21st Birthday

On my 21st birthday we opened for Cream. I had spent the day transporting a two-hundred-gallon oil drum from Ann Arbor to Detroit so that we could put a contact mike on it and Jimmy Silver would hit it on the one beat of our best song. I got it up three flights of stairs into the Grande Ballroom, by myself, and then we discovered that our amps didn't work. And when we went out onstage everybody yelled, "We want Cream! We want Cream! Get off, we want Cream!"

I'm standing there, having taken two hits of orange acid, going, "Fuck you!" It was one of our worst gigs ever.

I went back to Dave's Alexander's house with him. I was heartbroken. I thought, My god, this is 21. This is it. things are not going well.

Dave's mom served me a cheeseburger with a candle in the middle of it. The idea was to keep going and things would get better. Don't give up.

11:34 AM - 15 Comments - 92 Kudos - Add Comment

Heart full of napalm

I used to walk around London, through the park and stuff, with this leopard jacket I had, a cheetah-skin jacket actually - it had a big cheetah on the back - and all the old men in London would drive by in their cars and they'd stop and try to cruise me.

All I liked to do was walk around the streets with a heart full of napalm. I always thought "Heart Full of Soul" was a good song so I thought, what's my heart full of?

I decided it was basically full of napalm.

8:12 AM - 5 Comments - 21 Kudos - Add Comment

Ig and Sum 41

Alright. I get shit for this all the time. But you can thank my A&R guy for setting up the meeting with Sum 41.

But I gotta kick out of frontman Deryck Whibley's youthful zeal. He's a damn nice guy, but he's very "girls, vodka, girls, guitars, girls, vodka, " We've performed together a few times, and they'll always say, "Are you going to the after-show party, man?" And I say, "Well, no. I got a great girlfriend. It's getting late. I'm 56, guys. I gotta get up in the morning."

They're a real smooth machine and I got excited by what they did, and my vocal went well. And Deryck sang beautifully on it. He sounded like a beat-up choirboy.

I was impressed with how tight and efficient the band was in a recording environment and so, the door is open to future collaborations.

So, PISS OFF!

5:59 PM - 12 Comments - 23 Kudos - Add Comment

Nico

I was making love to Nico a lot. All day pretty much. Nico was really something special. I really dug her a lot. I couldn't fall in love with anybody, but I was really thrilled and excited to be around her. She was older and she was from somewhere else. I really liked that - her accent was from somewhere else, everything about her was from somewhere else.

Nico used to say to me, "Zhimmy, oh Zhimmy, you must be totally poisoned to do what you do. You are only mostly poisoned, you must be totally poisoned." She meant I had too much humanity. Then she'd feed me red wines with French names I never heard of. That's how I learned all that bullshit; that's how I learned to modulate my voice...wear light blue suits and speak to record company execs.

Also, she was extremely strong. I was like hanging out with a guy except she had girl's parts; that was the only difference, otherwise it was like hanging out with a tough-minded, egotistical, artiste kinda guy.

She'd be very opinionated about my work, and this, that, and the other thing - then all of a sudden that veneer would fall off and she would show tremendous vulnerability. And I would see her: Here's someone over 30, not a model anymore, not a commercial entity of any kind in the big business called America, and what the fuck was she gonna do?

Nico had a great sadness about her. You know, she had all the accoutrements of a really groovy international gal - the right boots, the right sheepskin coat, the right hair, and she knew people on the right level, and yet she was fucked up. She had a twist to her. She was a great, great artist. It was just a real kick to be around her.

7:51 PM - 15 Comments - 39 Kudos - Add Comment

The Doors

I was not yet a firm fan of the Doors before the gig at the Yost Field House, because their musical approach was so different from the Detroit rock approach. But I went to see them at this gymnasium.

The band got out onstage first, without Morrison, and they just sounded like pure shit. It sounded awful, worse than pussy - it was old pussy, ha ha ha! It sounded decrepit and disgusting and unbalanced - they were playing the riff to "Soul Kitchen" over and over, until the singer was gonna make his entrance.

Finally, Morrison lurched on the stage, but very sensuously. He looked incredible. I remember thinking, Hedy Lamarr in Samson and Delilah, because his hair was Hollywood-coiffed ringlets, and it was blue-black, greased and shiny. It was some good hair, I'll tellyou.

Morrison dressed really well in the black leather jacket, black leather pants, felt boots, and ruffled shirt, and he just sorta lurched forward like, "I'm gonna sing, but not yet..."

And the regular American guys were thinking, "Who is this pussy?" When Morrison opened his mouth to sing, he sang in a pussy voice - a falsetto. He sang like Betty Boop and refused to sing in a normal voice. I think they got near the end of the song and then just stopped. Morrison looked around, went over to the guitar player, and said, "Hey my man, play that one..."

I think it might've been "Love Me Two Times", and it was happening. Until he started singing int he Betty Boop voice again. Basically the concert proceeded like that. I loved the antagonism; I loved that he was pissing them off. They were all frat people, football killers, the future leaders of America - the people who today are the rock stars of America - and not only was Morrison pissing them off, but h was mesmerizing them at the same time. I was humping this little girl that I brought with me, thinking, this is great!

The gig lasted only 15 or 20 minutes because they had to pull Morrison offstage and get him out of there fast, because the people we gonna attack him. It made a big impression on me.

That's when I thought, Look how awful they are, and they've got the number-one single in the country! If this guy can do it, I can do it. And I gotta do it now and I can't wait any longer.

7:05 PM - 4 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

Boston

Soon after the Stooges began playing music, we became this real buzzsaw rocking outfit. We had Scotty Asheton on drums, Dave Alexander on bass, Ron Asheton on guitar, and I was just the lead singer this time. We were doing this nihilistic music. Audiences could not get far enough away from us, no matter what kind of gig it was, unless the place was too packed for them to move. We were used to silence, especially in Detroit. We silenced whole rooms. I was still kind of a hick - I had never seen the sea - and I got a phone call. It was one of the first gigs we'd ever received out of the immediate Midwest, outside of Chicago and the Detroit area. It was in Boston at the Boston Tea Party - an 1800s type of low ceiling, concrete-like bunker, like a mission for bums, near Fenway park.

We were really proud and exicted to be going all the way to Boston. We'd done our first album so we had a 4-song set together. That's how many songs we knew to go on stage with. It was "1969", "Dogfood", "No Fun" and "I Wanna Be Your Dog". We were all dressed spiffy - in clean t-shirts and spiffy trousers.

We were second billing to Ten Years After. They played what passed for blues; you know, all the college kids thought so. Man, that's how stupid they were. So they had this very rapt audience - sort of chi-chi-chiffon and guitar worship with heavy overtones of derivative music worship. Yes, it's real blues alright, plus a little virtuoso work.

So we get up to the dressing room, right. And here's these guys dripping with their silver bracelets and their perfectly razor-cutted shag hair and silks and satins and this and that. They were all pushing us around, all the people that worked for them, and here were these 4 little Stooges sitting there with our guitars and hating their guts. There was nobody to help us. We were just looking around . I thought, this is too much. I hadn't seen the audience, but I already felt alienated surrounded by all these sexist blues worshippers from the universities. You know what I mean? These were the cognoscenti. They didn't listen to rock.

Anyway, so the audience is sitting cross-legged - assuming the "college" position - right on this huge bare floor - one person in the whole place stnaidng up - ready to hear the concert right? - ready for class to begin. We weren't exactly the right band to have with that going on. So we come out and start playing. I start playing "1969" I think and I'm really getting into it and the guys are playing great. It sounds really good and there was this hush in the audience. It was strange to see that many people quiet. Usually you at least hear somebody ordering a drink.

I just started the second tune, and beginning with the second tune I began flinging myself at them! Uh, flinging myself on the floor, drawing blood, cutting myself, taunting, but never direct - taunting and mimicking them, walking amongst. Finally, after the 3rd song (the club was filled to capacity - 3,000 souls), there was an outburst of applause from about 12 people - still dead silence from the rest. And so I started talking directly to them, staring them in the face, you figure out what it means. I guess it was just a refusal to be ignored, just absolute refusal on my part. And if I wasn't going to get a positive reaction I was damned well going to get one that wouldn't let them sleep at night.

7:04 PM - 3 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

The Stooges, Dave and Scott

So I'll tell you the story of my first band. Let's see, I'll start with Dave, Dave Alexander. He ended up playing bass guitar. He was a friend down the block, a friend of Scott Asheton's, our drummer. David was kinda pink, because he had a really bad complexion. He used a whole lot of Clearasil because it ws advertised on Dick Clark for zits. I should mention that Dave's dead now.

Anyway, he had this orange hair, real long hair, and he used to carry a knife in his pocket. He was about 5' 7" and he would wear these stretch Levi's. They were always, well, he didn't have much of an ass, Dave, and they were always - they would cling real tight, but they were too big around the waist, the elasticity was lost on him - and they would always be coming down over the hips, you know, which did look funny sometimes because they really came down, plus his pockets were loaded and all of these things pulling - combs and knives, bottles of gin or whatever he was drinking, and wallets and things. They were what you call in Michigan high water. And then he'd wear Beatles boots because he and Ron Asheton (our guitarist) had skipped school at one time and gone to England, gone to Liverpool to be near the Beatles for an entire semester when they were in high school.

These guys are a couple years younger than I am. Dave was from this little hamlet of about 150 people - it was called Whitmore Lake, Michigan, and it used to produce these really degenerate kids. By the time he was 12 he was on glue and Romilar and, I don't know, Seconals too, I think - god knows what he was on. He was always on something bad, and had to be at all times. He always liked to live at home. He was spoiled rotten, like filthy rotten spoiled to the core, right? If he had to work more than 10 minutes he would whine. But he wanted to be in the band, and he had a car and money, which was a big attraction. He could get an amplifier and buy a bass, so he was in.

Dave used to do some funny things. i remember once, he saw Jimmy Hendrix set his guitar on fire in some movie. So Dave decided one night at the Silver Bell Hideout in Birmingham, Michigan, he was going to set his bass on fire. He'd seen it done, and it didn't hurt the finish, right. As it happened, that night I let him borrow a shirt, one of my favorite shirts. So he's wearing my shirt up there playing n stage, and we're singing a couple of songs and Dave ceremoniously lays out his bass - ha,ha, ha - he's going to set it on fire. So he lays it down on stage doing some appropriate gesture, and he pours some lighter fluid on it. But when he lit it, it went up like a torch. It went up about 3 feet and he looked at it in utter - I'll never forget it - he looked at it in utter shock and horror: "Oh what'll I do now?". So he decided - to maintain the stagemanship of his ply - he would put it out with his body. He just fell on it and put the fire out with his chest.....with MY shirt! He wasn't badly hurt, you know. There's this big fucking ring on MY shirt! He wasn't really burned, but it didn't look too good. So he didn't get that right. He missed. But I guess it was the thought that counted.

I'll never forget Dave. One time, before our first-ever Stooges concert, he said that he was on acid and wanted to paint my ancient Hawaiian guitar (which was central to our sound then) in a day-glo floral design. So I said, yeah, go ahead and paint... day-glo butterflies on it, you know. But he painted over the pickups, so my guitar was broken the day before the gig. As it turned out,t he course of history was changed because I had to play standing up, instead of sit-down Hawaiian, and my pants fell down slowly during my debut. Everybody thought it was part of my act, which included an aluminum Afro wig and whiteface and a maternity smock that I was sporting with my golf shoes. So that was Dave. He started out with us doing little odd musical jobs like pushing the heads off amplifiers and throwing things. He had a special talent for that, you know. So that was Dave.

Scott Asheton - he was the juvenile delinquent. He was this Elvis Presley looking character; a really quite handsome young lad, you know, somewhere between Elvis and Fabian, real tough dude, real badass, good fighter and shit like that. He used to always wear his sleeves rolled up. He also had the stretch Levis and pointed boots, and he had a big Elvis hairdo which he called his pomp or my do. He was a pretty interesting kid. He dropped out of school. His dad died, his and Ron's - they were brothers - so they didn't have much discipline at home. He used to hang out on the street near where I worked in this record store at the time I was drumming with the band. He started laughing out at our Prime Movers rehearsals. He'd hang out on the stairs with a couple of his buddies. He was like a hick kid. So he used to hang around and he asked me if I'd teach him to play drums. I liked him. He was a pretty neat guy, you know. So I said, "Year, I'll teach you how to play." And I started teaching him some things, and he sat down at my drum set one night and started drumming. Through Scott I met the rest of them: Dave and Ron. They all used to hang outin front of the drug store, Marshall's drug store, where later I used to go to get my fix. I used to say I was a diabetic. You know how those small town drug stores are.

8:44 PM - 6 Comments - 16 Kudos - Add Comment

Queering Out

When I was first supposed to go up for the draft, it was the biggest quarterly callup, and hopefully would be the last . It was late 1966. They needed 650,000 guys to sign the dotted line within 3 months; each was to serve for 2 years.

I didn't want to go up for several reasons. One, I couldn't stand the idea of being a pawn of the sick society of America, dominated by men. Two, there was my musical career - the odds are so great anyway that you can't have an interruption. Anyway, no way Jose was I going to sleep in a bunkhouse with a bunch of crewcut machos: I hate guys - at least ones who call themselves guys - they are full of shit.

So I was still in the Prime Movers band at this time. They were older guys, a blues band. I was waiting, smelling out the right move: waiting for the Stooges to appear. So what did I do? My strategy to get out was this. First, I said to my mom, "Mom, you know I've really been looking like a ragamuffin." So she bought me the kind of clothes that a mother buys, right? A pair of nice gray slacks that fit really absurdly, you know, and a funny crew neck, mauve sweater-ish sort of polo shirt. I had my hair cut very short. i looked great as a mamma's boy, my disguise was impeccable.

My idea was to queer out. So I went down to the station, down to Fort Wayne with my peer group. We all went down on a special bus line. We all did a mental test, and then we took physicals, starting at station one. Station one is where you take off your clothes down to your skivies, and then you're supposed to get in line for the next bullshit test. So, in my part of the room, I stripped off and didn't have any underwear, just bare naked - pretty clever plan, eh? I just whacked it a little bit and walked out with just the most enormous hard-on (11" x 1 3/4" at approximately a 94 degree angle), straight toward my place in line. I'd not gone four steps when a shout rang out: "Halt!" a sergeant approached. "Where's your UNDERWEAR?!!!"

So I got noticed right away. "Help me out man," I said. So they sent me to a rest station to collect myself. I then hyperventilated and ran down the hall, stopping just before I saw a medic - so I was really shaking - and he said, "what's wrong?" and I said, "I'm gay, man, I'm scared to be here with my clothes off around other men." So I went to the shrink, and he asked me questions like, "Wht does gay mean? What's a queen?" things like that. By this time I was really into it. He took me downstairs to the captain. I was almost in tears, I was so wrapped up in my role - lots of convulsions and tears. I started disgusting him and undermining his professional attitude, and he asked me to leave.

It only took me an hour and a half to evade the draft: all in a good day's work.

12:48 PM - 4 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

First fuck

We would always have girls over and shit - for me, I didn't get fucked until I was twenty. Before that I used to cum - just rub it against some jeans or something, or to just touch a nice ass was very enjoyable. I didn't want to get fucked.

There was this chick, Chuck's chick, who had her eye on me. A couple of them sort of had their eye on me for quite awhile: being a drummer and all, they thought, "He's a young thing; I'd like to try him out," you know. This one was a grad student - she was 25, which seemed ancient to me at the time. Being 20, I thought people 25 were like God, that was old!

Anyway, she'd follow me. She had a kid. I don't know, I don't like screwing chicks with kids. I just don't like it. It's like, I don't want to be there with that kid, and that kid's probably been there already, sloppy seconds; or you could sock yourself with some heavy jealousy with that kid. Anyway, she was a good looking kid. She was being very nice and she'd keep turning up, you know, making scrambled eggs. She kind of cultivated me.

She was trying to get me to fuck her. One time, i was kissing her and stuff on her couch, and I was laying on top. I was humping her, actually, and she was saying, "Why don't you go all the way? Let's go all the way." I was put off. Then finally, one night in my room - I had this really weird room with a little balcony. Anyway, she got me really stoned on good stuff. I'd only had a little marijuana in muy life, so it was still fresh in my blood.

I don't remember how I got my clothes off, but we were on the balcony - I cleaned the shit off the balcony and put a bed out there because she was coming over that night. "IT" wasn't hard, and I wasn't aware exactly what was happening to us. Somehow she managed to sort of do it herself. And then I came. It was very much like a dream sequence. I just sat up, didn't say a word, and took off. I ran downstairs and got on her bicycle and rode - just as fast as I could - away. I was very upset, and I turned a corner on the wrong side of the street. I was in a frenzy, and I ran head-on into a car. And flipped into the air. I flew over the car and landed on my feet.

10:50 AM - 4 Comments - 20 Kudos - Add Comment