egg y nudu. "Good Neighbour SHAZAM!"

"So you're leaving us to see your doctor?"

"I'm heading south for my annual physical."

"Someone said you were going out of town to get cosmetic surgery."

"Totally absurd."


















[One week later...]

"Glad you're back and things went well.  However, a few people still think you went and had body work."

"That's ridiculous."

The Sex Pimples.

"If music be the food of love, let's eat out," Oscar Wilde once said to Lilly Langtry, slipping under the table after consuming a brandy drenched tapioca pudding.  Using that maxim as a rule of thumb, foot and knee, can we assume then, that a book on music can be made a meal of?  Is the government ever to be trusted?  How many angels can you get on the head of a pin?  The answers to the questions are, respectfully, yes, no, and thirty if thin and lightly dressed.

"Scusi, Mio digresso," as some Italian men would say, rushing into the bathroom after a long Laura Antonelli movie.  Where was I?  Oh yes, making a meal out of music books.  Two of the aforementioned culinary tomes have recently come to my attention, although they might not suit all tastes.  They do fit, however, under the heading of music sociology and should be noted as thus.

The first, Eat My Shoes: The History of the Sex Pimples is a vivid document of this pivotal band in the 'punk' movement.  The second is Babylon's Forgotten Ashtrays, a focus on several of the breakthrough artists of the reggae genre.  Straightforward stuff here.  Not like that book The Liszt of Adrian Messenger, a cheap attempt to mix classical music with Agatha Christie. 

Eat My Shoes is an important look into the brief, frantic, manic and destructive flurry known as the Sex Pimples.  The Messiahs of the punk movement, the Pimples were destined to burn bright, quick and out.  Four of them, lead singer Ricky Barf, his Siamese twin brother (connected at the mouth) and drummer Mickey Barf, lead guitarist Mal-Content, and bass player Clive Noxious.

Where bagels go, trouble follows.  And troubles certainly followed the Sex Pimples.  Their single, "Young Fascists" was banned by the BBC.  So was the album, "Anarchy in the Ukraine."  Violence followed their concerts.  In Texas, a girl rushed on the stage and struck bass player Clive Noxious with a refrigerator.  Noxious was doomed for tragedy.  In London at the Flaming Groins Club, he covered his mom with linoleum, shag carpeting and new drapes, while singing "September of My Years."  Finally, Clive took his life by stapling his wrists together.  For his fans, it was the only way to go.  No one ever thought that Clive would be an old age pensioner.  As this song, "Young Fascists" says:

                    "...I can't stand my Mother

                    And I hate my Dad.

                    Sometimes I want to snuff  'em

                    Stuff  'em in a Glad Bag.

                    I got a white pale face

                    With the blotchy red specks.

                    I don't think nuthin'

                    But violence and sex.

                    Young Fascists!  That's we are.

                    Young Fascists!  I'm a living scar.

                    Young Fascists! I hate this song I just wrote.

                    But if you don't buy this record

                    Gonna cut your throat.

                    Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."

If that's not enough for you, sink your teeth into Babylon's Forgotten Ashtrays.  The book does not pretend to be a serious text book of reggae music, but more of a pictorial document.  The famous and the not-so-famous share equal pages.  Included are Jah Kitsch, Truck Drivers of Rhodesia and Oy U-Hoo, along with giants Barb Wirey and the Maulers and Poops and the Midols.  In fact, the book contains photos from the Barb Wirey concert held locally in 1976.

How I remember that show.  Held at the Santa Barbara Country Beach Men's Room, it was standing room only.  Poops ad the Midols had opened the show, featuring music from their album "Culture Dreaded Gnats."  I wasn't familiar with all the songs.  My comrade was convinced that they were playing the same song twelve times.  A man next to me said that they were alternating between two songs, six times apiece.  It didn't matter.  We were waiting for the headliner.

The crowd was in a lather (thanks to a handy soap dispenser) when Barb Wirey and his Maulers took the stage.  Barb is incredible!  What charisma!  Standing, proud, dramatic, defiant, and somewhat dazed.  His head was framed in a mess of "breadlocks" (pieces of Roman Meal braided into every strand).  Smoking a two and a half foot reed weed filled reefer, and then putting out the butt on a security guard's coatsleeve.  What audacity!  Fifteen minutes later he decide to play, nearly all of his album "Gastaman Vibrator," including the hit "I Shocked My Lawyer."  The crowd wanted an encore, but Barb doesn't give them.  With the last chord still hanging on the sink, Barb lit another reefer, flipped a thankful ash to the audience, used the facilities, and split.  It was the end of an experience.  So is the book.

[First published November 4, 1980.]

"They stare at the Zeppelin-Square."

It's time for a return to Gotham West.  On the Fritz to Blade Runner's workplace.  La Citta degli Angeli.  Or, La Cite des Anges.  We are mixing it up again.  The Old Pueblo meets Little Tokyo.  Civil servants and Middle Eastern cuisine.  A French band with Teutonic flourishes, choral versed in a language from a distant planet.  A Japanese feline that may be human, transformed into an endless variety of multi-ethnic characterizations.  SoCal.  So Cool.

Repeated visits to Los Angeles open new vistas, good and bad.  How this city has transformed in my memory and experience.  Downtown is not the Downtown of my '60s youth.  And yet it is.  The play is the same.  Only the décor changes.  The scene shifts somewhat and the hand props are different.  Costumes vary.  But the text is basically constant.  Modern dress does not conceal the classical themes.  There is a divide.  A contrast.  In current observation, one comes to the realization that the United States in cosmopolitan terms, is a Third World Nation.

But I digress...perhaps.

We are here, for the Rock Show!  (And a bit of culture, albeit of a pop nature.)  And it's Oesterreich.  Easter.

Having returned from last year's splendid pair of King Crimson shows at the Orpheum on Broadway, we are now venturing to uncharted territory in the Umberto Echo Park District for French faves Magma.

Yes, it's Magma.  A SPACE PIRATE RADIO mainstay since 1974, it is our second experience with Christian and Stella Vander and ensemble in real time since San Francisco, 1999.  A new venue for us, the well known Bohemian club, the Echoplex, basement club of the Echo, on the David Lynch side of Sunset Blvd.  I have reservations.  Both literal and figurative.  I am pleasantly surprised.

My hesitation about the club was predominated by the fact that the show was a standing room gig.  Being of the Elderly Persuasion and having been spoiled by the sit down, audio enriched atmosphere of Magma's performance at the Palace of Fine Arts, I was afraid the new environment would turn Magma into a Munchen Bier Hall Post Punk Moshen Space Party.  This was not the case, danke sehr Meine Gott im Himmel.

The nicely darkened club has side seating, a seemingly well stocked bar, food options (neither of which I felt necessary to enhance the experience, except for the seating) and a cool moderne retro beat feel.  A House of Blues without the tie-ins, more bongos and near blitz Underground lighting.  I can dig it!  :)

Magma, as always, are an experience musical unlike any other.  For the uninitiated, I will not even begin to explain.  Explore for yourself.  Seductive, challenging, mesmerizing, and sometimes a tad creepy.  If Buddy Rich and his Orchestra had been taken over by the pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or Carl Orff had taken mescaline during Carmina Burana sung in Esperanto Jazz.

 

Day 3 is a return to the Japanese American National Museum for Hello Kitty.  The wife has a more personal youthful connection to the feline changeling than myself, but I'm more geared for it than say, a Hockney exhibition. 

 

The layout is impressive, though the set up feels like a maze for human mice.  I'm glad I never started collecting in this field, 'cause one could go mad trying to be completist.  The varied items are an impressive lot, but even the wife notes items missing from her youth.  And speaking of youth, how ancient I feel when the dawn of the Nippon Gatto is 1974, the same year of SPACE PIRATE RADIO's debut.  The pitch of the display comes off a bit too sales pamphlet promotional.  Extolling the merits of the "brand."  There is the feel of a franchise convention.  Fortunately the displays of art captivate and looking at the gallery attendees, I wonder how many hipsters drop acid and visit this fantasy land.  I was only saddened not to see the Hello Hitler image.  The Hello Kitty Tarot Cards, however, were a pleasant surprise.

 

An added surreal moment is the fact that after facing the Afterlife with a massive Kittypatra figure (or as I call the Egyptian statue, NefferKitty), one is faced with an exit that leads to a display on Japanese Internment Camps.  Quite a segue.

 

Returning to the clouds, in our favourite suite, or its doppelganger ein flur below, we contemplate the city.  Coruscant...in the day, Gamorrah by night.  Off World vehicles above.

 

The morning is greeted by the sounds of African American mantras of anger to the THX 1138 LAPD.  A Day of Continued Adventure Awaits...Sending a message from Western Union Station.  The Trendy Train Set will be boarding.  Exit North.

 

"The city is sinking

But music remains

Beware Metropolis."  :)

egg y nudu. "Foxtrotsky."

"I've heard you have Russian ancestry."

"Perhaps."

"Tsarist or Bolshevik?"

"Proletariat, of course.  Why do you ask?"

"You look White Russian."

"Never!"

"Welcome home, Mr. Kane."

Possibly the biggest "star" in the musical world to visit SPACE PIRATE RADIO was Bryan Ferry.  It was during the final Roxy Music tour of 1983.  I had contacted Warner Brothers Records to see if Bryan wished to visit the show at KTYD studios during their visit to the Santa Barbara County Bowl show of May 6th.

 

The Warners' people told me Ferry wasn't doing press on this tour.  He had turned down Los Angeles radio and newspaper folks for the Universal Amphitheatre shows that would happen before Santa Barbara and nixed a Rolling Stone interview to coincide with the Berkeley show that would follow.  But then things changed...We were contacted by the record label saying that Bryan wished to visit the studio.  Zounds!

 

The story goes like this...Years earlier, so it was told, Bryan had stayed in Santa Barbara in the '70s and heard this crazy little station playing imports of Roxy Music, Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay albums.  Albums that the "big" LA stations wouldn't touch.  The DJ playing these unknown quantities was yours truly and the show was SPACE PIRATE RADIO.  Big Grin.  A memory served.  And a little reward for being "out there."

 

Day of the concert, I pick up Bryan at the El Encanto Hotel where he is staying in one of the apartment suites.  He is dressed very casual in shorts and sport shirt.  We hit it off immediately and chat like old friends.  His ride to the studio is as my passenger in my ultra-sophisticated 1976 Datsun B-210 Honey Bee.  He doesn't seem the slightest remorse that I passed on the Rolls, Bentley or Lotus Elan.  Bryan's rather thin, exposed legs are near the stick shift and I can't help but feel that I might shift his kneecap into fourth gear.  Otherwise, we talk art.

 

He is very fascinated with the Spanish architecture.  I ask him if he's been to Hearst Castle.  He says he doesn't know it.  "Really?"  I'm surprised, so I fill him in on brief historical details and tie in the connection to CITIZEN KANE.  He lights up with enthusiasm about the subject and says he has to plan an excursion to San Simeon to see more.

Now Bryan is here for SPACE PIRATE RADIO, but the program director has asked to interview him briefly for his daily show.  Being the program director, slash, music director lets him get his way, as the record company, indebted for those all important Tuesday record adds, allows it.  Bryan is uninspired by this. 

 

Now this program director is one of those types I've been forced to deal with through the years.  The type you can get along with reasonably well, but has the ability to be a weathervane, turning to whatever direction the wind blows, often with their back to you, doing what is ever necessary to stay in the business and the music is ALL GOOD.  A type of individual who doesn't recognize what's new and exciting in music until it's been validated by others.  I remember telling him about the Pet Shop Boys, unknown to the mainstream, and describing in detail their debut work.  Weeks later, I pass by the music director office and hear him on the phone to an EMI record rep, word for word how I described them.  I was offended.  I'm sure he got nice concert tickets, backstage, a tour jacket and unlimited promos for his "brilliant observation, musical taste and review."

 

Program Director knows little about Roxy Music and/or Bryan Ferry.  "What questions should I ask him?" he amazingly asks me, his supposedly Machiavelli behind the Borgia throne.  Knowing Bryan's hatred for the new '80s bands that imitate Roxy, I say, "Ask him how he feels about bands like ABC."  *giggle*

He does, and Bryan turns away, looking out the Eighth floor window of the Granada Building, a mumbled dismissal, eye contact gone and a temperature drop immediate.  Interview over.

 

The record people suggest a photo and Bryan passes by the PD and says, "I want to get a couple with my mate, Guy."  A Teletubbie moment.  "Big Hug!"  :)

In the studio with me, Bryan is terrific.  At the end, I ask him if he might do an I.D. for SPACE PIRATE RADIO.  Up until this time, most artists would do a simple, "Hi!  This is 'such and such' on SPACE PIRATE RADIO."  But Bryan changed the pattern.  He took his time and kindly brought me into the I.D.  "Hello...This is Bryan Ferry...And I'm here with Guy...on...SPACE...PIRATE...RADIO..."  I was gobsmacked.

 

And though he and I might differ on some political areas.  And foxhunting.  I still find my time well spent with this man of  Taste, Style and Distinction.

 

And there is that song, SAN SIMEON.

egg y nudu. "Eggstatic Interference."

"I think I should be on the radio."

"What?"

"You know, be on the radio.  A disc jockey.  Play cool music.  Say clever things."

"They wouldn't let you do it.  No one would hear you."

"Why?"

"Your broadcasts would be scrambled."