: We were driving down Sunset Boulevard and we passed this club called the Ooh Poo Pah Doo, which was kind of down on its luck. So on December 15, Rodney’s birthday, we turned it into the English Disco and quite early on all the kids started dressing up and coming in.

  BARRY BARNHOLTZ: I was gun-shy about putting in a lot of dough, so we looked for a small place because we thought if you take a hundred people and put them in a place the size of the Whisky, it would be like, “Yeah, the place is nice, but nobody’s there.” But if you take eight people and shove them in a closet and turn the sound system up, it’s like, “Wow, the place is jammin’.” We hoped to be able to turn the crowd over two or three times a night. The legal occupancy was only 135 or something. The rent was minimal, like $225 or $325 a month. I was mainly the business end and I put up the cash for the lease and got the permits, the licenses, and the other paperwork stuff together. It was beer and wine only. It was very expensive to get a full liquor license, and we reckoned that if it was just beer and wine, different city agencies might not be so concerned about people being over twenty-one. We sold British-style steak-and-kidney pies because serving food allowed us to bring people in under twenty-one.

  TOM AYRES: We had turkey, meat pies, bowls of potato salad, all you wanted for a dollar. It was like a soup line, except the faces went on to become famous people.

  KRISTIAN HOFFMAN: Above the DJ booth there was a sign that said RODNEY BINGENHEIMER’S—in glitter, of course—and over the bar was the most prized possession in the club—a copy of The Man Who Sold the World, the original cover with Bowie wearing a dress. Everyone used to try to figure out ways to steal it.

  CHUCK E. STARR: Architecturally, Rodney’s English Disco was just an empty store with a bar. Oh, but it was the most beautiful bar you’ve ever seen, this hand-carved wooden bar from some old tavern overseas. It had beveled glass mirrors in it. The backdrop was all the same wood. I’m sure it was older than the whole building. The rest of the joint was el tack: red indoor-outdoor carpeting and a bunch of folding chairs up against the wall. The mirrors were at the back of the club on the dance floor, the same mirrors from the E Club. The DJ booth also had mirrors on it.

  BARRY BARNHOLTZ: The opening night of the English Disco was planned around the Rolling Stones playing the Forum. We made up flyers that said, “After the concert the Stones will be partying at our new nightclub on Sunset.” We got a limo and parked it in front of the club after the concert to create the perception that the Stones were inside! Sure enough, after the concert a line of Stones fans started in front of the club and went down a block or so and then up three more blocks around the corner.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: Opening night was so packed that we kept running out of beer and we’d have to run to the liquor store to buy six-packs.

  BARRY BARNHOLTZ: The perception was that Bowie was a partner or some kind of investor in the English Disco too, but Bowie never put in any of the money and we never signed any legally binding documents showing any proprietary involvement, although we did have one of his gold records behind the bar and a framed picture showing him reclining on a sofa in a dress… and his music was heard there all the time.

  LORI LIGHTNING: I was twelve and a half when I started going to Rodney’s. The first time, David Bowie said, “Lori, come with us.” I was terrified. I was still a virgin.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: There was a strict door policy: girls a dollar, guys two dollars.

  STEVE PRIEST: The groupies were pretty obvious. They were just underage girls who wore red sequins and that’s about all. And they weren’t timid. They all acted like Mae West.

  MICHAEL DES BARRES: Sixties groupies like the GTOs were these flowery girls, whereas Sabel and Lori were that much more sophisticated, as evolution would dictate. Sabel was a true rock-and-roll girl: fearless, sexy, and ready for anything, not in a crude beans-in-the-bath-with-the-shark way. I found them incredibly inspiring. They were as inspirational to me as Chuck Berry ’cause they loved the scene and they nurtured it and they believed in it and they made you believe in it more. Those girls created the ambience in which the lifestyle could be lived and the songs could be written and the music could be recorded… it was one fantastic sort of orgasmic organism.

  AMY FREEMAN: My friends and I were wannabe groupies. Back then, we thought that the older musicians just liked to have us around. Today we’d probably look at them as potential child molesters and perverts.

  ANGELA BOWIE: Rodney liked young girls, and his club was full of them. Visiting rock stars off the leash from their wives in England would go to the English Disco to look for young girls under the auspices of arranging record promotion with Rodney. The club was Rodney’s storefront, where he did his business. Knowing Rodney or being prepared to interact with Rodney was a prerequisite to going to Rodney’s English Disco.

  KID CONGO POWERS: How come they let so many underage young people into the English Disco, I was always wondering. Very young girls and young boys. You know the movie Almost Famous, where there were all the young girls running around? Well, at Rodney’s there were also little boys running around. I was one of those young glitter kids scurrying around like that.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: Soon celebrities like Led Zeppelin, Shaun Cassidy, Keith Moon, and Linda Blair came. We had wild record release parties for Bolan, Slade, Suzi Quatro. There was a VIP booth. Jobriath would be up there with Michael des Barres and Silverhead and all the people down below could watch you.

  MICHAEL DES BARRES: When my band Silverhead came to Los Angeles in 1972, we were met by the legendary and messianic Rodney Bingenheimer, who actually arrived at the airport clutching our album. So we thought we were Elvis, really. We thought we had conquered America already. Rodney made us feel like we had, and that was the important thing. The club was twenty feet by thirty feet, and fifteen feet of that was the VIP booth. It was this absurd ratio of the entire Led Zeppelin band’s table and Pamela and me and then two hundred groupies compressed into five feet.

  TOBY MAMIS: The revelry was nightly. Rodney’s was an epicenter. From the rock stars and would-be rock stars to the industry-ites to the teen girls and boys, it was the place to see and be seen. It was much more exciting to me than the Max’s scene in New York I had come out of.

  MICHAEL DES BARRES: Los Angeles was the Babylon that we were looking for. We were looking for the playground, and it was here. There’s a simple reason for that—the weather. You can’t have a girl running around with two sequins on her tits and a Silverhead sticker on her pussy in twenty-below London! The other reason is this is the place of Errol Flynn’s ghost, the collective consciousness of Irving Thalberg, Clara Bow, and Errol Flynn… it’s here, in the bricks and the mortar and the concrete. Hollywood’s been the birth of fantasy, man, since 1914. It’s in the fucking air. It’s the mecca, the holy grail for beauty. It’s the magnet that attracts the cheekbones and great asses, and you put all that together with three chords and some pancake and you rock the fuck out, know what I mean?

  LORI LIGHTNING: In the back of the VIP booth
at Rodney’s there was this big poster of Mick Jagger …

  AMY FREEMAN:… with lots of red lipstick marks—Mary Quant Black Cherry, that was what we wore to Rodney’s—all around Mick’s crotch.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: The groupies even had their own magazine. Star magazine. It didn’t have a long run, but girls were so enthralled to get into the magazine, they all so badly wanted to be Star girls of the month, that they’d show up at Rodney’s with their own eight-by-tens.

  SYLVAIN SYLVAIN: There were two magazines. On the East Coast we used to get Rock Scene, and on the West Coast there was Star magazine, which used to feature all the Hollywood starlets. Me and Johnny Thunders used to get import copies of Star and there’d be pictures of Sabel Star in it, and he’d say, “Wow, this girl Sabel, I love her. When I go out to L.A. she’ll be my girlfriend.”

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: Tom Snyder did a Tomorrow show on the club. He interviewed me and Chuck E. and Zolar X. The show was all about the Strip and glitter rock.

  BARRY BARNHOLTZ: We were in Newsweek twice in one month, and we made a centerfold in People. These national publications weren’t writing about any other clubs in the U.S. until Studio 54, which came at a much later date.

  CHUCK E. STARR: One night Rod Stewart came in and Bianca Jagger. Bianca was wearing a three-thousand-dollar ensemble and the toilets were overflowing, running out onto the dance floor, and she was trying to step over stools to get through to the bathroom. It was wonderful. I was there when Elvis was there, Bowie, and Mick Jagger… all at different times, of course. You had to make a name for yourself in that environment, honey, so I became Chuck E. Starr, legend. I added another r. I didn’t want to be mixed up with Sabel.

  ANGELA BOWIE: The L.A. groupies greeted me, and we had a dance and a good laugh. The scene was like L.A. is now. Lots of girls holding on to each other and plenty of public French kissing.

  RICK WILDER: Rodney’s was a drunken cuss-and-fuss place, and the big thing was peacocking and dancing with yourself in front of these stupid mirrors… you’d wind up doing crazy drugs and getting into pointless fights with people. One time Chuckie whatever-his-name-was got mad at me for something, I had worn the same platforms as him or something, and we got in some dumb fight, and I put his head through one of those mirrors.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: We rarely had live bands. On special occasions we’d have Zolar X, who dressed in space suits and played original songs about life in outer space. They’d go everywhere dressed like that. They’d go to Ralph’s Supermarket dressed up like that.

  ZORY ZENITH: We were cruising the parking lots and back alleys of the movie studios and major department stores and you’d be surprised what you’d find on the loading docks. I can’t imagine what I spent in just those few years on silver aluminum spray paint. When we put that shit up at Rodney’s it was fuckin’ glowing!

  JACKIE FOX: Zolar X had prosthetic ears and heads… but I couldn’t name a single one of their songs.

  ANDY SEVEN: They were terrible… the guitar was constantly going into an Echoplex.

  ZORY ZENITH: Since Zolar-X was so loud and the clubs of the time didn’t have onstage monitor systems we couldn’t hear ourselves when we played. Everyone thought it was weird that we decorated the mike stands with acrylics and plastics and we were wearing antennae and all that space stuff. I also hooked a wire around my head, attached to this clear plastic tube. I took the tip end off of a transistor radio earplug and put it into the tube and stuck a wire through it and sent it around to my mouth so that no matter where I moved on stage, however loud it was, I had my voice coming directly into my right ear like a homemade monitor. This setup became my costume trademark. Now all the stadium acts use high-tech headsets.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: The first real L.A. homegrown glam rock band were the Berlin Brats. They were great.

  RICK WILDER: The Berlin Brats were me and Matt Campbell. We started in like ’72 in the bedroom of my mom’s house… that’s where Rodney discovered us. He walked up to my bedroom and saw us drinking Rainier Ale, and we told him we got it at the Lido liquor store, where if you were tall enough to reach the counter, they’d sell it to you.

  ROBERT LOPEZ: The Berlin Brats were New York Dolls–esque. They were trashy like the Dolls but not as shiny. They didn’t wear women’s clothes, but to us they were the bridge from glam to punk… the in-between.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: The Brats were accused of being a New York Dolls rip-off, but they were totally original. Nobody looked like Rick Wilder, the lead singer. He was way over six feet tall, and he wore platforms on top of that. And he was the skinniest person you’d ever seen in your life. And they had great songs like “Tropically Hot.”

  RICK WILDER: The Dolls weren’t a factor in the Brats forming at all, but we did have a lot of the same influences, which made it seem that way—early R&B Stones, the Standells and other ’60s garage bands, weird Chuck Berry B-sides, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. It was two different coasts. Sure, I loved the Dolls and what Johnny Thunders was doing, but look, I had a guitar player, Matt Campbell, who at fourteen was as good as Johnny’s big idol, Keith Richards.

  ANDY SEVEN: The Berlin Brats were great. They had that whole raw early Stones R&B thing going on, but Rick Wilder looked more like Peter Wolf than Mick Jagger, and the band were actually pretty decent musicians.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: The one thing the New York Dolls and the Berlin Brats had in common, besides heroin, was that they were glam but not at all femme. They were hardly pretty like David Bowie or Marc Bolan. And they didn’t experiment with bisexuality. It was girls, girls, girls, all the way.

  MICHAEL DES BARRES: Androgyny didn’t necessarily mean that you sucked cocks if you were a guy.

  SKOT ARMSTRONG: By the mid-’70s Hollywood was decadence-drunk, and the scene was wide open for clever street-level situationists to gain entry and turn freeloading and nose-thumbing into art. Enter Les Petites Bon-Bons led by Jerry Dreva and Bobby Lambert, former art students, guys who were as much energized by the post-Warhol Pop aesthetic, the Stonewall riots of ’69, and CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, as they were by catty English rock disco gossip.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: The Bon-Bons actualized the new music, this glitter dance pop, if you will. They were the antithesis of the Laurel Canyon buckskin-jacket country rock people. They were into clothing, they were into art, they were into makeup and drag, they were into the cutup method… they were scene makers and tastemakers who happened to dress outrageously with shaved heads, jewelry, dresses, boas, stuff you just didn’t see.

  RICHARD CROMELIN: There was a party at Peter Lawford’s mansion on the beach in Malibu after an Eagles concert at Santa Monica Civic. Jerry, Bobby, and I were leaving and we were walking back down PCH [the Pacific Coast Highway] toward Bobby’s car when these three dudes asked us, “You got any cocaine?” And suddenly they were running after us. There was fisticuffs, but we escaped with our skins.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: The party scene was a buncha newly moneyed, womanizing cowboys hassling cross-dressed glitter street trash. There weren’t gonna be any faggy freaks looking like Divine at their big New West rock-and-roll party. They couldn’t stand the idea of a guy in makeup or even wearing a velvet jacket. I remember them calling Rodney and his constituency “pussies.”

  RICHARD CROMELIN: Glam filled the role as an alternative to your more proper and corporate kind of music. It was renegade, it was dangerous, it was fun, exciting… glamorous. A lot of things that the mainstream had stopped being.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: Here were these people that were threatened by clothing, by Rodney and his friends or even chicks with cool mini-dresses? Most of them seemed to come out of the bar scene at the Troubadour and they liked those earth-mama girls. Those Laurel Canyon chicks in Levi’s overalls. They couldn’t understand self-expression of women then, women who were looking to be with the band or just dug the music and liked to dance to Slade. The poor glitter critters would be mocked constantly, and more than one of them got beaten up. These “L.A. So
und” clowns were so used to being cock of the walk. I’ve got nothing but animosity toward those people.

  RICHARD CROMELIN: My interpretation of Les Petites Bon-Bons was “Everybody is a star.” It was all about being flamboyant and cultivating a fascination with fame, no matter how minute, no matter how fleeting or tenuous the connection. Warhol was an obvious strong influence in that regard, and Jerry Dreva frequently cited Warhol. Les Bon Bons worked their way onto every guest list there was. Just being on the scene was part of their aesthetic. They wanted to be part of the social landscape. It was sort of male-groupie-ish, but at the same time serious artists who met Jerry were always taken by him, especially Bowie. Jerry was no dumb ornamental diva queen—he could converse with the best of them on politics, art, and culture. He had a brilliant mind.

  GENESIS P. ORRIDGE: Jerry Dreva and the other Bon-Bons people gave Bowie a whole lot of extra credibility through the L.A. gay underground and the mail arts scene and helped him cross over into an audience he might have taken longer to access. In England he had Lindsay Kemp and everyone behind him before he took to working Warhol and the Factory scene in New York and Rodney Bingen-heimer out west.

  BOBBY LAMBERT: Huge promo parties were being thrown all the time by major record companies, and they were always pretty easy to crash. Catered banquets and open-hosted bars made it possible to subsist on one meal a day. We routinely infiltrated any party for any band. Even funky old rural hard rockers Black Oak Arkansas weren’t beneath us!

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: Rodney and I lived on press parties four times a week. “There’s a steak dinner at the Black Oak Arkansas party!” I felt bad I usually didn’t like the guy’s music, but there was always great rib eye steak!