John Mendelssohn: The Rock Critic & Musician Recalls His Life In "I, Caramba" & Shares The Highlights In This Article!

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 Angelyne... 

"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

The History Of Peter Case Part 2: The Plimsouls

Originally published in Teenage Kicks #2 (Fall 1997)
By Devorah Ostrov

Back cover of the "Zero Hour" EP

In our last issue, we traced Peter Case's career with seminal power pop band the Nerves, whose lineup included Jack Lee on guitar and Paul Collins on drums.

After the Nerves disintegrated in early 1978, Case and Collins continued to work together as the Breakaways. Although short-lived ("It lasted about a month," states Case. "We played the Whisky once, that was it.") the band did record "eight or nine" tracks. Two Breakaways' tunes, "One Way Ticket" and an early version of "Walking Out on Love," can be found on the excellent Bomp Records compilation The Roots of Powerpop. "Walking Out on Love" would later turn up on the Beat's debut album along with "U.S.A.," another song originally by the Breakaways.

Amongst other things, the Breakaways suffered from an unstable lineup. "We had a bunch of different guitarists," acknowledges Case. In his opinion, the rhythm section was also weak. "I wanted to get off bass and I wanted Paul to get off drums," he says. At Case's urging, Collins switched to lead guitar, becoming the group's true frontman. Case took up rhythm guitar, Mike Ruiz and Steve Huff were recruited on drums and bass respectively, and the group's name was changed to the Beat.

Still, tension between the two principal band members led to Case's departure before the Beat was signed to CBS Records. According to Case, "Some problems went down, and I didn't want to work with Paul anymore. I just wanted to do my own thing. I let him have the Beat, and I went off and put my own band together."

Except it wasn't really that easy. For a year, Case kicked around LA, writing songs, painting houses, working "weird jobs." He even joined 20/20 "for a day." And he ran ads in music papers. "I knew Carla Olson [from the Textones] and Kathy Valentine [ex-Textones, soon-to-be Go-Go]. We were all running ads trying to start bands. We were going through thousands of people, and we'd always compare them."

Geffen Records publicity photo

Although he didn't know him well, Case was also acquainted with drummer Lou Ramirez. "He'd been over to my house a couple of times," recalls Case. "I think I might have met him through a want ad." Ramirez and his bassist friend Dave Pahoa had a regular gig backing a blind guitarist named Doc at a bar in El Monte. One night Ramirez invited Case to join them.

Things went brilliantly for several shows, with Case mixing in some rock 'n' roll and rockabilly with Doc's usual country repertoire, and alternating sets allowed the threesome to work out some originals. Plus, they got free beer.

Legend has it, one night they answered a request for "Polk Salad Annie" and delivered a rave-up version. "Hell-bent, lying on stage!" was how Case once described it. The bar's owner, sober for a change, freaked when he saw the guys going nuts and fired them.

In reality, only Case was fired, but the rest of the story holds true. "We did get way outta hand on 'Polk Salad Annie' quite a few times. We used to do a lot of feedback and noise... smash stuff! The boss came in one day and said, 'Pete's on acid.' He told David, 'We can't have Pete anymore.' David said, 'Well, we quit.'" For the record, Case wasn't on acid — that night.

Publicity photo

Case, Ramirez, and Pahoa stayed together, debuting as the Plimsouls for a performance at the Camarillo State Mental Institution (as openers for the Angry Samoans). Gigs in LA proper soon followed — at Club 88, Madam Wong's, and the Hong Kong Café. 

The group's moniker, a British expression for sneakers, was Case's idea. (He mentions having put together another outfit called the Plimsouls shortly after leaving the Beat, but that long-forgotten lineup never played live.) However, he's somewhat ambivalent about the name these days. "It's lightweight. It doesn't really mean anything, except that we like soul music. That's all it means. We named it that because the other groups were like the Cars — real obvious. And we hated that! So, we called it the Plimsouls. I guess it's a cool name."

Even though he can't remember exactly when it was, Case does know where he met guitarist Eddie Munoz. "It was at a Flamin' Groovies show at the Starwood." (He also recollects that the show was in promotion of the Groovies' Now album, which puts it sometime in 1978.) And according to Case, Munoz was considered a Plimsoul as early on as their first rehearsal. But Munoz, an Austin native who repaired guitars for a living, had to postpone joining the group while he worked as a guitar roadie on the Elvis Costello/Nick Lowe Armed Forces tour. His first appearance with the Plimsouls wouldn't be until they played Gazzarri's a year later.

Meanwhile, the three-piece group (reportedly on a budget of "something like $300") entered the studio to record the "Zero Hour" EP, which was released in 1980 on the very indie Beat label. "The label was this guy Steve Zepeda," says Case, "who lived with his mother in Long Beach. He lived in the garage, y'know."

Beat Records advertisement for the "Zero Hour" EP

Produced by the band's manager, Danny Holloway (introduced to them by Zepeda, his prior production credits included the Heptones' Night Food), the five-song EP featured the effervescent "Great Big World," and a nifty cover of Otis Redding's "I Can't Turn You Loose" as well as the rockin' "Hypnotized" and "How Long Will It Take?" Case wrote the bopping title track while he sat in a car waiting for his girlfriend. "I was trying to catch a train," he says of the song's inspiration. "So, I was mad!"

The EP sold well in Los Angeles, and KROQ's Rodney Bingenheimer played "Zero Hour" repeatedly, turning it into a regional hit. Overnight the Plimsouls became local superstars! "Before the EP we were making $150 a night playing pubs," muses Case. "We would take the bus to Santa Monica, with our amps, to play this pub called the Londoner. Then all of a sudden, we were packing the Starwood!"

And the Plimsouls appealed to all types. As Case told one rock 'zine, "We get everybody at our gigs: punks, skinny-tie college-types, bi's, tri's. You never have to worry about what to wear to a Plimsouls' show..."

Planet advertisement for the "Now" 45

"That was true," he confirms. "There would be punk rock people... I know the Circle Jerks were Plimsouls fans. And I just found out that Brett from Epitaph Records was a Plimsouls fan. All kinds of people were Plimsouls fans. On a lot of different levels, people were into it."

With all the hoopla surrounding the EP, their decision to sign a two-album deal with small-time Planet Records (an Elektra offshoot whose roster included, says Case, "nobody you've ever heard of") was a strange one. Case still can't explain how it came about: "It's a good question, really. I'm not sure, y'know. They just got real interested. They really wanted to sign some new bands. After [the success of] the Knack, they probably wanted a 'new wave' band and thought we fit the bill."

In 1981 Planet released the group's self-titled debut, with Holloway again acting as producer.  The opening R&B infused "Lost Time" featured a horn section arranged by New Orleans great Harold Batiste, while other tracks bounced ("In This Town" and "Hush, Hush"), swaggered with a country tinge ("I Want You Back"), and provided a rush of adrenaline ("Everyday Things"). Combined with the mid-period Beatles feel of "Now," the finely crafted "I Want What You Got," and the note-for-note remake of "Zero Hour," the album showcased their exceptionally wide-ranging skill. Meanwhile, two covers — the Easybeats' "Women" and Wilson Pickett's "Mini-Skirt Minnie" — neatly highlighted the Plimsouls intertwined pop and soul influences.

Planet issued "Zero Hour" as a 45 (b/w a live cover of "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" and a live take of "Hush, Hush"), which did okay in LA, but went nowhere nationally. A follow-up single of "Now" b/w an instrumental version of the old Nerves' tune "When You Find Out" (sounding very surfy) didn't fare much better. But it did garner an appraisal from Trouser Press' celebrity guest reviewer Billy Idol, who grumbled: "I don't really like this kind of American-sounding record... It's very professional — or sounds it." And, possibly due in large part to a lack of promotion by the record company ("There was no promotion, absolutely none," says Case), outside of a few major California cities, the LP didn't sell at all. Through sheer force of will, it climbed to #153 on the Billboard chart.

Nevertheless, a cross-country tour went well. (A live recording of their Cleveland show, dubbed One Night In America, is perhaps a better document of the group during that period than the studio album. "It's a lot more exciting!" asserts Case.) And they got some favorable write-ups in the national rock press.

Live! Beg, Borrow & Steal (Alive Records - 2010)

In his Trouser Press article, Jim Green enthusiastically described the Plimsouls' sound: "Ah yes. The ringing guitars, simple rocking beat — definitely American but with a twist of Limey-philia."

But he also brought up some sore spots. One was the evil Knack and the enormous hype build-up/backlash that was sucking up all other LA pop bands in its wake. "We ain't just another Knack," Case seethed back then. "We're real different — in motivation, content, approach... Sure, you can make superficial comparisons, and people do it before they hear us, see us live."

Sixteen years later, Case recalls a proposed anti-Knack photo shoot: "We were gonna take a picture of the Plimsouls with machine guns and call it Get the Knack!" With a vicious chuckle, he adds, "Would've been good."

Point number two was the slick sound of the LP, which Billy Idol had referred to in his review of the "Now" 45. Green treated the dilemma delicately, saying that the band was "displeased... inasmuch as it was cut in the conventional, fragmented manner of laying down backing tracks and then overdubs, making for less spontaneity than they would prefer." He then immediately stated that "some of the album retains their live R&B grit, and onstage the Plimsouls are hotter than ever."

Today Case can be more candid in his assessment: "It got ruined in the mastering. Planet had really taken the guts out of it. Somebody was afraid of how it sounded, and they ruined it right before it came out. Which was a real great surprise! They said, 'Here's your record.' And I remember me and Eddie were both holding our chests; we were both doubled over in pain. We were having dual anxiety attacks, going, 'Oh my God! They've ruined it.'"

(The Rhino Records CD reissue, Plimsouls... Plus, includes a re-mastered version of the entire first album and features a much superior sound quality. "I was pleasantly surprised when I got the tapes," comments Case. "They redid it, really made it a lot better.")

Photo from Trouser Press - August 1981

Once back from the tour, Case asked Planet to release the group from its deal. Although there was one more album to go on the contract, the record company didn't argue. Planet clearly thought the Plimsouls were a lost cause; for his part, Case didn't trust Planet to handle something new the band was working on called "A Million Miles Away."

The song actually dates from some months earlier. Case and his friend Chris Fradkin had gone to see the Germs (one of Darby Crash's last shows). Afterwards, they stopped off at a bar and Case, still reeling from the death of John Lennon and a recent break-up with his girlfriend, poured out his feelings of loneliness on a napkin:

"Friday night I'd just got back

I had my eyes shut

Was dreaming about the past

I thought about you while the radio played
Should've got moving
For some reason I stayed
I started drifting to a different place

I realized I was falling off the face of the world

And there was nothing left to bring me back..."

Later, the two went to the apartment of another friend, Joey Alkes, where a massive hook of a chorus...

"I'm a million miles away
A million miles away
I'm just a million miles away

And there's nothing left to bring me back today..."

was paired with an exuberant rhythm track and a Ventures-meet-the-Byrds guitar riff to finish a rough mix of the destined-to-be classic tune.

The prolific threesome (who had previously collaborated on "Now" and "Hush, Hush") wrote several other songs that evening — and then forgot about the tape "for quite a while." Finally, Munoz got a hold of the tape, and chose "A Million Miles Away" as the one they had to learn.

Planet Records publicity picture

Released in April 1982 as a 12" single (backed with the equally wonderful "I'll Get Lucky") on the group's own Shaky City label (with distribution through Bomp Records), "A Million Miles Away" blasted forth from radios across the country. "It was a huge radio hit!" exclaims Case. "It was a hit in San Francisco, San Diego, Atlanta, Boston, New York, Texas..."

And in Los Angeles, the Plimsouls pretty much ruled the airwaves. "I remember driving to a gig in LA," says Case, "and I turned on the radio — it was playing on all four of the stations I turned to!"

The band was selling out the Roxy night after night, and it quickly became apparent that they needed help handling the monster they'd created. "We felt like we just couldn't meet the demand that was going on with the record," explains Case, adding that releasing an LP on Shaky City was, at most, a brief consideration. "I didn't wanna be in the record business," he states.

On the strength of "A Million Miles Away," the Plimsouls were picked up by Geffen Records, then seen as a small label. "They only had a few acts, like John Hiatt, who was a friend of ours. And we thought that it might make sense to be with John. Of course, it didn't. But that's what we thought."

Case terms the months preceding their Geffen signing as "the winter of our discontent," but maintains that it was "actually a really good period for the Plimsouls. We were just hanging out, writing, playing music all the time, rehearsing five or six days a week." During this interval, Case wrote most of what would become the Everywhere At Once LP, and "half or more" of the songs were recorded through Shaky City.

Photo used for Beach Town Confidential 

(Live at the Golden Bear) - Alive Records 1983

So, with the inclusion of one track lifted from the "Zero Hour" EP (a re-recorded version of "How Long Will it Take?"), "A Million Miles Away" and its B-side, plus two well-chosen covers (the Equals' "My Life Ain't Easy" and Mouse and the Traps' "Lie, Beg, Borrow, and Steal"), it should have been straightforward for Geffen to rush-release the Plimsouls' second album. 

Instead (or as Case quips, "what sank the ship"), Everywhere At Once wasn't issued until July of '83. And by then, "A Million Miles Away" had finished its run. Geffen then reissued the exact same recording (supposedly the EQ of the mastering was slightly different) of "A Million Miles Away" as the album's first single. Were they hoping lightning would strike twice? It didn't. In fact, the reissue only reached #82 on the Billboard Hot 100. "They underestimated what we'd done on our own label," states Case. "They had no respect for underground stuff at that point."

The record was accorded a modicum of publicity, and it received some good reviews. One noted that the tunes all "bubbled with undiminished fire and melody, while the lyrics showed signs of frustration." But Case claims the reviewer was reading too much into it: "My frustrations were huge, but the Plimsouls were probably the least frustrating thing in my life at that point. Those songs were mostly about relationships, just being alive."

However, it was too little too late, and Everywhere At Once stiffed.

A video of "A Million Miles Away" (using "fake actors, fake scenes, and fake singing") was made for MTV, but it was rarely shown. "The big thing was Flock of Seagulls, all that New Romantic stuff," observes Case. "That's what we were up against on MTV."

A second 45, the rhythm-driven "Magic Touch," with its echoes of "I Fought the Law" and "Pipeline" guitar riffs, never made it onto the radio. It was "too primitive," says Case, quoting KROQ. "I thought it was a hit single," he remarks, "but they didn't."

Publicity photo by Craig Dietz

A minor role as a bar band in the teen-fad flick Valley Girl (they got the job through fan Nicholas Cage) has proved to be unforgettable (if hard to live down), but it didn't boost album sales. "They didn't tell me it would be called Valley Girl," sighs Case. "They said it was like Romeo And Juliet set in modern LA."

One day David Geffen asked Case, "What happened?"

"I said, 'You're David Geffen. You tell me what happened.' That was the last conversation we ever had about the Plimsouls."

Officially, the Plimsouls broke up at the tail end of '83. Ramirez had already wandered off, and Case announced that he was going solo. "I told 'em I was gonna go back to my folk roots, or what have you." However, he was coaxed into staying for one more cross-country tour to pay off the band's tax bill. "Of course, nobody used the money to pay off their tax debt," Case laughs. "They just accrued more tax debt!"

The Plimsouls with Clem Burke circa 1997
               Photo: Greg Allen

With a lineup that included a third guitarist and Charlie Quintana (ex-Plugz) on drums, the Plimsouls raged through some of their most legendary concerts. "It was a great tour!" enthuses Case. "I remember playing Liberty Lunch in Austin. We set the attendance record; there were thousands of people there. And the band just rocked out! We were just blazing as we went through Texas that summer."

Following the split, Case didn't see much of Pahoa. "I think he fronted a band called Psycho Witch," he says. But Case and Munoz (who emerged with the Walking Wounded) remained friends. "Me and Eddie were always the closest," he reflects. For the next decade, Case concentrated on his solo career, releasing five primarily folk albums. There were no plans to reunite the Plimsouls. Until...

An offer to re-record "A Million Miles Away" for the Speed soundtrack brought Case, Munoz, and Pahoa together again for a series of live shows. Case is vague about Ramirez, saying only that he spoke to the drummer when the group first got back together, but that his rejoining the band "is just not gonna happen." The lineup now includes ex-Blondie/ Dramarama drummer Clem Burke.

And while Case intends to carry on performing as a solo artist, a new Plimsouls' album has just been released (currently only available as an import through France's Musa label and Big Star in the UK). Titled Kool Trash, the ten songs (including "Playing with Jack," "Falling Awake," and "Dangerous Book") are as strong and catchy as ever. More US live shows also look certain.

★ ★ ★

Some intriguing trivia: When Case had some momentary doubts about being a full-time frontman, power pop icon Phil Seymour was offered the post. "I was trying not to be the singer," says Case, "because it seemed cooler to just be the guitar player — like Pete Townshend. We asked Phil to join, but he wanted to call it Phil Seymour and the Plimsouls. We said, 'No!' So, he wouldn't join." The group recorded a version of "Now" at Shelter Studios with Seymour on vocals, which has yet to surface.

* You can read part 1 of my interview with Peter Case about the history of the Nerves here: devorahostrov.blogspot.com/2017/01/peter-case-part-1-nerves.html

The History Of Peter Case Part 1: The Nerves

Originally published in Teenage Kicks #1 (Summer 1997)
By Devorah Ostrov

The "hopelessly rare" 4-song Nerves' EP (self-released, 1976)

It was the dead of night, in the middle of winter, and a raging blizzard was dumping several inches of snow on upstate New York. Meanwhile, a teenager from the suburbs of Buffalo named Peter Case was on a bus to Chicago, guitar in hand, living out his personal version of On The Road.

"I would hitchhike all over the East Coast, play folk clubs, see how far I could get on $10," Case recently reminisced about the inconspicuous launch of his musical career in the late '60s. He would go on to become one-third of power pop trailblazers the Nerves and leader of the Plimsouls, for which he wrote the hit "A Million Miles Away," before revisiting his roots as a solo artist.

Much like the heroes of On The Road, Case's Midwest chapter was only a stopover on an ultimate journey to the West Coast — albeit lacking in Kerouac's romanticism. "I got drunk in a bar," he laughs, "and bought a train ticket to San Francisco!"

Why San Francisco? The reason, says Case, was simple: "I wanted to get as far away from Buffalo as I could, and I didn't want to go to Los Angeles." And it didn't hurt that Case's sister, ten years his senior and a key influence on his musical upbringing (it was her record collection which instilled Case with a passion for '50s rock 'n' roll as well as '60s folk, to which he added his own leanings towards country-blues and American garage-punk), had lived in the City during the glory days of the 1960s, returning home to fuel her little brother's imagination with "amazing stories."

Case arrived in San Francisco during the strange post-hippie/pre-punk year of 1973. He took to playing guitar and singing on the street for spare change. "I didn't even have an apartment," he emphasizes. "I just lived on the street and wandered around."

L-R: Paul Collins, Peter Case & Jack Lee

Jack Lee, a fellow itinerant musician, caught one of Case's street corner performances and inquired, "How much you makin' out here?"

"Fifty dollars a night," Case exaggerated.

"I'll double that if you join my band," boasted Lee.

It didn't take Case long to surmise that Lee had perhaps misrepresented the situation. "Jack lied about everything," chuckles Case. "He didn't have a drummer. He didn't have any gigs."

Still, Case decided to stick it out with Lee and the two soon roped in Paul Collins, another ex-New Yorker, to fill out the trio. "Paul didn't know what he wanted to do really," muses Case. "He joined the group... but he didn't know what he was getting into."

In 1975 with Case on bass, Lee on guitar, and Collins on drums, the newly christened Nerves began playing Friday and Saturday nights at a seedy bar in the then no-man's-land South of Market Street. "I remember one time the owner gave us free drink tickets to get people to come in," says Case. "We couldn't even get winos to come in off the street. That's how bad it was!"

The group's earliest sets consisted of mostly covers. As Case recollects: "We used to do 'Howlin' for My Baby' and 'Hitch Hike,' weird blues and Motown, a lot of soul, country, rock 'n' roll..." But by the summer of '76, they'd worked up enough strong originals to think about putting out some vinyl.

At the time, the major labels were too busy with chart-toppers like Wings and Elvin Bishop to care about the stirrings of the Bay Area underground. Signing locally with Berserkley Records, which was having some success with Jonathan Richman, the Rubinoos, and Greg Kihn seemed like a good idea — until Lee and Collins got into a shouting match with label president Matthew King Kaufman.

In the end, they agreed a DIY EP was the way to go, becoming the first of the soon-to-be Mabuhay scenesters to issue product. (Crime's debut single, considered to be the first true SF punk release, followed by a matter of weeks.) 

L-R: Paul Collins, Jack Lee, Peter Case
(photo for the 2008 One Way Ticket retrospective)

The EP's unpretentious black and white cover photo showed three clean-cut young men. And judging by the just visible wide lapels, they had already taken to wearing the snazzy three-piece suits for which they'd always be remembered, fondly or otherwise. Case stresses that the suits were "just a gimmick when we thought we needed a gimmick," and further insists that they weren't powder-blue and doesn't know why everyone thinks they were.

Meanwhile, the four songs within showcased each member's uncanny ability to write and sing short, fast, catchy tunes. There was the British Invasion feel of Case's "When You Find Out," and the classic pop of Collins' "Working Too Hard." And there were two tracks written by Lee: "Give Me Some Time" and "Hanging on the Telephone" — the latter a wallop of a two-minute ditty concerning a frazzled would-be lover, the girl of his dreams and Pac Bell, which had been part of his repertoire for awhile. (Case mentions an earlier recording of the song featuring Lee backed by some hired hands, possibly musicians from the Condor Club!)

Three thousand copies of the EP were pressed, and although it's now listed in record collector guides as being "hopelessly rare," at the time, it was a seemingly enormous amount. "I remember when the truck pulled up," says Case, "and we unloaded them into our basement on Folsom Street. We were like, 'What the hell are we gonna do with all these?' It was really hard to get rid of them."

The final Nerves' show - a Bomp! night at

the Whisky with the Fast, the Zippers, and the Zeros

In fact, SF's Aquarius Records and Berkeley's Rather Ripped — the two hip Bay Area record stores — only stocked "like five" copies each. An ad in the back of Rolling Stone helped sell "a bunch," and Greg Shaw bought the remaining discs to distribute through Bomp. Ironically, Case didn't keep one for himself.

By late 1976 things were beginning to happen. Local radio station KSAN picked up on the EP and began playing "Hanging on the Telephone." That Christmas, Case heard himself on the radio for the first time. "KSAN played us in a set with the Flamin' Groovies and the Hoo Doo Rhythm Devils," he reflects.

Simultaneously, the SF punk scene was gelling around the Mabuhay Gardens, with the Nerves appearing on some of the first bills. "There were a few bands before us," states Case, "but we were there early on."

But that wasn't enough to keep the guys in San Francisco. On January 1, 1977, the Nerves packed up and relocated to Los Angeles. "There really wasn't much going on in San Francisco at that point," explains Case. "We didn't really know the people that were about to start the whole scene. We were like, 'Where is everybody? Where is our generation? It's gotta be happening in LA!' We bought some LA papers and saw that there were a few bands playing around."

Not surprisingly, the LA music scene circa early '77 also left a lot to be desired. "I remember we went to the Whisky," says Case, "and Van Halen was playing. I couldn't believe that they were still listening to music that was so prehistoric. Then a week later, I saw Tom Petty play to 50 people." And LA didn't trip over itself to welcome these newcomers who, as one 'zine observed, played "crisp songs with strong melodies" but "looked more like Hoover salesmen than rock and roll stars."

"We couldn't get a show at the Whisky," Case recalls. "We couldn't get a show at the Starwood. Nobody would book us." However, as they'd proved with their EP, the Nerves were nothing if not self-reliant.

"Ramones meet Merseybeat"

 The Nerves in Trouser Press - September 1977

On the corner of Sunset and Gower sat the tiny Orpheum Theatre (described by one patron as "tacky"). With their last $700 Case, Lee and Collins rented the basement (described by another patron as "dilapidated"). 

They dubbed it the Hollywood Punk Palace and booked a series of shows that in hindsight are referred to as "essential." In the March '78 issue of Bomp! magazine, writer Kenneth Funsten goes so far as to say that from the Punk Palace, "L.A. new-wave was born." Perhaps more accurately, these shows, along with Rodney Bingenheimer's KROQ nights, the Masque rehearsal rooms, and several other forces helped to push along an already burgeoning punk scene.

Some of the groups given exposure at those Punk Palace gigs were the Germs, the Weirdos, the Dils, the Zeros, and Screamers — with the Nerves being featured on every bill, although they weren't necessarily the standout attraction.

Recounting one Punk Palace show, the book Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New Wave notes: "The band of the hour was a bizarre group dressed in clothes that looked like a hellish collision between Robert Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock. Taking the intense, bombastic stage style of Captain Beefheart and welding it to a frenzied wall of Ramones power chords, this band was called the Weirdos, and their shock rock tactics demanded you 'Do the dance, do the dance, do the dance!'"

In May, the Nerves were on the move again, booking their own cross-country tour as well as supporting their idols, the Ramones, on a number of dates. "It was like going on tour with the Beatles for us," enthuses Case.

L-R: Jack Lee, Paul Collins, Peter Case

The initial leg of the tour began with a three-night stand at the Starwood and took in San Francisco, Denver, Washington DC, and Boston (with DMZ); while the Ramones' shows took them through the Midwest and into Texas (where they played Randy's Rodeo well before the Sex Pistols). 

When the tour ended some three months later in Chicago with Mink DeVille, they'd logged over 100 shows and put 28,000 miles on a '69 Ford LTD station wagon — "The highest-paid member of the touring organization," they once quipped. "I was the driver and the bass player," remarks Case.

Their LA homecoming was celebrated with two bill-topping nights at the Masque (support bands were the Avengers, the Zeros, and Shock). Then they disappeared. 

When a 'zine writer eventually tracked them down, Case told him: "We've just been getting oriented to what our next move is going to be. I mean, say you're a new group, you've released your own record, you've run your own club, and then you went out and did your own national tour, now what do you do after that?"

There was some talk of recording an album on Bomp Records, and a new 45 ("One Way Ticket" was even listed in the Bomp catalog as "forthcoming"). But the truth was, the tour had taken its toll. "We were just wasted," sighs Case. 

The Nerves made their final appearance during a Bomp! weekend at the Whisky with the Fast, the Zeros, and the Zippers sharing the bill. After the show, they "discussed" the direction of the band.

L-R: Jack Lee, Paul Collins, Peter Case

"Jack felt that we'd been upstaged by the Fast," states Case. "I dunno why. Their songs weren't that great, but they threw stuff into the audience at the end of the set, and Jack felt like they'd upstaged us. Jack was always paranoid about being upstaged, and he was afraid of being upstaged by punk rock. He wrote this song called 'Sex,' which was basically that word repeated over and over. He thought that would be controversial. Then he wanted to chainsaw all the equipment in the middle of the set. He wanted to have fake amps and chainsaw them! I said, 'I don't really wanna do that. It's against everything we stand for. I think we should just write really great songs and be a rock 'n' roll band.' So, we had a big disagreement, and the band broke up."

Today the Nerves are hailed as one of the pioneering originators of power pop, but for much of their short-lived career, it was an uphill battle. Case quickly (and rightly!) points out that "we had a lot of fans; there were a lot of people into the Nerves."

Yet he also admits that the group "never really fit in, except that we played really fast and hard. The power pop thing is a lot bigger now than it was back then. A lot more people are aware of it as a style. Back then, people just didn't understand."

As for the "power pop" tag, he adds, "I never really saw the Nerves as power pop. We just considered ourselves to be a rock 'n' roll band. We thought we were like the Beatles or the Stones. Power pop just sounded like a fake term to us. Punk was kinda a cool name, but power pop never sounded that good to us."

The Nerves retrospective LP (Offence, 1986)

After the split, Case and Collins continued to work together as the Breakaways, but internal conflicts led to a quick dissolution.

According to Case, the Breakaways did record a handful of songs (including a version of the Collins/Case tune "USA") but only two, "Walking Out on Love" and "One Way Ticket," made it to vinyl (both were featured on the 1996 Bomp Records compilation The Roots of Powerpop!).

At Case's urging, Collins switched from drums to guitar and formed the Beat. He reprised "Working Too Hard," "Walking Out on Love" and "U.S.A." on the Beat's debut LP. Lee sold "Hanging on the Telephone" to Blondie (supposedly Debbie Harry heard the song on a mixtape made for her by Blondie fan club president Jeffrey Lee Pierce). It was included on 1978's Parallel Lines (along with a second song written by Lee) and became a hit in Britain. Lee went on to collaborate with the Rubber City Rebels, who recorded a cover of his "Paper Dolls." He's also behind the 1986 Nerves' retrospective on the Offence label.

Case, of course, formed the fabulous Plimsouls!

* You can read part 2 of my interview with Peter Case about the history of the Plimsouls here: devorahostrov.blogspot.com/2017/01peter-case-part-2.html

The Babysitters: A Really Rough Guide To London

Originally published in Rave-Up #10 (1985)

By Devorah Ostrov

The British Tourist Authority should hire these guys! The Babysitters represent the trashy side of mid-'80s English glam. But when they aren't busy ripping off Bo Diddley via the New York Dolls with tunes like "Rock 'n' Roll Chicken," they do a fine job as London tour guides. I took photos of them posing with bobbies, splashing amongst the lions in Trafalgar Square, and with the neon lights of Piccadilly Circus shining in the background. My friend Sara Brinker and I met up with the Babysitters during a visit to England in 1984 and became huge fans! 

Seeing the sights with the Babysitters

Photo: Devorah Ostrov

Quite likely the trashiest and most fun band in London, the Babysitters are:

Buttz Baby - Lead Vocals
Jimbo Kaksov - Guitar and Backing Vocals
Boo Badu - Bass and Backing Vocals
Stik Wunupim - Drums

Rave-Up: So, is this just 1974 revisited? Or is it something completely different?

Stik: Well, we weren't about in 1974.

Meeting English bobbies

Photo: Devorah Ostrov

Rave-Up: So, it's not just nostalgia?

Jimbo: No, it's nothing like that.

Buttz: Most of the people that come to see us are like 14 or 15 anyway, and they shouldn't be allowed in the club in the first place. So, they don't remember anything like that, I shouldn't think. I certainly don't!

Stik: But the first record I ever bought was Gary Glitter!

Rave-Up: That's commendable.

Buttz shows us the Trafalgar Square fountain
Photo: Devorah Ostrov

Jimbo: Commendable, that's not a bad word.

Buttz: What does it mean?

After explaining the meaning of commendable...

Rave-Up: Dave, from your agency, says you've only played about 11 shows so far.

Buttz: Yeah, a few more than that. It's about 15 now.

Rave-Up: How long of a period does that cover?

Buttz: A year.

Jimbo: In fact, our anniversary's coming up pretty soon.

Rave-Up: Are you doing anything special?

Jimbo: We'll probably split up.

Rave-Up: Is it just as hard for a band to make it in London as anywhere else in the world? We have the notion in America that it's really easy to become famous in London.

All of them: That's crap!

Stik: Every band in America wants to come over here and make it in England, and every band in England wants to go to America and make it over there. It's completely fucked up.

Rave-Up: It does seem as if the rock scene is bigger in America.

Hanging around Piccadilly Circus
Photo: Devorah Ostrov

Buttz: Well, that's it, isn't it? Take for example... uhmm... someone who was... uh... very good at...

Jimbo: A prime example, that!

Buttz: Yeah, it is a classic example. No, the bands are big over there. ZZ Top and Def Leppard are pretty huge. You know, all the heavy bands.

Stik: So, how would we go down in America?

Rave-Up: Really well, I think!

Buttz: So, perhaps the Americans aren't as stupid as I thought. Oops!

Rave-Up: You do seem to have a good local following. At the show the other night, there were a lot of kids who knew the songs and had obviously seen you before.

Buttz: Yeah, our tape is fairly widespread.

Stik: And we write basically catchy songs. So, I mean, who can blame them?

Rave-Up: Has there been record company interest? Has anyone come down to see you?

Buttz: Yeah, they've all come round!

Jimbo splashing about in the Trafalgar Square fountain

Photo: Devorah Ostrov

Jimbo: We told 'em all to piss off! I think that was the trouble.

Buttz: They're all useless. One company said we'd be good if we had a synthesizer.

Jimbo: So, we've got one now.

Rave-Up: And you're still not signed?

Jimbo: We couldn't figure out how to use it.

Buttz: There's no batteries.

Annoying the Buckingham Palace Guards

Photo: Devorah Ostrov

Rave-Up: Is the tape the only thing you have out with your songs on it?

Jimbo: We've got a remixed version of the same songs.

Rave-Up: Is this tape the whole repertoire, or are there more songs?

Buttz: No, there's lots more than that. That's well old, that tape. A lot of things have happened since then. Like the geezer who paid for it... He wants his tape deck back.

Rave-Up: So, how are tape sales going?

Jimbo: We've sold thousands!

Posing with Nelson's column
Photo: Devorah Ostrov

Buttz: We have. We've sold a hell of a lot. I wonder what it would be like with a single, though?

Jimbo: Everybody's got it on the tape, haven't they?

Rave-Up: How did you guys decide on the cover songs you do? There's the New York Dolls and Motorhead...

Buttz: We don't do any New York Dolls! That's "Rock 'n' Roll Chicken." They stole that off us and called it "Pills," about a nurse. But the original that we wrote in 1968 was about this chicken who dresses up in a drape and creepers.

Boo: Does it sound like a cover?

Rave-Up: Well... yeah.

Boo: Strange that.

Buttz: They did it well, you know.

Boo: It's funny, people say that "Overkill" sounds like Motorhead.

Rave-Up: It does kind of.

Buttz: And then Chuck Berry came up to us and said he liked our new number.

Rave-Up: So, are you guys gonna be the biggest thing to happen to the English music scene in years?

Buttz: We've done it! It's just that a lot of people missed it. I mean, it's pretty obvious, isn't it? We're the only band you can go see and have a laugh for £1.50!

Taking time out for a rest

Photo: Devorah Ostrov