We Got the Neutron Bomb Read online

  PAUL ROESSLER: Paul would wear a tuxedo jacket with reflective laser paper on the lapels and no shirt underneath and his hair was cut like nowadays we’d call it a mullet but at the time it was a Bowie haircut.

  PAT SMEAR: We went to used-record stores and went for weird album covers like the Witchcraft Coven, the totally Satanic one with the nude girl being sacrificed in the gatefold and a black mass on side two. There’s no way that record could come out today. We were little kids listening to the black mass in the dark. We tried to stay awake for a whole week once. I lasted a couple of days, but Paul did it, we did weird stuff like that all the time on a dare.

  PAUL ROESSLER: Paul and George were on acid most of the time and always had this demented look on their faces.

  PAUL BEAHM (AKA BOBBY PYN, AKA DARBY CRASH): You know what’s fun? You take like 10 hits of acid and drink a six-pack of beer and you go down to Santa Monica Pier, there’s a bridge that goes to nowhere ’cause they’re supposed to lower it for boats and you go out to the end and jump off right, and you can swin and it’s so great ’cause it’s dark you know and you can just swim and it doesn’t matter if you live or die or anything just swim and swim and you can feel the fish nibbling at your feet.

  GERBER: Paul called me on the phone and said, “I got this purple microdot and you should come over.” During one of our many acid trips in his bedroom we tried to fuck. It was a pretty heavy acid trip, and I think during the peak of that acid trip we decided that we were both gay.

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: I first met Paul [Beahm] and George [Ruthenberg] at a Tubes concert at Santa Monica Civic in the spring of 1975, the White Punks on Dope tour. George was wearing a black cape, low hip-hugger pants with no shirt, and Alice Cooper makeup, and Paul had the Ziggy Stardust rooster cut and a perfect Aladdin Sane lightning bolt painted on his face. I gave them my number and they called me the next day and we started calling each other. We all lived at home and we’d be on the phone with each other for hours.

  HELLIN KILLER: Paul’s mom was intense, she was a scary lady. She was the screaming voice from the other room, the disembodied voice of Faith Baker… she worked nights cleaning up planes between flights and so she was usually asleep all day, and if you made noise, she’d scream from the other room, “Shut up!” I think she thought I was Paul’s girlfriend, and in a way, I was.

  GERBER: Paul Beahm’s mom was a very scary woman and I was traumatized by her when I was tripping out on LSD in his room. I was like blazing, frying out of my body… and naked. We were playing that chicken game, where you throw the knife between your fingers. He was always trying to get me naked to play this chicken game on acid. Every so often his mother, who was very fucking scary—she was kind of Divine-like when you’re on acid—would just barge in. His room had all these black-light posters and lots of Frampton stuff and Bowie stuff, too. His mother would roar at me in this big authoritarian voice, “Do you want some potato chips?” and she’d be clutching this big bowl of chips and stuff while I’m like blazing out on acid. “No, I don’t think so.” She was trying to be friendly, but like while on acid, naked with her son, discovering we were both gay, you know, it all seemed just too weird. There were times when he was naked and there were also a lot of times when I was naked and he was not, or there were times when he was naked and I was not. We were trying to figure out sexually if we were actually human beings. We’d look at ourselves naked in this full-length mirror with Bowie lyrics cut out and glued on it. On acid it was as if I didn’t believe I was a human being.

  PAUL ROESSLER: It was a two-bedroom apartment. It was dark, there were boxes stacked to the ceiling everywhere. Boxes of who knows… magazines or junk. Some seriously depressing things had happened to that family. Paul was not a person who would ever talk about it, but his whole vibe when you were around him was “I know something you don’t know.” One of the things he knew, even from the time he was eighteen, was “I’m gonna kill myself.” When you have all this knowledge it really sets you aside. You know? He said, “You guys are all just little kids starting off your life, but I’m going to be dead in two or three years.” When a person has those kind of thoughts, they are different. Plus, he had a 180 IQ.

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: George and Paul went to IPS, this special school program at University High School, where they’d have classes on the lawn with people sitting in a circle, giving each other back rubs, playing guitar. Louise Goffin, Carole King’s daughter, went there. Some other people, like Alby the magician, went there. I started dating George but he’d always get mad ’cause I’d make out with Paul. I went to Beverly High and they went to Uni High. I used to cut my school and take the bus to their school. I used to go around with them. They were always trying to see what you could make people believe or not believe.

  HELLIN KILLER: Paul would call himself Astrid and write these letters about this Bowie-like character and put them up at school. He’d say he was a child from the stars, he tried to convince everyone of that.

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: Paul had green hair and he’d tell people he was Dean Stockwell’s son. Dean Stockwell was in that movie The Boy with Green Hair.

  PAUL BEAHM (AKA BOBBY PYN, AKA DARBY CRASH): We went to IPS, the school they threw us out of for having our own religion. We called it interplanetary school. Everyone wore CERTIFIED SPACE CASE silver stickers. We convinced about half our school that I was God and George was Jesus, this one girl almost had a nervous breakdown ’cause I sat there for like half an hour telling her I was God and she started screaming and there were all these Bibles in the class and she started throwing them at us, she didn’t come back to school for a week. They used to hassle me for having green hair, and [George would] walk around with ice creams in his coat without the wrappers.

  PAUL ROESSLER: They were the kids where everybody says, “Don’t talk to them, they’ll brainwash you. They’ll turn you into a follower.” I just went, “Wow, I’ve never even heard of a seventeen-year-old kid that came with warnings like that, you know?” Most high schools don’t have fledgling Charles Mansons.

  PAT SMEAR: We carried around copies of Helter Skelter like it was a Bible, and told everyone I was Jesus and Paul was God. We had our little group of LSD friends, and Paul and I started convincing them that the teachers weren’t right, and we got all these followers that rebelled. One of them was the head of the school’s son. The student council kicked us out of the program. Paul’s deal was that he’d get his diploma if he never came back to school; mine was to go to continuation school off campus.

  GERBER: I believe they kicked Paul out of IPS—they offered him an honorary discharge, but he wasn’t going for that. He took the attitude of “I’m taking it all down.”

  PAUL ROESSLER: Paul read the Encyclopedia of Philosophy and he had studied Scientology. One time we all went down and took tests at the Scientology place. They gave out free personality tests and they’d tell you, “Well, you did good here but you need work here. We can help you if you take this course.” I scored normally—good in this area, but in that area I really need help or whatever. But Paul scored perfect on everything! And they said, “Well, we’ve never seen anything like this before. Would you like to come teach at our center?” And George scored zero. Absolute zero all across. And they said, “You’re a dangerous person and you should be locked up.”

  PAT SMEAR: IPS was a combination of Scientology and EST therapy. The first day was called basic training, where they yelled at you and said you were assholes for eight hours, and you had to bring a parent with you. If you survived, you got to go to this special school. The big thing in IPS was that the teachers were always right, you were never supposed to question anything that they said or told you to do—which, of course, is exactly what we did.

  KIM FOWLEY: Uni High, my old high school, was all rich kids, movie star kids, and TV actor kids during the ’50s, when I went there. It was James Dean, repressed high school, just like in Rebel Without a Cause. It was: “Thou shalt not fuck, thou shalt not come, thou shalt not get drunk
or high or have any fun. Thou shalt go to college. Thou shalt be a credit to our parents—we’ll make them proud. We’ll all be doctors, we’ll all be lawyers, and we’ll all be castrated, Episcopalian puppets. And we’ll stand there and we’ll be like Ozzie and Harriet’s children”—because that’s what everybody wanted their kids to be like at the time. By the time Pat Smear and Bobby Pyn were at Uni, it was “You better not smoke dope, you better not go to Hollywood on weekends, you better not suck cock, you better not eat pussy, you better not have a black girlfriend. Ooh, you better not start a band. Ooh, you better not shoot up. Ooh, you better not drop or smoke. You won’t be a credit to this family.” But of course, everybody’s families by the ’70s were like single-parent, dysfunctional families.

  KIM FOWLEY: The loneliness of a visionary is that you might be the only one in the universe at that time who recognizes magic. I’m a magical person, and so I recognize other magical people. It takes one to know one.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: When Charlie Manson was on trial in 1970, Kim and Rodney drove out to Spahn Ranch… there were still people living up there, the family girls. When they pulled up, Kim leans out the window and shouts, “I’m your new leader!” He was just too weird. Also, if you were at a party and talking to a girl, he’d literally push you out of the way and say, “I’m Kim Fowley, I have a hundred gold and platinum records. This guy doesn’t.”

  KIM FOWLEY: It’s a man’s world, says James Brown, and he’s right. When you get women doing traditional male things, you’re gonna have combustion and controversy. The Runaways was my idea, and I went to find people to be the group, and through a series of confusion, luck, and design, five girls were selected.

  JOAN JETT: I told Kim Fowley I played rhythm guitar and about my idea of forming an all-girl band. I just thought people would freak out over an all-girl teenage rock-and-roll band. Before I met Kim I had met Kari Krome at Rodney’s, I believe, and I knew she wrote songs and that Kim was her publisher. I thought she played guitar or something, too, and I told her we should form an all-girl band. She said she didn’t play, just wrote, but I should talk to Kim about it.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: Joan Jett was a regular at the English Disco. She had blond hair then. She was fashioning herself after Suzi Quatro. She stole the big Suzi Quatro poster from my club.

  TOBY MAMIS: I had known Joan when she was a stone Suzi Quatro fan who dressed like Suzi and sat in the Hyatt lobby when Suzi was playing at the Roxy in March of ’74. I’d see her just sitting there silently, not even daring to speak to Suzi when she’d finally walk past. She was first in line at the Roxy to get in the door so she could be right in front of the stage. That same night I saw her back in her chair in the hotel lobby with some guy and I told them they might as well go home because Suzi had gone to sleep and wouldn’t be back in the lobby until 10 A.M. or whatever the next morning.

  JOAN JETT: I wanted to be a rock star, not to be chasing rock stars for autographs or waiting around hotel lobbies for them.

  KARI KROME: I met Kim a coupla times at Rodney’s, then more formally at Alice Cooper’s birthday bash at the Hollywood Palladium, where he picked my brain about songs and a contract came out of it. I met and became instant friends with Joan not long afterward. I told Kim about wanting my own band to create and write songs for, even if I wasn’t a performing member of this band.

  TOBY MAMIS: Kari Krome really played a key role in focusing both Kim and Joan on the goal line.

  KARI KROME: Kim was one of those odd birds, brilliant at the art of the hustle. A master puppeteer, zeroing in on his prey with a wicked smile and a constant stream of dazzling bullshit it was hard not to get caught up in, at least in the spectacle of it. And if you didn’t respond with the appropriate behavior, he could turn that skill to verbal venom and devastate you, anyone, flat with embarrassment. No subject was sacred: who you were secretly in love with (who may even be there in the same room), your drug habits, sexual rituals (gay, straight, or bi), what kind of geeky, uncool music you listened to alone in your room.

  KIM FOWLEY: When I first knew Kari Krome she was a real poetry person who was much more interested in Jack Kerouac than Chuck Berry. She didn’t have rock star potential. She was a pleasant-looking girl, but you gotta be Steven Tyler or Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop. Kari Krome wasn’t Patti Smith. Patti was interested in all the same things Kari was interested in but one of them was a performer and the other wrote lyrics for people to perform.

  JOAN JETT: When I first hooked up with Kim he said to send him a demo tape. A couple days later Sandy West met Kim in the Rainbow parking lot and told him she was a rock drummer. Kim gave Sandy my phone number and she called me the next day and I took four buses all the way to her parents’ house in Huntington Beach so we could jam. We got along well. Then we decided to start looking for other people.

  SANDY WEST: One night in the summer of ’75 I saw this guy in this weird orange suit in the Rainbow parking lot at closing time, and my girlfriend said, “That’s Kim Fowley. He’s made records with Alice Cooper.” So I walked up to him and said, “My name’s Sandy West, and I’m a drummer.” And his eyes lit up and he said, “Oh, really? Well, I know this girl who knows some girl in the Valley who plays electric guitar.” And I said, “Really?” I’d been playing with guys all my life. A chick that can play guitar? I wonder how good she is. Kim called me the next day to give me Joan’s number. She took about three buses down here… took her like four hours to get from Canoga Park to Huntington Beach. She had a little Sears guitar and I had my drums, a Marshall amp, and a piano set up above this three-car garage at my parents’ house. Joan walked in, and I said, “Here’s a fuckin’ Marshall stack, what do you know how to play?” And she said, “The only thing I know is Suzi Quatro… that’s how I learned how to play guitar.” So I said, “Well, that’s cool.” We jammed on some song by Suzi and she had perfect rhythm. I was like, “God, this is so right on the money.” I told Kim, “This girl’s got perfect timing.” And his eyes just exploded out of his head. A fifteen-year-old girl with perfect timing? He said, “If there’s two of you who can play well together, there’s gotta be more.” Joan would come down to my parents’ house on the weekends and we’d work on song ideas. Eventually we’d go to Kim’s apartment in Hollywood every weekend… writing and auditioning and talking to people. Kim relied on me as a musician to check the girls out.

  RON ASHETON: Kim Fowley said to me, “I need a place to audition women.” So I hooked him up with this guy who’d been the conductor of the NBC orchestra for twenty-five years who had this little practice studio out in the Valley. I’d come by every once in a while and peep in on some of Kim’s latest finds. It was really hilarious. It was hard to keep a straight face with some of the people who showed up for auditions.

  KIM FOWLEY: Why couldn’t there be a girl Elvis, or a girl Beatles, or a female Little Richard, or a girl Bo Diddley? There’s always been that female version of everything in music, but nobody ever recruited five girls and said, “These five girls are magical, and if they sing songs and look a certain way, the public will buy it.” It was like casting a movie.

  SANDY WEST: I remember checking out some girl from New York or Cleveland. I don’t remember how we found Micki Steele. I think Kim started putting out ads all over the place and we checked her out and she could play.

  DON WALLER: Just about everybody from the Back Door Man staff and the Torrance/Carson contingent of old glam rockers and earth dogs were present when the Runaways played their first gig in Phast Phreddie’s parents’ living room in Torrance. There was a lot of beer and reefer and amphetamines.

  PHAST PHREDDIE: The first Runaways gig was in my parents’ living room. I don’t remember a lot about it because I was so drunk.

  JOAN JETT: I remember our first show at Phast Phreddie’s house. Everybody was standing so close. Or that’s what it felt like.

  SANDY WEST: One day Lita Ford tried out as bass player to replace Micki Steele, who quit. I think she had stage fright. She used to freak
out before we played.

  MICKI (MICHAEL) STEELE: The official story [why I didn’t stay in the band] was that ideologically I wasn’t in line with the others… but early on this thing started with Kim, this sordid personal angle. He was enamoured of me in a way that I found very uncomfortable. I’d been raised in a sheltered manner… and wasn’t savvy enough to know I could say, “C’mon Kim, fuck off.” I got it in my head that he would throw me out of the band. But I didn’t want to say yes because I definitely wasn’t into it. I dealt with it by trying to stay neutral, but the pressure started building and building. My performance went down the tubes. I—I started going kind of nuts from it.

  SANDY WEST: Lita and I started jamming on Deep Purple songs, and not just “Smoke on the Water,” either. I was blown away. I was like, “You gotta be the lead guitarist.” I told Kim, “This is the lead guitarist. She’s fuckin’ hot.” Everything was moving real fast. Me, Joan, and Kim were always together.

  LITA FORD: Kim was pretty scary when you’re sixteen years old. I didn’t grow up in Hollywood. I had a pretty normal upbringing. I didn’t grow up around people that were eccentric. When I first met Kim, I thought, “Oh, this guy’s a fucking piece of shit. I don’t like him and I don’t want to be around him.” I packed up and left after three days.

  MICKI (MICHAEL) STEELE: When Kim finally got rid of me, he was out for blood. He’d realized I wasn’t into it, and I guess he resented my inability to simply tell him to knock it off. But I was just too intimidated. When he pulled the plug he went a little over the top. He said, “You have no megalo, you have no magic. This is the only chance you’ll ever have to be a rock star and you’ve blown it.” Perhaps my musical thing didn’t lend itself to his slutty jailbait design, but the way Kim treated me made me depressed for a long time. Then I got angry, and I decided I was gonna show him. So it was a harsh experience, but it firmed my resolve. It’s especially nice to know that he was wrong about the rock star thing.