 |
Christopher Milk
(L-R) The Kiddo, Surly Ralph, John Mendelssohn, G. Whiz
|
In 1995 Rhino Records issued
I, Caramba, the autobiography of the legendary rock critic, musician, and graphic artist John Mendelssohn. The book came nicely packaged with a CD featuring solo demo material and several tracks from two of his bands: The Pits and Christopher Milk.
Shortly after the book/CD was released, my friend Loren Dobson and I visited Mendelssohn at his Sunset District home to chat about his life and times. Well-known for his vitriolic wit and inclination for over-the-top self-promotion, Mendelssohn was extremely gracious and surprisingly soft-spoken. He gave us an afternoon of his time as well as a personal copy of the extraordinarily hard to find Christopher Milk LP
Some People Will Drink Anything.
However, the interview was never published or indeed written. Which was my fault. I knew it was going to be a big job — never mind transcribing the two hours of taped conversation; there were also dozens of extracts I wanted to include from the book and stacks of old magazines to comb through for research. It would have to be split into two, maybe even three parts to fit into the 'zine we did. But mainly, I was worried that Mendelssohn wouldn't like the finished product, that he would find flaws with my grammatically incorrect sentence structures and misplaced punctuation marks. So, having worked myself into a tizzy of self-doubt, I completely chickened out. And the tapes have sat in a drawer for the past 21 years.
Until now! A few weeks ago, Loren posted a question about Christopher Milk on his Facebook page, which in turn put me in touch with photographer (and Mrs. Twister) Heather Harris. Heather nudged me to "do it" — and this time
dammit! I couldn't think of a good reason not to.
Interview by Devorah Ostrov & Loren Dobson
Story by Devorah Ostrov
"Long victimized by their own awesome physical beauty — which often so dazzles an audience that it doesn't even notice the group's music — Christopher Milk here demonstrate that they are indeed the most brilliant rock band in the history of the universe."
So began the liner notes included with the first (and only) Christopher Milk LP,
Some People Will Drink Anything. Although credited to one Bhaskar Menon, this excessively boastful introduction could only have been written by the group's lyricist and frontman, John Mendelssohn, whose sharp sense of humor has antagonized fellow musicians and entertained rock magazine readers for several decades.
As he's an experienced journalist, Mendelssohn took the reins of this interview by asking if I was surprised by anything I'd read in his book. And so, we began with the picture he paints of a somewhat grim and neurotic childhood.
Mendelssohn was born in Washington, D.C. "in the same year as David Bowie and Iggy Pop," as stated in his autobiography. That would be 1947. When he was just a few months old, the family moved to Southern California.
Mendelssohn writes about his mother being "excruciatingly shy and insecure." He adds, "She was terrified of nearly everything, and I was very much her son."
When I ask about his earliest memory, he recounts a passage from his book: "My mother encouraging me to hide under the bed while she took a shower. Now there's a view of the world that makes for a lot of confidence. 'Hide under the bed because somebody is going to try to kidnap you while I'm taking a shower!'"
At the same time, he talks about how his mother dominated the family, especially his father. "My mother sort of ruled the family," says Mendelssohn, "and she was desperately unhappy. She
loathed my dad. My dad was really passive and never ever stuck up for himself. Except when it would go a little bit over the line, and he would
explode. My mom is a really joyless sort of person. It got beaten into her at an early age to experience the world as a joyless, frightening, oppressive place. And that's what I learnt. I struggle with that to this day."
It sounds like you had a painful childhood, I suggest.
"It was a terrible environment," replies Mendelssohn. "I was a very unhappy person. This is something I realized only in my 40s. I always felt that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, which is a horrible way to grow up — thinking that there's something internally, fundamentally wrong. But the thing was, I never saw anybody being strong. I never saw anybody sticking up for himself. My mom bullied my dad mercilessly. So, I had no idea what strength looked like. I had no idea what self-defense looked like. When I was six or seven, living in the San Fernando Valley, I got into fights almost daily. There was a period where I would fight back, and I would win sometimes. But it just seemed wrong to me that I should fight back. In a perverse way, it seemed like the natural thing was to back down. And as I got older that became the pattern. And I hated myself for it. I always hated myself for not being a fighter, and for allowing people to pick on me."
Did your parents encourage your writing, musicianship, artwork?
"They were proud of me. They were always very proud of me when my work was published. As far as being an artist... They always had a real pragmatic approach to the whole thing. I greatly regret that I didn't do something in school that I would have enjoyed. While I was getting a degree in sociology, the Mael brothers [Ron and Russell, who later formed Sparks] went to UCLA film school. What I'd always been told was, 'You've got to do something more substantial.'"
I comment that, based on the confident swagger of his writing and flamboyant stage persona, I thought he'd be more outgoing and funny as a teenager.
"I was fairly funny, but not at all outgoing. It was my one small claim to fame, I had a sharp tongue and a quick wit. My mom slashed my dad up every day of my life as a kid. I was exposed to some very high-grade sarcasm."
Apparently even as a child, Mendelssohn was a rock 'n' roll snob. Terming himself an "elitist," he writes that he "left Elvis to others and idolized the folkabilly sensation Jimmie Rogers, of 'Honeycomb' fame." Mendelssohn laughs and says, "I was just joking about that. I liked Elvis. But there was something about Jimmy Rogers' voice that really got me."
What was the first record you bought with your own money?
"'The Stripper' by David Rose. It inflamed my 15-year-old passions! I exchanged it for 'Ahab the Arab' by Ray Stevens because my passions were a little bit too inflamed."
 |
| Mendelssohn's autobiography |
In the book, Mendelssohn also insists (unlike every single other teenager of his generation) that he was unimpressed by the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. "That's right," he tells us. "I didn't get it. I thought it was really corny."
But seeing
A Hard Day's Night made him change his mind. "I couldn't have changed it
more," he emphasizes. "I was smitten."
He writes of the film: "Much as I adored every frame, I could hardly wait for it to end so I could assemble a group of my own with me as the American Ringo."
Mendelssohn's first combo included "these guys who were in the Santa Monica High School jazz band," and according to the book, he named them the Fogmen "in honor of the great popularity at that time of many groups from London."
What sort of music did you play?
"Beatles stuff... a couple of originals... a couple of surf songs to fill the set out."
And you played drums?
"Yeah, really badly. I didn't have a clue. I mean, I actually thought that having played snare drum in the Orville Wright Junior High School orchestra... What else is there to know? When you play snare drums, you're using your hands, not your feet. So, I bought my first drum kit... I didn't even bother to buy a high hat. I didn't do anything with my left foot. It was just sort of over there."
The Fogmen disintegrated when a couple of the guys ("who'd actually known how to play their instruments") left to form the Inrhodes — "sort of the Beatles of greater Santa Monica." Mendelssohn enrolled at UCLA and aimlessly shuffled through a series of mindless jobs before he formed his next band, a jazz/rock trio called the 1930 Four. "The idea was," Mendelssohn says, "if we called it that, we could wear 1930s-era clothing."
Nice pun. However, I feel compelled to point out there were only three of you.
"Yeah, the fourth guy quit. The organ player [of whom Mendelssohn writes, "hated me for my ineptitude"] was a jazz guy. I was the last person in the world who would have been able to or inclined to play jazz. But it was fun for a while."
On June 16, 1967, two days before they took the stage at the Monterey Pop Festival, Mendelssohn traveled to San Francisco to see the Who at the Fillmore West. "I've never seen anything better," he writes. When I ask what the show was like, he can barely control his excitement: "It was like nirvana! The physical sensation of a microphone coming that close to my head...!"
A couple of months later and back in LA, Mendelssohn staked out the back of a local radio station where the Who were being interviewed. In his book, Mendelssohn relates the tale of how he "managed somehow both to speak the great man's name and to hand him some... trippy lyrics I'd written." What was it like, I wonder, to finally meet his hero Pete Townsend? "That was..." he reflects, trails off, and after a long pause continues, "beyond thrilling! I could barely breathe."
Other than that interlude, Mendelssohn was miserable during the summer of love, writing that he spent it "in agony." He was kicked out of the 1930 Four, and his girlfriend broke up with him. (In the book, Mendelssohn remarks: "...I wrote my new girlfriend every day and called her every night. When she neglected to do the same, I made no attempt to conceal my disappointment. After about three weeks of this, she'd had enough, and informed me we were through.") He also writes that he "secretly loathed" the music coming out of San Francisco and name-checks "the Jefferson Airplane and that whole bunch."
He wasn't any happier the following year. The summer of 1968, he says, "was all this English blues. All this stuff I
hated. John Mayall, Fleetwood Mac... Fleetwood Mac, Arthur Brown, and the Who were all on this bill together. And I
swear Fleetwood Mac played the same song over and over and over again. The same tempo, the same key, the same solo. It was painful." Not even the Who could cheer him up. "It was a real disappointment to me when they started dressing badly on the '68 tour," he states.
But it was during these two years that he met Ralph Oswald, formed the nucleus of a band around the moniker of Christopher Milk, and began his career as a rock critic. In the book, Mendelssohn mentions that he wrote "a little essay unfavorably comparing the Doors, whom I thought pretention made flesh, to the Crazy World of Arthur Brown," which was published in UCLA's
Daily Bruin newspaper.
Was this your first attempt at rock criticism?
"No... I'd sort of written what could be construed as rock criticism in my high school newspaper. I wrote little bits and pieces. And then I wrote something in college, but I didn't get any encouragement. Then at the beginning of my senior year, I wrote [the Doors piece], and the editor encouraged me. He opened the door. It was very inspiring to have somebody encourage me."
Do you remember what you wrote?
"I said the Doors were stupid and pretentious, and Arthur Brown was wonderful — essentially."
In his book, Mendelssohn discloses how he developed his distinctive journalistic style and penchant for acerbic wit. He writes: "I hadn't much to say, and couldn't write to save my life... Just in the nick of time, I developed a style — or, more accurately, stole one, from the great English provocateur Nik Cohn..."
Considered to be one of the fathers of rock criticism, in the 1960s, Cohn wrote a regular column for
The Observer and authored
Pop from the Beginning, at the time the most important title on the subject. One recent review of Cohn's book termed it "...an unruly, thrilling and definitive history of an era, from Bill Haley to Jimi Hendrix, full of guts, flash, energy and speed. In vividly describing the music and cutting through the hype, Nik Cohn engendered and perfected a new form: rock criticism." (Penguin Books)
"I'd gotten some notoriety before that," notes Mendelssohn, "but when I got hold of that book, I just plugged into that. It was a conscious desire to be as interesting as the music."
I venture that he was almost picking fights with his writing, provoking people with his words.
"Sober, responsible criticism is a real yawner for me. Unless it's
really good, sober, responsible criticism. And I guess I didn't feel up to that task. So it's partially that, and probably to a much greater extent, my yearning for attention. I figured I could get people to pay attention to me that way."
And you did.
"And I did."
 |
1970s Christopher Milk billboard advertisement
|
Although the autobiography doesn't specify how they met (when pressed, Mendelssohn admits, "I don't know how we actually made plans to get together"), it was during the summer of '67 when he and Ralph Oswald first became "semi-friendly."
Ralph had been a member of Dave & the Van-Tays. "They were the top surf band at University High School," says Mendelssohn. "They ruled University High School!"
Nicknamed "Surly" Ralph (evidently because he tried to hide his acute shyness with surliness), the guitarist was a "man to be reckoned with," reveals Mendelssohn. "He had a hookah. I'd see him at these parties with his hookah. Ralph had quite a reputation."
In the book, Mendelssohn simply writes that he and Ralph began playing with "different bass guitarists as Christopher Milk, a name I'd seen in San Francisco and been amused by..."
"We were called Christopher Milk from the summer of '68," he elaborates. "Ralph and I drove up here so I could torture myself by seeing this girlfriend who'd caused me all this heartache during 'the summer of love.' So I could see her again and be reminded that she didn't want any part of me. So, we came up here for that, and we saw the signs — the Christopher Milk signs.
Signs?
"A former mayor of San Francisco was called George Christopher," Mendelssohn explains. "And he owned a dairy."
This first, tentative version of Christopher Milk was short-lived but the family tree on the group's website (
christophermilk.com) has bassist Steven Bruce Ferguson giving way to noted
LA Times rock critic Richard Cromelin (who "played one gig"). After playing a frat house party and an aerospace social, the band broke up. Surly Ralph went off to study pharmacology at USC. As for Mendelssohn, "I dunno..." he shrugs. "I just sort of lost the taste for it."
By 1969, Mendelssohn's career in rock journalism was flourishing. His byline appeared in
Rolling Stone "beneath a disapproving review" of Led Zeppelin's eponymous debut LP, which was soon followed by his infamous appraisal of
Led Zeppelin II. He interviewed Pete Townshend and was hired by Warner/Reprise Records to spearhead the "God Save the Kinks" campaign. And for a brief time, he was the drummer for Halfnelson — the outfit fronted by Ron and Russell Mael before they morphed into Sparks.
Firstly, how did you get involved with
Rolling Stone?
"They had a little box that said, 'If you're interested in writing, send us something.' So, I copied my review that had been published in the UCLA
Daily Bruin and sent it to them. And they published it, to my amazement."
Mendelssohn's reviews of
Led Zeppelin and
Led Zeppelin II, both printed in
Rolling Stone in 1969, made him notorious.
Of the first album, he proclaimed: "'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You' alternates between prissy Robert Plant's howled vocals fronting an acoustic guitar and driving choruses of the band running down a four-chord progression while John Bonham smashes his cymbals on every beat. The song is very dull in places (especially on the vocal passages), very redundant, and certainly not worth the six-and-a-half minutes the Zeppelin gives it..."
He didn't like
Led Zeppelin II either. And his criticism, Mendelssohn observes in the book, "made me the talk of two continents and several islands." (The snarky yet funny prose reads in part: "And who can deny that Jimmy Page is the absolute number-one
heaviest white blues guitarist between 5'4" and 5'8" in the world?")
"The amount of attention that review generated was ridiculous!" Mendelssohn exclaims.
Of this era, he writes: "On the basis of perhaps a dozen snide record reviews, the populace of Los Angeles had come by this time to tremble with excitement at my approach. False-eyelashed flacks made themselves available to me sexually. I was taken to lunch. Led Zeppelin took time out from their show at the Anaheim Convention Center to promise to make my ears resemble cauliflower."
Did you really skip your college graduation to interview Pete Townshend?
"Yes. Not that it was a big deal. Believe me. Probably 14,000 people graduated that day. It's not like they were going to call anybody up and shake their hands. It was just this mass thing. I wasn't missing that much."
Were you nice to Townshend, or were you sarcastic?
"With people I'm in awe of, I don't get sarcastic. You can see that photograph of us where I have that shit-eating, fawning look on my face. And that little wispy mustache, and those stupid glasses... Oh, I was a sight!" (The photo is reprinted in the book with the caption: "Which the pop star and which the hopelessly dweebish former (just barely!) college student? It was nearly impossible to tell on the day I interviewed my idol Pete Townshend for the first time.")
When did you first see the Kinks?
"When they came to New York in October of '69. They were incredibly
bad. They hadn't rehearsed. Ray would start a song, and the others would just sort of stand there not knowing what to do. So, he'd have to stop and pick another one."
In the book, you say that you changed your appearance due to Ray Davies' influence. You bought more expensive clothing; got a $10 haircut.
"I went to New York in this derelict leather jacket... I was always fashion-conscious, and there was a brief period where it seemed fairly fashionable to wear leather jackets that looked as though you'd pulled them off a drunk in the gutter. So, I got one of those and I wore it to New York. Ray Davies was immaculately tailored; I felt like an idiot. So, I took steps when I got home."
Is that when Ray gave you his orange velour tie?
"It was a couple of weeks later in Los Angeles. It was a beautiful tie."
 |
| David Bowie picks Christopher Milk! |
Do you still have it?
"No. I gave it to Harold [Bronson, co-founder
of Rhino Records]. But we're not really on speaking terms anymore."
You write that you met Russell Mael in Italian 101 at UCLA...
"I didn't actually
meet him... We used to see one another at UCLA and sort of eye one another suspiciously because there were very few people at UCLA who looked as we did."
How did you come to join Halfnelson with the Mael brothers?
"I think they knew about me, and they knew I played the drums. Oh y'know... I had this friend, Dennis Castanares, who was the pied piper of UCLA. He would sit down under a tree with his guitar and play the entirety of
Sgt. Pepper. He would get crowds of 200 people around him, singing along. He had this amazing charisma! So, he and I and the two Mael brothers met up at a kind of mutual audition. They called themselves the Beverly Hills Blues Band. Ron was playing lead guitar. That lasted as long as it took to rehearse."
Mendelssohn also plays down his time in Halfnelson, telling us that he was only in the band "for a couple of unforgettable weeks when I was very young."
However, blogger and podcast host Monte Mallin (
montesnewblog.blogspot.com) says his tenure lasted from July - September 1969. During these months, the group recorded a never-released twelve-song demo with Mendelssohn on drums and Earle Mankey on guitar (and very possibly Surly Ralph on bass). "I imagine it's really, really bad," says Mendelssohn about his performance. "
I was awful. I never bothered with things like rehearsing, and I didn't really have much of a knack for it."
In your autobiography, you write that the Mael brothers "wanted to be precious and adorable as they wrongly imagined the Kinks to be, while I, a Who fan, wanted to be intimidating..."
"I started pushing my ideas. They wanted to be really cute, and I found that nauseating. They had these little things where the drummer who replaced me would jump up and run over and tinkle some little bells, and then he'd run back. It made me wanna gag. I wanted to push things off stages and break them!"
Mendelssohn wasn't concerned when he was "asked not to be in the group anymore." By the end of the '60s, Mendelssohn writes, he was making "plans for lunch with Spencer Davis" and "associating with a much higher caliber of person... As only befitted the king of L.A."
No less a personage than Iggy Pop set the wheels in motion for the rebirth of Christopher Milk. Mendelssohn had written an article on Mr. Pop for the May 29, 1970, issue of
Entertainment World — "the trade weekly for all the entertainment industry" as it billed itself. A few weeks later, he met Kurt Ingham, the photographer who snapped the magazine's cover pic of Iggy. Ingham described a Stooges show at the Whisky where "Iggy had leapt off stage and crawled between tables gnawing on the audience's shoes." In his book, Mendelssohn writes: "The photographer intimated that if he were in a band, he'd be willing to do likewise."
That was all Mendelssohn needed to hear. "I thought, what could possibly be better than that?"
Ingham was rechristened Mr. Twister, Surly Ralph came back, and a bass player dubbed The Kiddo magically appeared. (The Kiddo's real name is Kirk Henry, but there's no backstory for him in Mendelssohn's book. According to the Christopher Milk website, Henry had been a member of the Stack, "whose claims to near-fame included signing with Columbia Records, a Pepsi-Cola commercial in the can, and a behind-the-scenes contribution to the soundtrack of
Wild in the Streets." He and Mendelssohn crossed paths at parties and on the UCLA campus.)
That summer they "compromised the purity of our musical vision" and rehearsed a bit. "It seemed to me that rehearse was the last thing we wanted to do," writes Mendelssohn, "the first being setting up somewhere without permission and making as much noise as possible while the little photographer... gnawed on shoes." They also made their live debut at a UCLA dormitory party. "To ensure that we wouldn't sound too slick, I played lead guitar through much of it," he writes. "I'd had a guitar in hand for a total of maybe an hour in my lifetime at that point. I'm not certain that I'd have been worse if I'd played with my toes."
As other gigs followed, the band quickly acquired a reputation for creating mayhem. In
We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk, photographer Heather Harris says: "Doug Weston banned Christopher Milk for life in 1970 after lead singer Mr. Twister caused havoc at the Troubadour's Monday 'Hoot Night.' [Mr. Twister] 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 customer's laps." And in a two-page spread about the band in
Phonograph Record Magazine, writer J. Robert Tebble states: "Mr. Twister was Christopher Milk's Iggy Stooge."
During Christopher Milk's first couple of years, Mendelssohn continued with his other job as (in his words) "a heartless destroyer of careers." In the autobiography, he humbly declares: "I saw no reason that I couldn't both have my own group and remain the king of West Coast rock criticism."
Which is why readers of
Rolling Stone found it humorous when the band's name was casually inserted into his reviews, such as this one for
Who's Next: "And there you have it, chums, an album that, despite a degree of sober calculatedness that would prove fatal to a lesser group, ranks right up there with David Bowie's and Black Oak Arkansas's and Crazy Horse's and Procol Harum's and Alice Cooper's and Christopher Milk's as among the most wondrous of 1971." — John Mendelsohn,
Rolling Stone, September 2, 1971
Other musicians with whom Mendelssohn was now sharing the bill were less amused. He writes: "I brutalized the frightful local group Pollution in general and co-lead singer Dobie Gray in particular in the
Times. Two weeks later, we... naturally!... opened for them at the Whisky. If looks could kill, Dobie's as we came off stage the first night would have been the end of me."
In early '71, accompanied by The Kiddo, Mendelssohn flew to San Francisco to interview "an obscure English folkie" named David Bowie for
Rolling Stone. Intimidated by Bowie's cleverness and self-confidence, Mendelssohn writes that they "might as well have sent a cabbage."
 |
Christopher Milk promo pic
Phonograph Record Magazine November 1972
|
"I ran across the [interview] tape a couple of years ago," he tells us. "I marveled at it. I just sort of sit there and mutter a few unintelligible syllables every now and again and Bowie, in desperation, just keeps talking." Mendelssohn's write-up of this meeting was printed in the April 1, 1971, issue of
Rolling Stone. It begins with a lovely, almost poetic description of the singer: "In his floral-patterned velvet midi-gown and cosmetically enhanced eyes, in his fine chest-length blonde hair and mod nutty engineer's cap that he bought in the ladies' hat section of the City of Paris department store in San Francisco, David Bowie is ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall, although he would prefer to be regarded as the latter-day Garbo."
At the time, Bowie ranked Christopher Milk as one of his 3 top picks (alongside Iggy Pop and Paul Rodgers) in the
New Musical Express feature "How The World's Best Picked The World's Best."
Had you given Bowie a demo tape?
"He came to a rehearsal. We flew back to LA together and hung out a little bit. Christopher Milk was rehearsing, so he came by."
Obviously, he was very impressed!
"I think he was being light-hearted about it. I can't imagine us having impressed him that much. We played 'Waiting for the Man' with him."
Do you have a tape of that anywhere?
"No."
By this point, Mendelssohn figured the band might get signed to a major label on the strength of his name alone. Being only slightly facetious he writes: "I decided that nothing less than the pope's balcony could satisfy me now, and I appointed myself Christopher Milk's lead singer."
Demos were recorded and shopped around. "Nearly everyone for whom I played our demos was appalled," he writes, "but I thought it was they who were missing the boat. It meant so much to us! How could it possibly be less than brilliant?"
United Artists Records finally signed the group and issued a four-song EP (five if you count the lead track "Hey, Heavyweight," which turns up again in mono on side two). Co-produced by Mendelssohn, the packaging included a lavish gatefold sleeve, mini-poster, and lyric sheet. But Mendelssohn writes that the project was "disastrously amateurish." Lester Bangs told him, "It doesn't make it."
In
PRM, Tebble asserts that UA "created a super-exploitation campaign for the band even before the record was released." And he goes on to say that "entertaining but fallacious" press releases were sent out, including one about Mr. Twister biting a policeman.
Tebble also mentions that UA ran adverts offering a free Christopher Milk EP to anyone who wrote in and asked for it. "The response was tremendous," he states. "Ten thousand copies of the record were sent out." One respondent was Andy Seven, who reminisces about the marketing ploy on his blog page (
blackhairedboy.blogspot.com): "It was available only through mail order. I think the whole thing cost $1.00, so I jumped at the opportunity to score this puppy." Commenting on Andy's blog, T. Tex Edwards agrees: "I too jumped at the chance to order the UA C-Milk EP when I saw the offer in
Phonograph Record. I still dig it out from time-to-time & it still holds up."
Strangely, Mendelssohn doesn't discuss this promotion in his book and when we bring it up, he doesn't seem to have been aware of it. "I didn't give any away," he says. "The record company might have sent some out. I don't know how many." However, he does allow that the EP "was made to create interest."
The EP wasn't well-received by the music press. One particularly unkind review from
Coast magazine (under the headline "No Use Crying Over Spilt Milk") said it thought one song was a "bad parody of the Strawberry Alarm Clock imitating the Beatles imitating the Association." And Nick Venet, then-head of A&R at UA pronounced the EP was "dog shit." Meanwhile, management problems hampered the group's ability to properly promote the record through live shows. And UA declined to put out an album — saying there was no budget for a Christopher Milk LP in that quarter of the fiscal year. In
PRM, Tebble wrote: "Mendelsohn was adamant. He wanted an album or a release. He got the release."
Although he confused Mendelssohn the person with Christopher Milk the band, Venet's final words on the subject were, "We wish Christopher Milk all the luck in the world. We hope he has hits and a wonderful career as a performer. We wish him no stoppage of his career. And when he grows up, he'll feel that way about the next label that dumps him."
When the EP didn't do well commercially, and UA had dropped the band, you still wanted to carry on?
"Oh, I wanted to keep going
forever!"
Christopher Milk was a serious enterprise then? It wasn't just a rock critic trying to prove he could also be a rock star.
"We were dead serious. Ralph gave up pharmacology college to do the band, so it was pretty serious for him. Everybody had other things that they were doing."
 |
| UA advert for the Christopher Milk EP giveaway |
Having ballooned to a sextet on the EP (with Donnie Alvarado on guitar and Tres Feltman on drums), before they moved on some drastic personnel changes were made. Feltman was replaced by George Dragotta, who became known as G. Whiz. Alvarado disappeared. And as Mendelssohn was now the official lead singer, Mr. Twister's services were no longer required.
"It was ridiculous," Mendelssohn says about the group's extended lineup. "We had two singers — it was like a mini-review. I'd do my bit and then [Mr. Twister] would come on. He was there for shock value; he was supposed to create chaos — as he did to some extent at the Troubadour. He jumped up on a table, and all these drinks went smashing to the floor! That was pretty good. But he secretly fancied himself Mick Jagger. He was very serious about it. He wasn't going to chew anybody's shoes. And chewing people's shoes was the reason he was in the band in the first place."
Christopher Milk's EP did attract the attention of up-and-coming British producer Chris Thomas, then-known for his work on a couple of Procol Harum records and the Beatles'
White Album. He would go on to co-produce
Never Mind the Bollocks,
Here's the Sex Pistols.
Mendelssohn takes pleasure in telling people how Thomas "flew halfway around the world" (sometimes he "swam across the Atlantic") to work with Christopher Milk, and he produced an album's worth of material for them on credit. Mendelssohn writes that Thomas, "...either thought that we had terrific ideas, as he claimed, or liked the idea of spending two months in Southern California at someone else's expense..." In the book, Mendelssohn recalls the recording process: "Discerning early on that I didn't give him much to work with, Chris resigned himself to vocals that would forever embarrass me, and spent nights on end getting Surly R[alph] to overdub guitar and keyboard parts while The Kiddo and I killed time playing pinball..."
Mendelssohn didn't have to shop the LP for very long before David Berson signed the band to Warner/Reprise.
PRM reported that Mendelssohn told Berson he was recording an album with Chris Thomas and that Berson would surely love it. Berson did indeed like what he heard, and the label arranged a showcase gig for the band. In the book, Mendelssohn hilariously recounts the evening: "I kept stumbling over mike cords and guitar cords and cymbal stands and other members of the group, and spent most of the performance prone on the stage trying to make it appear intentional." In
PRM, Mendelssohn described the show as "the worst in the band's history... It was a
disaster!"
Nevertheless, in 1972 Warner/Reprise (where Mendelssohn had been employed three years
previously) released the group's first (and as it turned out, only) album,
Some People Will Drink Anything. (The band's website says the title was altered from
Some People Will Drink to Anything at the behest of Chris Thomas.)
The album's cover photo, taken by Richard Creamer, showed the guys sitting in a booth at Santa Monica's famous Oar House Saloon. Their expressions are frozen in place — for better or worse in the case of Surly Ralph who seems to be impersonating Edvard Munch's
The Scream — gawping at The Kiddo as he's about to gulp down a dubious-looking cocktail.
You've said that the album cover was a good idea, but it wasn't realized very well. What did you mean by that?
"It wasn't even a very good idea. I mean, it's
horrible!"
The advertising campaign for the LP seemed to rely heavily on a full-page mock review written by Mendelssohn. In the ad, Mendelssohn heaps praise upon his bandmates: "The rhythm section of pint-sized percussionist G. Whiz and heart-throbbingly-cherubic The Kiddo on bass is red-hot and right-on throughout. Ralph (Dr. Sax) Oswald's is surely one of the most stunning recording debuts by a guitarist in recent memory, and I've little doubt that anyone with unbiased ears will fail to be most impressed with the same as a composer..." At the same time, he treats his own contributions with self-deprecating humor: "...in my once expensive opinion, Christopher Milk's
Some People Will Drink Anything is mostly sublimely far-out (as often as not, I hasten to add for purposes of credibility, in spite of rather than because of the things I did on it)."
Was it your idea to write the review/advert?
"No, it wasn't. It was Stan Cornyn [then-head of the Creative Services department at Warner/Reprise]. He was the guy who originally hired me there as a writer."
Did he ask you to write something self-mocking?
"He didn't necessarily want it to be self-mocking. But I wasn't gonna be... One of the few things I like to pride myself on, is that I have some sense of proportion. I wasn't gonna write a straight thing about how
great we were. My philosophy was all ads said pretty much the same thing. My attitude then and now is to write something completely outrageous that's going to get somebody's attention. Make some ludicrous claims!"
Surly Ralph did a chart to ensure they signed their deal at an "astrologically propitious moment." Mendelssohn penned hyperbolic ad copy. Christopher Milk opened for Foghat at the Whisky. ("They were British," he writes, "so every groupie in Southern California showed up in her most scandalous attire. And didn't give us the time of day.")
PRM predicted that "everyone with a typewriter and access to a printing press wants the chance to slam Christopher Milk, just as Mendelsohn slammed their faves." But despite all that, the LP was basically ignored — apart from Nick Tosches, who Mendelssohn observes "beat it to a bloody pulp in
Rolling Stone."
They were given one last chance. "David Be[rson] wangled us a small budget to try to record a hit single," writes Mendelssohn. And the following year, the band released its swansong 45 — a cover of Terry Reid's "Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace" b/w (per the group's website, an "overamped piss-take") cover of the Beatle's "I Want to Hold Your Hand."
The single didn't top the pop charts, but it wasn't for lack of trying. In the September '73 issue of
PRM, Lisa Rococo told readers of her column: "...if 'Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace' ever gets played on the radio and enough people hear it while they're driving (it's an exquisite car song), it's going to be an unqualified smash. It's easily the best thing the boys have done." Meanwhile, members of the band personally called program directors all over the country, urging them to play the 45. Mendelssohn writes: "Many of them didn't believe that it was really The! John! Mendelssohn! on the other end... but nobody much played the record, and the label showed us the door."
Their final performance was at the El Monte Legion Stadium. Mendelssohn writes: "I came on stage in platform shoes I'd had to buy in the ladies section because they weren't making them for men yet, but had to kick them off 16 bars into 'Hello Susie' for fear of breaking my neck." For Christopher Milk, it was all over except for the "bitter quibbling."
From what I understand, the break-up wasn't on good terms.
"No. It was on fairly bad terms. We were frustrated, and we all blamed one another. And when it came time to split up the equipment, it got fairly acrimonious. We'd bought it with the advance from Warner Bros. I thought that The Kiddo got more than his share, and The Kiddo thought otherwise. It got fairly bitter."
Speaking of the Warner Bros. advance money... What's the story about the group's manager and a drug deal gone wrong?
 |
Cover photo for Some People Will Drink Anything
(Reprise Records - 1972)
|
"This guy said, 'If you give me X number of dollars, I can double it,' and I liked the idea of his doubling the money. So I said, 'If it's all right with the others it's OK with me.' He not only doubled it... he lost it."
With the band's demise, Mendelssohn also (more or less) gave up writing about rock 'n' roll. "I was bored with it," he says. "It didn't seem very important."
He devoted the next couple of years to making tapes. He became a regular at the Rainbow and the Starwood. He longed for a lost love and found "momentary consolation" in the arms of others. He "wrote some wonderful songs, and was accused, to my limitless mortification, of sounding like Sparks."
In the
June 1974
issue of
Creem magazine, Lisa Robinson reported: "John Mendelsohn phoned from L.A. to say that he has finished a solo demo he's been working on since last June but has long since abandoned the idea of becoming the superstar he always thought he would be."
But hey! In the spring of 1976, Christopher Milk was back (albeit briefly), when they reformed for a two-night stand at the Starwood. "We wore our ridiculous sequined overalls from the El Monte gig," writes Mendelssohn, "played a couple of The Kiddo's songs, and reveled in our ill-preparedness."
"It was a disaster!" he verifies. "But for once, we weren't terrified.
I'd always been rigid with terror before going onstage with Christopher Milk because I knew I wasn't very good. This time, we were awful and we knew it, and it was just
fun! So, the audience enjoyed it for a change."
In early 1977, Mendelssohn re-emerged with a new outfit called the Pits. Some years later, in a feature for Mojo, he recalled how the band came about: "Three years after my group Christopher Milk... agreed that we'd delighted audiences long enough, I played some new songs for an A&R guy at a publishing company... He did a bit of this and a bit of that on the side, including some promoting, and said if I put a group together, he could guarantee a lucrative Canadian tour."
You can almost hear Mendelssohn sigh as he writes: "He liked my stuff, and the dream flickered back to life." The tour failed to materialize, and the A&R guy abruptly stopped taking his calls. But the Pits (whose lineup included Mendelssohn's old friend and ex-Motel, Richard d'Andrea, on bass) stayed together long enough to open for Devo at the Starwood. ("How Devo's militantly dweebish and misshapen fans loved our long hair and traditional rock sexpot attire..." writes Mendelssohn.) Their final show, at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco, included last-minute recruit Gary Valentine (cousin of the Pits drummer) on guitar. "By the time we got home, writes Mendelssohn, "the Pits were only two. I threw in the towel, freeing Richard to hook up with the former bass guitarist of Blondie."
According to the autobiography, as the '70s ended and the '80s dawned, Mendelssohn worked on his music, wrote unsaleable short stories, and got a tan. To alleviate his boredom, he restored the second "s" to his surname. "Cultured sorts would wonder if I were related to the composer," he muses. (And uncultured sorts who read music 'zines would forever wonder why sometimes his name was spelled with only one "s" and sometimes with two.)
And every so often, his name would pop up in the pages of rock magazines. Readers of
Rolling Stone might have noticed Mendelssohn's byline on articles about Andy Kaufman and Foreigner, while the August 1980 issue of
Creem featured his interview with the Cramps ("The Lord Giveth While The Cramps Taketh Away"). Occasionally, you could even find his byline in a certain "high-quality magazine for men" — for which he interviewed
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls actress Edy Williams and lived to tell a funny story about it.
By the time of his 35th birthday, married and broke, he could usually be found at his day job, typing enrollment cards at UCLA Extension. "I left no middle initial untransposed," he writes, "not only because I wanted to keep my passive/aggressive chops up, but because I believe that... middle initials are sheerest pretension, an attempt to sound like a CEO or something."
In July 1983, Mendelssohn's fans were thrilled to see him return on a monthly basis as the new Eleganza columnist for
Creem. "It was supposed to be about fashion," Mendelssohn recollects in the book, "but I got bored with that halfway through my second column, and began devoting the space to rabid denunciations of Motley Crue..."
It seems like Creem would be the perfect outlet for your writing. How did you come to write the
Eleganza column?
"They just called me up and offered it to me. Dave DiMartino liked my writing."
(In a conversation with A.C. Rhodes at
rockcritics.com, DiMartino confirms: "I was such a fan that I sought him out and got him to write for us... we gave him the Eleganza column and started using him as a feature writer. And I was really happy to do that.")
How many years did you write the column for?
"Four-and-a-half or five. You know, it drove my wife crazy because I used that column as an excuse to meet all these women I lusted after."
Like the "Daughters of Darkness" column that featured Patricia Morrison!
"Nature abhors a vacuum, but Eleganza adores someone who dares to dress with panache, élan, and all the other French nouns that mean pizzazz. You might not go for the specific look that the three Los Angeles women who are this column's stars have in common. But you can't contest their pizzazz." — John Mendelssohn, Eleganza: Daughters of Darkness, Creem, November 1983
And his May 1984 Eleganza column introduced us all to Angeline...
"Hollywood teems with lusters after fame, rock stars of tomorrow, would-be symbols of sex. But none of them has managed to make herself more conspicuous than Angelyne, whose pouting likeness has adorned traffic light switching boxes and bus shelters through the '80s, and who, as this is written, reclines sultrily atop her fuchsia Corvette on a jillion fluorescent back-lit billboards from Capitol Tower to the sea." — John Mendelssohn, Eleganza: Introducing Angelyne,
Creem, May 1984
* * *
Q: While you were writing about Angelyne in
Creem, William Morrow published your book,
Kinks Kronikles. But you only devote two short sentences to it in your autobiography: "I wrote a book about The Kinks. The Kinks were not pleased." And there's nothing at all about the 1972 Reprise double-album compilation for which you're famously known. Why is that?
A: It still haunts me. I got a fan letter today... half of it was about me, while the other half was about the Kinks. I don't
care about the Kinks! I haven't liked them since 1970! And yet for the past twenty-five years, people hear my name and they think, "Oh, yeah!" And they write me letters... They tell me about some rare Indonesian B-side that they're sure I'll just die to have.
Q: To be fair, for a while, you were the world's biggest Kinks fan.
A: I might have been the most conspicuous, but I certainly wasn't the... There are people who are
really obsessive about them. People who have those Indonesian B-sides!
Q: You've said that you hate the design of
The Kink Kronikles album cover.
A: Oh, God, yes!
Q: Could they have done better with the artwork?
A: The question is, could they have done
worse? Yes, they could have! They could indeed have! And I'll tell you how: I volunteered to do the artwork. I was just beginning my infatuation with Coca-Cola then, and I was writing everything in Coca-Cola script. I tried to do
The Kink Kronikles in it and did a really lame job. I pushed it fairly hard.
Q: Is it true that they cut your liner notes to make them fit?
A: It's not that they're cut... Do you know what a "widow" is? It's where you come to the last line of a paragraph, and you have a little word that looks out of balance with the rest of the lines. Every time that would happen, they would start sticking words in to make the lines longer.
Q: You once wrote a letter to David Geffen in which you say, "If I had it to do over again... Christopher Milk would be a very different group." What did you mean by that?
 |
| Ad for The Kink Kronikles 2-LP set |
A: That's a complex question. I probably shouldn't have been the singer. I think that's the biggest thing. And in hindsight, I can see that we should have presented ourselves completely differently. I should have followed the advice that I later formulated in Creem, which is: The last thing you want to do is to look like everybody else. And that's exactly what we did. We tried to be fashionable in all the standard ways. We would open our set with "Hello Susie" by the Move. It's like waving a sign that says, "We're a cover band!" And I'd try to curb Ralph's pretensions a little bit. I was very much a Beatles fan and a Who fan. And Ralph was into all this pompous stuff, like Yes. So, a lot of his stuff got sort of inflated. These songs would go on for six-minutes when they should have gone on for two-and-a-half. I guess those are the major things.
Q: How did Christopher Milk come to have a lien imposed on it by the Franchise Tax Board?
A: The California Franchise Tax Board said that we should have paid sales tax because we sold our master to Warner Bros. We maintain that Warner Bros. should have paid the sales tax. But it was eight years after we broke up that we got [the notice]. Nobody had any money. The Kiddo got stuck with it because he'd bought a condo. He broke up with his fiancé, sold the condo, and the Tax Board stepped in and said, "We'll take that." It was a horrible thing.
Q: How did the autobiography/CD deal with Rhino come about?
A: Harold invited me to do it. We were in touch.
Q: Was it a good mental exercise to reflect on all the details of your life?
A: Some of the reviews have said things like "this is really narcissistic" and "it's incredibly detailed." How do you write an autobiography without appearing narcissistic? And detailed? To me, it seems like a tiny portion of what I could have written about. Was it therapeutic? Is that what you asked? I carry my life around with me. It's not like I have to sit down and think: What did I feel like when I was fifteen? The way I felt when I was fifteen is right there. I could've written a thick book just to the age of seven or eight.
Q: How is it selling?
A: My question is... How did I put this to them? It's not gonna sell if you can't buy it. And you can't buy it. So how can it sell? The week the Rolling Stone review came out — which was kind of favorable — it was impossible to buy the book in San Francisco. And I dare say, it was impossible to buy it in a lot of other places.
Q: Have the guys in Christopher Milk read the book?
A: Ralph has. Ralph liked it. The Kiddo sent me a letter saying, "You're a liar and a coward." The drummer... no one speaks to.
Q: I love that you refer to G. Whiz as "the drummer" in the intro to your autobiography ["Surly Ralph! The Kiddo! John! The drummer!"]. You did something very similar in the advert for the God Save the Kinks campaign ["Ray, Dave, Mick, and Whatshisname"].
A: I always teased [G. Whiz]. I always gave him a hard time. And y'know, I think it's kind of funny that there be somebody in the group who's so completely insignificant that you wouldn't remember his name: "The fans call him Whatshisname."
Q: Has your mother read the book?
A: She started to, but it hurt her very badly. It got her very upset. She put it aside, hid it somewhere.
Q: What do you think about the current state of rock journalism?
A: I don't think about it. I only think about it when I read Joel Selvin [SF Chronicle music critic]. And I think: How is it that a person who writes this badly is paid by a major newspaper to do this? How can this be? I don't pay much attention to rock 'n' roll anymore because I find so much of it disappointing. I listen to NPR.
Q: Tell us a bit about your latest project — the Spandex Amazons. It's a comedy troupe?
A: It's the repository of all my hopes and dreams at the moment. It's half sketches and half songs. I write it, act in it, and direct it. I feel a lot more confident in my ability as an actor than I did in my ability as a drummer or singer. I never had any confidence in myself as a singer.
Q: Who were you most scared of interviewing? David Bowie?
A: That was bad, but I wasn't really scared. Procol Harum was the first one, and that was really frightening because I considered them these God-like characters. And here I was... I was completely awed, and they were really boring people. [You can read Mendelssohn's complete 1971 interview with Procol Harum here]. Whereas Bowie, if you sat next to him on a bus and just started talking to him, you'd stand a chance of being a little intimidated because he's very, very bright.
Q: What rock star were you most thrilled to meet?
A: They were all great! I was meeting my heroes!
Mendelssohn's life continued its roller-coaster trajectory through the 1990s. He worked unhappily "processing words" for a corporate law firm, which he sardonically refers to as Payne, Misery & Suffering; he spent time with his young daughter; he mourned the death of his father; he entered a contest to name a Paula Abdul concert tour (The Annoying Talentless Little Butterball Tour sadly didn't win).
In more recent years, Mendelssohn relocated to the UK with his second wife, where he composed and produced the solo album, Sex with Twinge, as well as Mistress Chloe's Like a Moth to its Flame. He authored and published three books (Dominatrix: The Making of Mistress Chloe, Waiting for Kate Bush, and Gigantic: The Pixies and Frank Black), and has directed and starred in two sketch comedy revues. Returning to the US in 2007, Mendelssohn composed, performed, and recorded his second solo album, Sorry We're Open (released in 2010 and available on Spotify). He is currently back in the UK, living in London and performing with his new band the Freudian Sluts.
Stay up to date with Mendelssohn's thoughts on life by following his blog: "Mendel Illness" (johnmendelssohn.blogspot.com).
Websites I found useful:
www.christophermilk.com
www.rocksbackpages.com
www.bootlegzone.com
rateyourmusic.com
For more info about John Mendelssohn:
johnmendelssohn.blogspot.com
John Mendelssohn - Wikipedia
Join the Christopher Milk Fan Club group on Facebook
Watch these amazing Christopher Milk videos on YouTube:
The Christopher Milk Story
More Christopher Milk
