by (epub)
Holy fuck! I almost crapped my pants. Mommy! Mommy! I’m dead! I told myself, trying to keep my terror from being too obvious. I finally said, “Here’s my hotel. I can get out here. Thanks again, you guys.” They dropped me off without a problem, bursting into laughter as I got out of the car. I started laughing too, relieved that I was still alive.
Steve, Basile, Bill, Phil, and Marc, 1980
CHINESE ROCKS
New York, 1979
WE CAME BACK TO NEW YORK to the news that Max’s was launching their own record company—Max’s Kansas City Records—and they wanted us to do an album with them. The Troggs—the legendary British band that had brought us “Wild Thing”—was also going to be recording an album for their label. We accepted their offer right away and happily signed the contract promising us a minimum sum of one dollar! All four of us asked in unison if they had any quarters. On the other hand, we were also guaranteed all the free dinners we wanted at the club’s restaurant downstairs. With the exception of Bill, we were all so skinny that they knew damn well they could get us with free food!
We recorded The Senders Seven Song Super Single, produced by Peter Crowley, the club’s manager, and we were pretty happy with the result. The record was released as a twelve-inch vinyl with a magnificent black-and-white cover. We would bring it with us whenever we went to Max’s so the waiter could verify our identities and we could order lobster without having to pay for it. One night, one waiter actually asked Marc to make the same expression as on the album cover, because he couldn’t recognize him. The guy should have, because they’d decorated the walls of the bar upstairs with big framed photos of all the bands, and the first one you saw when you walked in was a fantastic shot of The Senders. We had become one of the club’s favorites.
Peter Crowley invited me to play harmonica for the Troggs’ album, but they must not have been too thrilled with my work, because when the record came out, I wasn’t on it! We signed a one-year management contract with Frank Yandolino and his partner Michael Lang. Michael was the guy who had organized Woodstock—the little guy with curly blond hair you can see on a motorcycle in the movie. He also managed Joe Cocker. We might have thought that glory was right around the corner, but in reality, we didn’t think much about it. We didn’t give a damn. We were living in a fucking movie. Most of all, it was essential to us that we keep our artistic integrity, rather than becoming someone else’s puppet—even if the pay was better. After all, we weren’t particularly ambitious; we were perfectly content to be in our own little trip, and we felt that we had already made it, since we’d successfully avoided working nine-to-five office jobs like most of our friends were doing. Why let some idiot in a polyester suit ruin everything?
But we now had a manager who could negotiate with the enemy, which seemed like a good idea, since our ridiculous rebel attitude wasn’t going to get us very far. In the meantime, we played everywhere. Constantly. Max’s, CBGB, Hurrah’s, the Peppermint Lounge, the Mudd Club, Rock Lounge, the Rocker Room, Tracks, Heat, Great Gildersleeves, Studio 10, A-1, Irving Plaza, the Orpheum Theater. In the suburbs too: My Father’s Place, Dirt, Maxwell’s. We played Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania. … From Philly to Boston, nonstop. The Senders would go back to Boston at least once a month to play at the famous Rat. We often played there with the Real Kids, stars of the Boston underground and a great fucking band. John Felice, their guitarist and singer, would put us up at his place, and there were always a few girls who wanted to take us home, including a pretty ugly one we called “Potato Face.” Potato Face was actually really nice. She had a Mod look, wearing white plastic miniskirts and sunglasses, with her coal black hair in a Cleopatra haircut. She would tell all her girlfriends about us and eventually started a little fan club. The audience at the Rat was very cool, and we always felt welcome there. They drank a lot in Boston, and it was pretty wild. I was always glad to go back to Boston—it felt like my “American hometown.”
There was one night at the Rat that we felt we were so good, the sound was so perfect, and the energy in the room was so unbelievable, that I remember it was actually magic. For a few minutes there, we might have been the best rock ’n’ roll band in the world, and the audience knew it—you could see it in their eyes. We had them by the balls. I don’t know why—it’s hard to explain—but I never forgot that show. Perhaps you have to have been in a rock band to understand what I mean, but I believe it would be worth it to spend a lifetime onstage just to live those few seconds when all is right, when the band and the audience become one. Anyone who hasn’t had the luck of experiencing that during their lifetime has missed out on something incredible: the real magic of rock ’n’ roll mixed with the real magic of being young and drunk! We were beside ourselves—it was fantastic. After three glorious encores, Bill, drenched in sweat, collapsed onto a sofa, laughing his ass off, and declared, “We’re the fucking Yardbirds, man! It’s 1966 and we’re the fucking Yardbirds! Hahaha!”
We could have gone home to New York right then and there. It would have been the perfect evening. But nooo, why not stay a little longer and fuck everything up?
By four in the morning, the room was still loaded with people. Not as loaded as we were, though—particularly Marc. There was this one hippie girl—a Deadhead, perhaps—who was totally into Bill. A little chubby chick, who just had to have our guitarist! She kept trying to invite him over, but he didn’t seem to particularly interested in her.
“We’re all in the same car,” he explained. “We can’t leave each other! How will I get back to New York with a Twin-Reverb amp and two guitars if those assholes leave without me?” She then turned to me and asked if we would like to come over for salad.
“Salad?” I said as politely as I could. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We’re all smashed—look at that bunch of nuts, do you really want them in your home?” We could have easily gone to crash at the Real Kids’ or at Potato Face’s, and what did she want with a bunch of greasers drunk out of their minds, anyway? Was she that crazy about Bill that she couldn’t see the state we were in? Was she out of her mind or what? But she insisted and Bill finally talked us into going to her place. He climbed into her car, and we followed them through Boston as best we could. We sat down in her kitchen, and she started pulling out eggs, tomatoes, and all the rest. Then she started telling us all about the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead?! Was that sheer provocation or what? They were the incarnation of everything we most loathed: old San Francisco hippies, the dreariest band in the world. Precisely the name to avoid! As soon as she turned her back, Marc threw an egg across the kitchen. It exploded against the wall, then slowly started trickling down to the floor. Things snowballed from there. We all grabbed everything she had just put on the table and started lobbing them at each other: tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers.
“Can we help?” Bill asked.
The girl seemed to think it was funny, which naturally encouraged us to fuck around even more. Steve went into the living room and put on a record, with the volume up high: the Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Marc came out of the bathroom holding a tube of shampoo to his crotch, spraying white liquid everywhere, and shouting, “Shit, I’m coming! Look, I’m coming!” Bill found a few beers in the fridge and helped himself, throwing one to Marc.
“If you can, don’t drink all the beers. They belong to Bob, my roommate!” the girl said.
Her what?! She told us she had a roommate, but he worked the night shift and wouldn’t be home until around seven in the morning. We went searching for Bob’s room and started putting everything we could find into his bed. We didn’t realize what time it was and figured we’d be long gone by the time he got back. Marc emptied an ashtray onto the sheets, then threw in a little salad.
“Oh, man, you guys, that’s fucked up,” I laughed at them.
While Bill was flirting with the girl in the kitchen, we started making more and more of a racket in
the living room. Marc turned the record all the way up, playing “Happy,” then “Turd on the Run,” and “Ventilator Blues,” and we all started shouting, “Some kind of ventilator. … What you gonna do about it? What you gonna do?” Then we screamed at the top of our lungs: “Gonna fight it, gonna fight it!” and pounded our feet on the floor in rhythm. The girl should have thrown us out but she just kept laughing. She hadn’t seen what we’d done to her roommate’s bed yet.
Then somebody pounded on the door. It was the downstairs neighbor—a cute girl—and she demanded, “Are you completely crazy or what? Do you realize the racket you’ve been making? It’s past 5 a.m.—enough already!” Marc took one look at her and decided to go cruise her in the stairs, trying to convince her to join the party. Goofing around, I closed the apartment door on him, locking him out. The neighbor didn’t find Marc’s advances funny at all, and she ran back to her place, threatening to call the cops. Stuck in the hallway, Marc started pounding on the door, shouting, “Very funny, you guys! Open the door, you assholes! Open the fucking door or I’ll knock it down!!!” Our hippie girl ran to open the door at the exact moment Marc kicked it in. The door went flying into her face, bam! She fell to the floor. There were a few hooks on the back of the door and one of them had hit her square in the middle of the forehead. She sat up, holding her face in her hands, and we saw blood running between her fingers. Shit! Now we really had crossed the line. Immediately, Steve pulled off the record, and we all jumped on her. “Holy shit! Are you all right? What happened? Are you okay?!” She clearly wasn’t: she had a hole in her forehead and it was gushing blood. We were sure she would finally get pissed off, but no, this girl was unflappable! She just kept smiling, blood running down her face, telling Marc—who was bending over backwards apologizing—that it wasn’t his fault, that it was an accident, and that he shouldn’t worry. That poor hippie girl was a fucking saint, and we felt like total schmucks.
“She probably needs a few stitches,” said Bill. “I’ll take her to the hospital.” We put some ice in a dish towel and stuck it against her head, and Bill took off with her to the emergency room.
We found ourselves sitting there, mortified and ashamed, as we looked over the damage we had done to the apartment. It was spectacular. There was food everywhere, on the floor, in the kitchen, in the living room, in the roommate’s bed. … The roommate! Shit! He was going to be home any minute now—and he was going to find three strange guys, shit everywhere, blood on the floor, and no hippie girl! Realizing that we were going to get massacred, or at the very least arrested, we decided we would try to clean everything up before he got home—but it was impossible. We were sliding on the broken eggs, beer, shampoo, and all the other stuff we’d thrown around. On top of that, we were still too drunk to actually do any good. All we managed to do was to make matters worse. There was nothing to do. It was too late and we were fucked.
We waited in suspense. Who was going to come home first? Bill and the girl, or the roommate? And who was this roommate we would have to deal with? Maybe this Bob guy was a karate teacher, or a cop, or a Hell’s Angel—or a hit man for the mafia! From the look of his clothes, he must have been pretty big. We absolutely had to get the hell out of there, but we couldn’t leave without Bill. First of all, that would have been very mean, and second, he had the car. So we waited in the kitchen for what seemed an eternity. We debated the merits of waiting downstairs for Bill, just in case the roommate did come back first, but in the end, we figured that if there was no one there to explain to him what had happened, he would call the cops immediately, and things could only go downhill for us from there. So we decided we would stay put and tell him a version of the truth—that there had been a party and the girl had had a little accident and all those bastards who had messed up the apartment had left … except for us, who had stayed behind to clean up. And most of all, we had no idea who had gone into his room.
Suddenly, we heard someone unlocking the door. We froze, in absolute terror. Thank God, it was Bill and the girl. She had three stitches and a huge Band-Aid on her forehead. She was still smiling, though.
“I’m going to lie down,” she said, taking Bill by the hand and leading him into her room. She closed the door.
“Shit! Now they’re gonna fuck!” Steve moaned.
“No way!” Marc cried. “It’s ten to seven—run for your life!”
They both looked at me. “Phil, go get Bill—we’re outta here!”
I opened the bedroom door just a little bit, peeked in, and saw through the darkness that they had just crawled into bed. “Bill,” I whispered politely. “We’re leaving!”
I turned and headed for the door so he wouldn’t have a chance to argue. He came hurrying out of the bedroom, pulling up his pants, “Wait for me. Wait for me!”
After that, we were afraid to go back to Boston for a while. We felt really bad for the poor girl, though. We thought of sending her flowers or something, but ultimately decided it was probably best to disappear and let her forget about that night.
Meanwhile, back in New York, the shows went on. Max’s, CB’s, etc.
The bands at Max’s and CB’s got along pretty well. Everyone went to each other’s shows. There was a spirit of friendly competition among the camaraderie. And of course, any time someone had anything nice to say about your band, they would immediately cut you to pieces as soon as you turned your back. It was always, “Wow! That was great, Tim—loved your show!” then, as soon as Tim was three feet away, “What a horrible fucking band. They suck!” But all in all, everyone was friendly.
Backstage at Max’s, the walls that separated the dressing rooms were so thin that you could hear everything going on in the next room. We would yell things like, “Wow! Did you see who we’re playing with tonight? They’re fabulous!” while pretending to throw up, with someone adding, “Yeah, really good!” and miming jerking off.
After a show one night, we were casually smoking a joint backstage and listening delightedly to the band in the next room getting berated by their manager. They were Bon Jovi clones, but by the way he was screaming, you’d think they were a fucking football team. “You were horrible, hor-ri-ble!” he yelled. “We talked about this at rehearsal—the energy, where was the energy? And you fucked up at least ten times, always in the same spots! Horrible!!” Then, much to our surprise, he added, “Why can’t you be more like that other band, those Senders? Now, that’s a band!”
We all exploded into laughter, and I nearly choked on the joint.
“Shhh,” hissed Steve. “It’s too good to be true.”
“It’s good advice. He’s right!” Marc whispered.
“That’s true. If we were a band, we’d want to be more like us.”
“We should hire that manager.”
“No way. They’re putting us on. They also have a secret backstage code.”
“Maybe, but theirs is much more elaborate. …”
We had T-shirts made: black, with The Senders logo in magenta. We sold them at shows and at Rebop. When summer came, Marc had the excellent idea of giving them to all the Bowery bums panhandling, usually drunk out of their minds, in front of CBGB. It was our advertising campaign. Our “models” seemed glad to have something clean to put on as they wiped windshields at red lights, while we were happy for the free advertising they so graciously gave us twenty-four seven.
I did all the graphics for our posters, which we would get printed on Canal Street. They were adorned with slogans like, YOU CAN’T OD ON R&B or DON’T GO COLD TURKEY FOR THANKSGIVING. There were no computers to do the lettering in those days, and you had to scratch each letter one by one from clear plastic sheets to print them on the poster. It never worked; in the end, all the info would get completely fucked up and there would be different amounts of space between each letter. That may be how the “pUnK pOsteR” style started. For a while, we paid a guy to put our posters up all over the Lower East Side, but we figured he was probab
ly throwing away half of them so he could get home sooner, so we started putting them up ourselves. This involved walking around with a bucket of mixed paste and water, which was a drag, so we drove everywhere—spilling glue all over the seats as we stopped at street corners to hang flyers and have a smoke. What a joke! Once, a little hardcore punk asked if he could have a little bit of glue to solidify his Mohawk! Another one—who looked fucking insane—asked if he could have a sip.
“It’s industrial glue,” I said, “and we dropped the brush in dog shit!”
“Really? Great!” he said, as he plunged his hand into the bucket then swallowed a big gulp of it. If he didn’t die, he must have gotten pretty constipated.
Thursday and Friday nights often turned into “poster wars.” We would just be wrapping up three hours of postering, only to discover that some lame band had covered up all of our posters, because they were playing the same night. So, we’d rip down all of theirs. In order to avoid a big confrontation or an all-out rumble, when we spotted a band covering up our posters, we would just discreetly follow them with the car. We would pull down their posters as soon as they disappeared around the corner, laughing at the thought of their faces when they discovered their posters had already vanished! By then, the glue on ours would be dry, and they wouldn’t be able to tear them off. Haha! The best thing to do was to put them up at 6 a.m. and hope we were the last coat; after all, it was illegal to put up posters on the streets of New York. We did get caught by the police once, but when the cop saw the posters, he offered to let it slide in exchange for one of them, saying he was a big rock fan. “Take three and we’re good for the year,” said Steve.
We ended a night of putting up posters by throwing glue at each other … which was fun for a while but ended with me in the hospital the next day. One of my eyes was completely glued shut, and I couldn’t open it at all. They had to pry my eyelids open with pliers like in A Clockwork Orange, spraying my eye with a solution to dissolve the glue. Charming. …