Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking It in Hair Metal L.A.

by Anne Thomas Soffee

  As if it isn’t demeaning enough to be a shop girl instead of a jet-setting rock journalist, I have to swallow the bitter pill that is the fact that my William and Mary nemesis, the director of the college radio station, is now writing for Rolling Stone. Even though I know that she had to pay her dues at Wenner-owned US magazine before cracking the RS nut, just seeing her byline rubs three hams’ worth of salt into my Rolling Stone-byline-less wounds—and it stings. Honestly, I don’t even like Rolling Stone; it’s too mainstream and dry for my journalistic taste, and probably sour to boot. My resume has been sent to the smaller, more creative rags, like Alternative Press, Spin, and, of course, Rip. And I haven’t gotten so much as a form letter back from any of them. Eventually I grow desperate and start sending resumes to every music magazine on the stands (except Rolling Stone, of course, not that I’m bitter).

  I lower my goals, informing Metal Maniacs that I counted no less than twenty-seven spelling and grammatical errors in their latest issue and, for a small fee, I’d be glad to make myself available for copy editing. Go figure why they didn’t hire me right away.

  And so it goes, letter after letter, beer after beer, and gift-wrapped ham after gift-wrapped ham, until the fateful day arrives when I finally receive a hand-addressed letter from the imaginatively titled Metal magazine. I tear it open, hoping to see the typewritten equivalent of hosannas and heavenly choirs—here she is to save rock journalism, come on out, your corner office is waiting. Instead, I’m greeted not with the usual form letter, but with a personal note from editor Steve Peters relaying the noncommittal but not entirely discouraging news that Metal works mainly with freelance writers and I’m free to stop by their Hollywood office if I’m ever in the area and see about open assignments.

  Well, a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat, and a maybe’s as good as a yes to a ham-wrapping would-be rock writer. Before my parents have even had a chance to recover from the Rolling Stones tour, I’m loading up the car to make my fortune as a freelance heavy metal journalist in Los Angeles. It’s been almost a year since I finished college, and all I have to show for it is a folder full of tearsheets from the same free local weeklies I was writing for when I was in high school. If I’m planning to follow in Lester Bangs’s footsteps, I only have a decade to get famous before my untimely death from mixing cold medicine with Darvon, so I’d better get cracking. Nobody ever hit it big reviewing Holiday Inn lounge bands in Richmond, Virginia.

  Q: Didn’t Pat Benatar get her start singing for a Holiday Inn lounge band in Richmond?

  A: Yes. Remember all of those great reviews she got that catapulted those writers to journalistic stardom? Neither do I.

  Inasmuch as one can “plan” a move to a city three thousand miles away where one has no friends, no job, and nowhere to live, I start planning the move. By this I mean I map out the route that will take me past the greatest number of my faraway friends, friends who understand why this is a perfectly sensible plan, that will allow me to visit the most cool places, and, naturally, the route that takes me past Graceland, because what rock ‘n’ roll pilgrimage would be complete without a trip to Graceland? In a well-worn Rand McNally atlas that already bears the thick neon-green paths I followed on the Rolling Stones tour, I map my desired stops—Graceland and Sun Records, then down to the Blues Archive in Oxford, Mississippi, and William Faulkner’s grave right down the street (I may have a rock ‘n’ roll heart, but my brain is pure English major), across the bottom of the country to New Mexico and Arizona, two states where I’ve got buds who will put me up and put up with me, and then on to Los Angeles. Much to the shock of my rivethead friends, I plan to make the first stop on my pilgrimage in Athens, Georgia, of all places. Athens, home of REM, Pylon, and enough paisley shirts and pegged pants to fill every overpriced thrift store in Georgia, represents everything I hate about music and, more important, music journalism. Rock journalists like Athens bands because Athens bands are basically rock critics with guitars. Nerds and outcasts with too many albums. I should know, I am one. But I also know that I would make a really lame rock star. Apparently no one told Michael Stipe.

  I’m going to Athens to bury REM, not to praise them. I’m planning to visit three of my old Deadhead buddies who moved to Athens for college and never left. Chris got a job working for Coca-Cola, James is moving toward a career in political lobbying, and Dave, though none of us know it yet, is changing the face of the Athens music scene playing bass in his new band, Widespread Panic. Everyone’s been humoring Dave for the past few years, figuring he’ll outgrow this long-haired hippie phase and get a real job, but not me. I know what it is to want to spend the rest of your life on this stuff because nothing else makes you feel like yourself. I’ll say it again—the men don’t know, but the little girls understand. Even though Widespread Panic’s meandering jams have little to do with loud, fast rules, Dave is following his musical muse and that makes me more than happy. For Dave and the guys, I will tolerate much paisley. I plan to stay in Athens for a week.

  Q: OK, hold the phone. You were a Deadhead?

  A: Although I do have dancing skeletons in my closet, it would be more accurate to say that I went through a period in which I ran with Deadheads, and availed myself of their, uh, generosity. In short, when I was in high school, I had older friends with IDs and connections who were Deadheads, and so, yes, I did travel to some Dead shows, and I did do some noodle dancing, although I did so in an Agnostic Front T-shirt. Patchouli was worn. Mistakes were made. You would be fair to think less of me for this.

  To my surprise, my plans are not met with the celebration and rah-rah knock ’em dead spirit I expected from my friends. There is a lot of grumbling from my metalhead buddies about upcoming shows I’ll miss, never mind the plethora of shows I’ll be able to see on any given day in Los Angeles. My old Deadhead buds humor my hair-metal fetish as a crazy phase I’m going through and seem almost worried that I’m serious enough about it to relocate. The only one of my friends who is behind my plans is Stacey, who can’t wait for updates on my upcoming brushes with cheesy greatness in the form of all of the hair gods and has-beens who populate the Sunset Strip. We have our own double feature movie night, Foxes and Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. I can’t decide who I want to be more, Lita Ford or Cherie Currie. Stacey is just happy that Poison is in Decline, and she cheers when C. C. DeVille says if he weren’t a rock star, he’d be a shoe salesman. Stacey is inordinately amused by Poison.

  Pity my poor parents, who pepper me with foolish questions like where are you going to stay when you get to L.A.? and what if you don’t get enough work to make a living? I know it is the job of parents to be sensible, but maaaaaaaan, what a buzzkill. I am resolute in the face of reason and logic. I am moving to Los Angeles and that’s all they need to know. My father’s steadfast sense of denial works in my favor; after about half a dozen “why-in-the-shit” questions go unanswered, he clicks over into pretending I’ll change my mind and leaves me alone. My mother is a bit more problematic, demanding TripTiks, bank statements, and backup plans. I’m not sure why she’s even bothering; we’ve already seen this movie anyway, and we know how it ends. Just like the year that I traded the colonial confines of William and Mary for Bejing Linguistics Institute, just for a change of scene, they know I’m prone to rash decisions and hastily packed suitcases, and that nothing they say or do will change my mind when I decide there’s somewhere else I need to be. They know that I’m going and I know that they’ll pretend I’m not until the day I leave. I put in my notice at the mall and prepare to hit the highway.

  Q: Beijing? As in Beijing, China?

  A: It sure wasn’t Kansas, Dorothy. Yeah, weirdo that I was, I took Chinese for my foreign language requirement, and one thing led to another, and well, Beijing. That’s a whole ’nother story and not a particularly rocking one, but I will share with you one glimpse of my efforts to bring Lou Reed to the masses of the People’s Republic. I call it Scene from a Taxicab, and it has be
en translated from the Mandarin by yours truly.

  Me: Could you play this while you drive, please? Thanks. (I hand the cabdriver a Velvet Underground cassette to replace the European synth-pop mix that all cabdrivers in Beijing have been issued.)

  Radio: Opening strains of “Sister Ray,” Lou Reed moaning about hitting his mainline over screeching guitar feedback.

  Irritated Chinese Cabdriver (ICC): Is this what people listen to in America?

  Me: Yes, it is.

  ICC: No, what I mean is, do a lot of people in America listen to this, or do just you and a few other people listen to this?

  Me (grumbling): Well . . . me and a few other people.

  ICC: Aha! That’s what I thought. How about One Glove Black Man? Everybody likes him, right?

  Just like when I left for Beijing, and when I left for the Rolling Stones tour, my impending departure is ignored until the eve of the very day that I leave, and then I am suddenly a horrible, horrible daughter, causing heartbreak and anxiety, and I eat dinner by myself, because everyone has locked themselves in their room so as not to see my soon-to-be-leaving face. I season my lonely meal with tears of remorse and guilt, guilt that I know I deserve every gut-wrenching bit of, but that I also know I must bear without crumbling, because the only way that I could ever possibly please my parents would be if I live in my childhood room until I’m fifty and spend every waking hour eating and appreciating their food, and I’m sorry, but this ain’t that kind of party.

  Q: Surely you don’t mean your parents would really have you cloistered for life if they had their way.

  A: Listen. The ass-kicker is, something like buying a can of peas when he thinks I should buy green beans upsets my dad just as much as me taking off on some half-cocked globe-trotting adventure. So I’ve learned that sometimes you’ve just gotta buy the peas and pay the piper. I love my dad with all my heart, but sometimes you need a can of peas.

  So after a festive solitary farewell dinner of Fruity Pebbles, I spend my final night in my bed at my parents’ house and roll out the next morning to head for Athens completely without fanfare—true to form, my parents have gotten up extra-early for work so they wouldn’t have to see me leave. Unfortunately, the most haphazardly laid plans are almost guaranteed to go awry, it seems, and Dave is on tour in California of all places when I finally roll into Athens in mid-August. I’m sorry not to see him, but on the upside it leaves me quartered in high style in the “rock star suite,” as Chris and James jokingly call Dave’s room. Small, shabby, and humid, just like their rooms, Dave’s bedroom is set apart only by the presence of a giant waterbed, purchased with real rock star dollars! Never mind the crumpled copies of Relix and dirty socks that Dave has left in his wake—this is still big luxury. I stretch out on the bed my first night in Athens, my toes not even beginning to reach the end of the mattress, and sway back and forth with the motion of the water. I know that it is not the lot of the rock ‘n’ roll journalist to ever see even a fraction of the money that a musician sees, but I feel hopeful that maybe a king-sized waterbed is somewhere in my future. In an interview with CREEM in 1981, Rick James told Dave DiMartino that his goal was to make “Paul McCartney White Boy Money.” I may not be able to aspire to that as a gonzo journalist, but I think that Dave Schools Rock Star Money may be within my grasp. Visions of waterbeds and bylines dance in my head as I drift off to sleep.

  It turns out that I have sold Athens short, as I have with most things I’ve condemned prior to investigation. There is an overabundance of paisley, to be sure, and homages to fortunate sons REM are around every corner, from clubs that they own a stake in, to restaurants that tout them as regulars, but so are quirky used record stores, dusty old rummage shops, and diners that offer huge plates of biscuits and gravy at three in the morning for under five bucks. The lazy gentility makes Athens feel like it’s back in time, and the cost of living is rock-bottom compared even to Richmond. I see now why the guys never came back after college, and it makes me even more apprehensive about my destination. From what I know of Los Angeles, the prices are high, the people are phony, and everything is slick, plastic, and devoid of character. I know there won’t be biscuits and gravy served up with sweet tea by waitresses who call me baby, and if there were I probably wouldn’t be able to afford them because they’d be considered some kind of kitschy Beverly Hills delicacy. The guys sense my apprehension and waste no time trying to talk me out of proceeding with my plans and call it foreshadowing when a homeless man at the Varsity Diner treats us to an out-of-the-blue rant about a new restaurant in town that charges two dollars for a cup of coffee.

  “I didn’t pay it! No sir, I didn’t! Do you know what I told them? I said, well, maybe nobody told you when you came up the road, no I don’t think they did, but I’m here to tell you, you in Georgia now, boy, and you can’t charge those L.A. prices! You hear what I told him? You can’t charge those L.A. prices! That’s the kinda price they charge in L.A., not Georgia, no sir!” For the rest of the week James and Chris repeatedly remind me of “L.A. prices,” as if I might not already realize that I am biting off more than I can chew. By the time I head out of Athens bound for Graceland, I am filled with self-doubt: What if I can’t find anywhere I can afford to live? What if I don’t get enough assignments to pay my rent? What if I get on the L.A. freeway and can never get off, like Charley on the MTA? It may be a Kingston Trio song, but it instills the kind of fear that only Elvis can cure, and I know that I need to leave Athens and make my way to Graceland posthaste, before I have time to change my mind.

  I know in my heart that Graceland will set me straight, but I’m still three states away, so I have to fend off the urge to turn the car around with as much rock ‘n’ roll as I can muster. I play Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes all the way through Alabama, singing along with “Freebird” at the top of my lungs like a good southern girl. (Hey, it’s not my usual gig, but when in Rome and all that.) I can tolerate some southern-fried boogie right now, because my next stop will be Mississippi, birthplace of the blues, and everyone knows that this is where rock ‘n’ roll really began.

  Well, everybody should, but most people don’t. Driving past dilapidated juke joints and roadhouses, I’m reminded of the Rolling Stones concert in New Jersey where I almost came to blows with the yuppie scum in the seat behind mine. It was the last night of the Steel Wheels tour, and there had been rumors that Eric Clapton might join them onstage. Except for the fact that he was a Yard-bird, that didn’t really do much for me, but I was at a Stones show so I wasn’t going to complain about anything. Not so the two khaki-wearers in row F.

  “All right, New Jersey! We’ve got another special guest for you,” Jagger announced from the stage, and the khakis high-fived each other.

  “It’s Clapton,” they yelled jubilantly, cheering and whistling until the guest appeared and was decidedly not Eric Clapton.

  “Who the fuck is that?” One of them spat as an elderly, stooped black man in an orange suit and hat was led to a stool in the center of the stage. “What the hell?”

  “Ladies and gentleman, John Lee Hooker!”

  “Who?” Before I even had time to be outraged, the other khaki followed up with this: “I know I didn’t pay fifty dollars to see some rickety old nigger.”

  I wanted to say something. I wanted to say “there wouldn’t be a Rolling Stones or an Eric Clapton without John Lee Hooker.” I wanted to say “neither one of you guys is fit to lick John Lee Hooker’s boots!” But I didn’t say anything. I watched John Lee Hooker sing “Boogie Chillun” and I felt like crying, I was so pissed off. Fuckers. They didn’t deserve to be in the same room with John Lee Hooker or the Rolling Stones. As usual, the men don’t know, but the little girls understand.

  And the Doors didn’t write that, by the way. Willie Dixon did.

  I pull into Oxford, Mississippi, just before bedtime and take a room in the Old Miss Motel. I pick up a copy of USA Today, a box of Fig Newtons, and a Coke at the market down the street and hole up for the
night, watching prime time and eating cookies. As I’m flipping through the paper looking for a crossword, a cheesy graph catches my eye. It’s ranking the cost of a cheeseburger, fries, and a drink in different cities around the country. I look for Athens, but of course it’s not there, an also-ran in world economics. Los Angeles, of course, is leading the pack with a total of $12.63. Twelve dollars for a cheeseburger! One thing I had made sure not to tell my parents before I left was that my high school journalism teacher told us the average income for freelance writers was $5,000 a year. I scribble the math in the newspaper margin. Well, heck. I could get four hundred cheeseburgers for that. Until I remember things like rent and clothes, I am heartened. I roll up the sleeve on the rest of my Fig Newtons and stick them in my backpack. I’m probably going to need to save them for Los Angeles.

  The next morning, I walk over to the university library where the blues archive is housed. I figure the presence of actual artifacts from Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and maybe even Robert Johnson will cleanse any remaining paisley stains from my soul. Will they have instruments? Will I be able to actually listen to any recordings? My own blues collection consists of a stack of Sonny Boy Williamson reissues and a Robert Johnson box set, but I am nothing if not eager to learn. I plan to spend the whole day at the archive. Or planned to, until Evil Blues Librarian gives me the blues good and proper by refusing to even let me in.

  “You need to have a specific research purpose in order to access the archive,” she sniffs prissily, peering at me from behind smudgy lenses. Her mouseburger gray-brown hair is cut in that triangular chin-length pageboy that looks so at home among ivory towers and special collections, and, just in case you didn’t know she was true academe, around her neck hangs the hallmark of the female scholar—the art necklace. A thickly corded, chest-length mishmash of oddly shaped glass beads, fetishes, and metal bits, it fairly cries “Don’t fuck with me, missy, I’ve got tenure.”