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

by Anne Thomas Soffee

  “A purpose other than wanting to learn about the history of the blues?” What more noble purpose could there be, I wonder, than love of the music and a desire to be closer to its source?

  “A specific research purpose,” she reiterates. If I’d had any poison on me, I would have Robert Johnsoned her coffee right there.

  “Look,” I say, hoping to appeal to the nerd in her, which has gotta be awfully big since she is, after all, a research librarian at a university, and don’t forget that necklace, “I drove down here from Richmond, Virginia, to see the blues archive.” I conveniently leave out the part about Los Angeles and hair metal and Elvis. Like they teach you in writing class, you don’t want to muck up the plot with too many details. “I drove through five states to see this stuff, and you’re telling me I can’t see it because I don’t have a good enough reason?”

  “You don’t have any reason,” she corrects me and closes the logbook.

  “And you don’t have any soul,” I spit back. I leave, dejected, but not before stopping mid-slink to take a picture of Sonny Boy Williamson’s actual harmonica, housed in a glass case at the library door. Fuckin’ Sonny Boy, man, I came to see you, I think, gazing wistfully through the glass. I wonder what Sonny Boy and Howlin’ Wolf would think if they could see us now, anyway—a couple of nerdy white chicks fighting over them. The blues probably never thought it would end up locked in a library, accessible only to elite scholars. Fuck a library, I think. What do they know from rock ‘n’ roll?

  The nasty run-in with the blues librarian almost makes me want to blow off my one academic side trip, but after stewing over it on the walk to the car I realize that William Faulkner would have thought she was a raging bitch, too. I decide to go visit him in spite of my burgeoning resentment against Ole Miss. Besides, Faulkner wasn’t an academic, he was a badass. I follow my map to the cemetery on the north side of town, and, after scouting around the grounds for a good bit, find the final resting place of Count No Count himself. I bring no pageantry, no flowery speeches, and no pretentious bottles of wine with me on my visit; I’m just paying a southern social call to say, “Hey, man, you were pretty damn good.” I grab a couple of photos and dust the Mississippi mud off his marker as best I can, wondering what kind of advice ol’ Bill would have for me if he were here. Probably something gruff and hard-bitten, like don’t suffer fools or keep your cards covered. I hope that I am hard-bitten enough to make it in the big city, as it were, and as I sit with my back against William Faulker’s headstone, I resolve to keep my cards covered and suffer no fools from here on out. After a languid hour of reflection and meditation, hoping to absorb some of Faulkner’s writing talent and fame by osmosis, but hopefully not the accompanying alcoholism and bouts with electroshock, it’s off to Memphis where the King awaits.

  In Memphis, I figure I can go for the proverbial two birds and eat lunch at Sun Studio, because they have a restaurant there—or rather, they are a restaurant there, right where Elvis used to record. I could spend a long time lamenting the state of a world where the birthplace of some of the most important music of our generation is whored out as a kitschy rockola-style tourist trap, but I am just happy to be here, and besides, I’m hungry. Man does not live on rockabilly alone; man needs meatloaf, and iced tea, and peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. You know Elvis would have agreed. After gratefully checking out of my hellhole of a motel—and pausing to take a few pictures of it from the safety of my car—I drive down to Sun, where I order myself up a nanner sammich and a tall glass of milk.

  I can feel the sandwich making me more rock ‘n’ roll with every bite. I try and concentrate on the experience so I’ll always remember it. I’m eating Elvis’s favorite sandwich in Elvis’s recording studio. I wonder if he ever ate a nanner sammich here? Probably not, but I’ll bet he wanted to. If there was one here, well, he definitely would have. That works for me. I finish my lunch and take a walk around the studio, peering into the one preserved studio and trying to feel the presence of the greats move through me. In truth, though, I feel more at one with the spirit when I see the Sun Records T-shirt on the wall over the cash register.

  Q: What’s the big deal? It’s just a T-shirt, isn’t it?

  A: For the uninitiated, the Sun Records T-shirt is the official uniform of the truly cool. Like the CBGB T-shirt, the Sun Records T-shirt is always black—only black—and is usually seen with Levi’s, boots, and either a denim jacket or a leather jacket. Wearing one is like knowing a secret handshake or having an Ovaltine decoder ring—it’s a message to other hipsters that you are a hipster, too. You can buy Sun Records shirts online, and you can buy CBGB shirts at Hot Topic now, but it’s my personal belief that you shouldn’t be allowed to wear either shirt unless you—or someone you actually know—purchased it in person at Sun Records or CBGB. You can’t buy cool online, and you sure as hell can’t buy it at Hot Topic. On this same subject, when I see teenagers at the mall wearing Sid Vicious T-shirts, I think that it would be entirely fair for me to demand that they sing me the first verse of “Anarchy in the UK.” If they can’t do that, I should be allowed to kick them in the shins.

  Needless to say, I have to buy a Sun Records T-shirt. After all, what else will I wear when I am photographed hobnobbing backstage with Guns N’ Roses after I become the most in-demand freelancer on the Sunset Strip? I imagine myself in my Sun Records shirt and Levi’s, looking effortlessly cool and somehow very tall and skinny (hey, it’s my fantasy). I’m chuckling wryly and sharing a witty story with Axl and Slash, who hang on my every word. Yes, I have to have that T-shirt.

  Except I’ve left my credit card in the car. I have a ten in my pocket, but that’s not enough for the lunch and the shirt, so I need to make a quick trip outside. After the laconic gray-haired cashier gets my shirt out of the cabinet for me, I hand him the ten and ask him to hold it while I go to the car.

  “Now, why would I want to do sum’n lahk that?” he drawls from beneath his brushy mustache, waving the money away as if he were swatting at a lazy fly.

  “Well, because I already ate lunch and I haven’t paid for it. You know, so you can make sure I don’t skip out on the tab.”

  His eyes crinkle with amusement, and he shrugs. “You’re the one’s got to live with yourself if you do.”

  I take back the ten, chastened, and walk out to my car wondering how I’m going to manage when I leave the south. Then I come back, because I have to live with myself, and if I don’t have a Sun Records T-shirt to wear in Los Angeles, I will surely die.

  Shirt in hand and sandwich in belly, I arrive at Grace-land serene and full of the spirit, or at least of peanut butter and bananas. I buy my ticket and attach myself to a group of European tourists about to head inside. Camera at the ready, I prepare to document my experience room by room. A perky brunette tour guide who looks for all the world like Shelley Fabares in Girl Happy herds us into the living room, and for a moment I think it’s all been a dream, because this can’t be Elvis’s living room. It looks just like my Aunt Ida’s living room, down to the last framed family portraits on the glass end table! Well, except for the overwhelmingly garish stained-glass peacocks flanking the door, that is. But honestly, the thing that is the most striking about Elvis’s living room is how incredibly rock ‘n’ roll it is not. Really, it looks like an old lady living room—which, once I think about it, makes sense, because if there is anything Elvis wanted to do his whole life it was please his mama. This living room is Gladys all the way. I snap pictures furiously, making sure to capture details like the miniature Greek goddess ensconced in a hurricane lamp. That about says it all when it comes to Elvis’s decor.

  The dining room is more Gladys—candelabras, china whatnots, cranberry glass jars, and a huge chandelier dripping with crystal overwhelming the small room. Click. Clickclickclick. We move into the hallway and I stop to stare at a toddler photo of Lisa Marie, hanging in the mirrored stairwell (yes, mirrored stairwell). Click. But we don’t get to go upstairs, because Elvis’s A
unt Delta still lives at Graceland and we’ve got to respect her privacy. Elvis’s Aunt Delta! No way! Can we meet her? No, of course not, don’t be silly, move along, please. We head down to the basement to check out Elvis’s TV room.

  In the basement, I say a silent prayer of thanks that I did not die in the seventies and have everything I wore and every room I decorated in 1977-era style preserved as a standing monument to my life. If that had been the case, people would be touring my green shag-carpeted room, their eyes tormented by my lavender bunk beds and matching beanbag chairs, all set off perfectly by the floral vinyl wallpaper in Easter egg hues. Let me be even clearer: Elvis was a styling motherfucker. Fifties Elvis in jeans and work-shirts, sixties Elvis in black leather and sideburns—it’s all good. But seventies Elvis? White jumpsuits and scarves, butterfly collars and rhinestones . . . and this room. This godawful nightmare of a room. Elvis’s TV room looks like a rejected set from the Electric Company—black, yellow, and white with a huge cloud and lightning bolt painted on the wall. What was it with lightning bolts in the seventies? Did the whole world lapse into an unexplained period of Zeus worship for a decade? The room is horrific. I’m thrilled when we’re escorted out of the basement.

  We’re not allowed to go into the kitchen, because that’s part of Aunt Delta’s lair, and that truly disappoints me because to me Elvis and kitchens go hand in hand. I want to see the room where the nanner sammiches were made, the pork chops were cooked, and the ice cream sundaes were concocted on a whim for breakfast. I want to see the source of his corpulence and stand in the same room where I know Elvis stood in the middle of the night on a search for tasty treats. I try to peek in as they lead us past on our way to the jungle room, and I’m admonished by Shelley Fabares to “please stay with the group” for the third time on the tour. Can I help it if I need longer to soak up the holiness? Besides, it’s the details I’m checking out, the whatnots and ashtrays, what pictures are on the end tables and what books are on the shelves. I don’t care about the gold records on the wall; I want to see what Elvis was doing when he was home alone and bored on a rainy Tuesday morning.

  I forge ahead and catch up to the tour, though, because it’s time to see the jungle room, which is what everyone talks about when they talk about touring Graceland. Oh, the jungle room, it’s so amazing, completely over the top, you just won’t believe it, they say, shaking their heads in awe, wonder, and something that almost looks like superiority. Yes, superiority, and this is the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll they’re talking about. Well, to this I say clambake now that I personally have seen the jungle room up close and in person. Fake stone walls, tiki lamps, and fur-upholstered chairs, not to mention the exact same green shag rug that my bedroom sported in 1977. I’m disappointed and find myself getting just a little pissed on Elvis’s behalf. The jungle room is the ultimate 1970s rumpus room, complete with wet bar, and yes, styles have changed, so maybe it looks garish by our pedestrian standards, but Elvis didn’t ask anybody to freeze it in time and lead tours through on the hour, now, did he? How dare a bunch of smart-ass rock-critic types use the tackiness of the jungle room to belittle the King? For all they know, if he’d lived, he’d be wearing paisley now and decorating in rocking Danish modern. Well, probably not, but he’d be cooler than them no matter what his sofa looked like. It’s not his fucking fault he died in 1977.

  My righteousness on behalf of my new best friend El is cut short by the beeping of a smoke alarm. A smoke alarm, so pedestrian and homey, here at Graceland. For a minute I don’t even recognize what the beeps mean. Shelley apologizes—“there are men working in the trophy room and they keep setting it off”—but fire codes being what they are, we have to evacuate. No problem for me, because in my ire over America’s collective sneer at the decor of the jungle room, I started to feel a little ghoulish myself. Does Elvis want us walking around his house, staring at his things? Would he want me taking pictures of his whatnots? I hope in my heart that he realizes my motives are pure and that I’m not here to laugh and sneer at his tiki lamps. I just want to feel a little closer to him is all.

  Bringing up the rear, as always, I stop on my way through the dining room to steal one last peek at the china cabinet when I notice motion back in the kitchen. Getting as close to the door as I dare (because really, what can they do now, throw me off the tour? It’s over), I am rewarded with a quick glimpse of Elvis’s Aunt Delta in all her house-coated glory, scurrying off, no doubt, to some secret fire exit or maybe just to grab a quick biscuit while we’re all out on the front lawn. I feel as though I’ve had a vision, or that I’ve been given a sign, an omen blessing my rock ‘n’ roll future in Los Angeles. I have gazed on Aunt Delta with my own two eyes. I have been in the presence of a Presley. Hallelujah and thank’ya verrahmuch. I feel that now the trip has already been worthwhile, no matter what happens from here on out.

  The rest of the day is inconsequential—after all, I have had a sighting of Presley kin. I take my pictures in the meditation garden where Elvis, Gladys, Vernon, and Grandma Minnie Mae are buried, and I add my name to the wall out front with the thousands of others in languages from around the globe, but it can’t hold up to seeing Aunt Delta in living color.

  I visit some souvenir stores on Elvis Presley Boulevard, picking up some T-shirts, coffee mugs, and a fringed velvet pillowcase for my best friend Melissa, whose Boston wedding I am missing even as we speak—linens are always an appropriate wedding gift, even for rocker chicks getting married in thrift-store dresses that show off their tattoos. Then I set out for my next scheduled destination: Tucson, Arizona, 1,400 miles away.

  2

  Confessions of a Reluctant Danzig Bimbo

  “Sorry, Kid, We Don’t Speak Irony”

  the long, lonely stretch of highway between Memphis and Tucson gives me plenty of time to think about the inevitable fiasco that awaits me in L.A. No job, no apartment, not even a friend to show me around—what was I thinking? Well, I was thinking I was going to be the next Lester Bangs, but that’s beside the point. The point is that I am almost there and now, suddenly, it all seems way too real. I distract myself with Suzi Quatro tapes and a one-pound bag of Twizzlers propped open on the passenger seat. With red licorice as my copilot, I shall overcome. Hauling ass across the southern states in my now very well-traveled Hyundai, I power open the sunroof, hoping to maybe add some highlights to my ready-for-L.A. body-waved hair. I was hoping for something along the lines of Tawny Kitaen but I ended up closer to Chaka Khan. Big hair is big hair, though, and mine is the biggest it’s ever been. Tearing through the desert with Suzi blaring, I feel like I am finally living my rock ‘n’ roll dream, and it squashes my self-doubt into an almost imperceptible little nugget deep down in my subconscious.

  At least I have a friendly face waiting for me in Tucson. Well, I hope so, anyway. I haven’t seen Rachel since just after high school graduation, when she grew out her mohawk, went all macrobiotic on us, and took off to follow the Grateful Dead. Midway through the tour she fell in love with Avram Shulman, a rabbinical student and psychedelic rocker. They settled in Tucson, where Rachel inched toward a bachelor’s degree and Avram balanced his fuzzbox dreams and Talmud studies with a day job embossing personalized pencil sets.

  Rachel and I have kept up a steady correspondence over the years, based mostly on mutual complaining about the scenes at our conservative colleges and trading fliers for punk rock shows in Richmond and Tucson. Now, by happy coincidence, I’ll actually be able to tour some of the clubs I’ve come to know through four years of long-distance fliers.

  Rachel meets me at her front door in tie-dye and combat boots, both of the Rachels I remember crammed into one tiny four-foot-eleven package. It’s just like old times immediately, and minutes after my arrival we are happily sipping jasmine tea in her tiny, cluttered kitchen, the have-you-heard-about-so-and-so patter occasionally interrupted by furtive taps at the back door. Each time the taps occur, Rachel pauses the conversation long enough to reach in the refrigerator f
or a wax-paper-wrapped burrito or peanut-butter sandwich from the bottom shelf, which she hands out the back door with a quick “de nada.”

  “Illegals,” she explains without really explaining. I would expect nothing less. I regale Rachel with tales of my trip so far, and of my plans for taking L.A. by storm with my nouveau Lester Bangsian greatness. Even though she’s hardly a metalhead, Rachel is the most supportive of my plans of anyone so far. It’s the whole hippie follow-your-bliss thing, seasoned with a sprinkle of good old punk rock “fuck ’em if they don’t like it.” We talk well into the night, until Avram comes home from a show he’d promoted for the Marshmallow Overcoat, a band I remember from Rachel’s faithful flier collecting (“Try On the Marshmallow Overcoat!”). Rachel had already warned me about Avram’s crippling shyness, so I do my best not to overwhelm him with greetings and glad-handing. Besides, by that time, I’ve been up for a good twenty hours, so I gratefully accept my pillow and linens and head for the couch for some shut-eye.

  Aside from the requisite psychedelic club-hopping, my weeklong stay in Tucson is decidedly laid back. Rachel and I spend our days prowling thrift shops and eating at taquerias, and our off-nights drinking beer in a series of seedy dives around her and Avram’s equally seedy apartment. Sometimes Avram joins us, but usually he stays home with his sixties records and Hebrew texts. On one such night, we come home to find Avram uncharacteristically animated, waiting to fill us in on the fantastic score he’d made while we were down at the corner reminiscing over pitchers of draft beer. It seems that somewhere between Shoftim and Yeshaya, he had managed to be the seventh caller to KXCI and won himself two tickets to see Danzig tomorrow night at the El Casino Ballroom.