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

by Anne Thomas Soffee

  For the uninitiated, Danzig is just about the boo-spookiest prepube metal band on the metal scene. Long shunned by MTV for such video antics as, say, ripping a chicken in half over the stomach of a scantily clad babe laid out on an altar under a crucified demon, Danzig is shopping-mall horror at its cheesiest. Lead singer Glenn Danzig is a five-foot-three bundle of deltoids, leather, and Lady Clairol Midnight Black, a role model for every pencil-necked middle school misfit who ever devoured The Necronomicon in study hall. Speaking of misfits, if Danzig looks familiar, it’s because Glenn fronted the seminal punk band the Misfits in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The Misfits’ “Fiend Club” grinning skull logo is the Lacoste gator of the skateboards-and-mohawks set, tempting me occasionally to grab the odd fiend-sporting suburban teenage wannabe from his seat at the Chesterfield Mall food court and demand he hum a few bars of a Misfits song so I can slap him when he can’t, just like the Hot Topic kids, and besides, where do you think he got that Misfits shirt? But I digress. The Misfits are no more. Danzig is the new Black Messiah. And now we are going to see him. Well, two of us are, anyway.

  “You go with Avram,” Rachel insists. “I have physics homework.”

  “But he’s your boyfriend; he’ll want you to go.”

  “I don’t want to see Danzig,” Rachel says, pulling a leftover tofu pup out of the fridge and dabbing it with hot sauce. She has a point.

  “But we won’t have fun without you,” I plead, not adding that I find shy Avram hopelessly difficult to talk to, a problem compounded by a situation that very morning in which I, thinking both of my hosts had already left the house, wandered naked and glassesless out of the shower and ran smack into a traumatized Avram in the hallway.

  “Well, I’m between a hard rock and a stone.” Rachel is not an English major. “I’d really rather not. You and Avram will have fun. He never goes to these things; it will be a learning experience for him. Do it as a favor. You guys can dress up and try to blend in.”

  After sleeping on Rachel’s suggestion, I reluctantly agree to go with Avram. The concept of turning it into an exercise in irony does actually take a little bit of the pressure off me, plus it appeals to my pretentious smartass side, which I need to be cultivating anyway if the rock critics I grew up reading are any kind of example.

  That night, in preparation for the show, I tease and spray my Chaka Khan hair until it resembles the tumble-weeds I passed on Interstate 40 on the way into town and don my black leather skirt and matching push-up bra. With fishnet stockings and stiletto spikes, it is truly an outfit with which to be reckoned. I have only worn it on two other occasions because it always seems to attract the wrong element. Slut fashion notwithstanding, we still need to keep out the riffraff.

  Presently Avram arrives home from his job at the pencil factory. I wobble into the living room and do a runway twirl on my spikes. “Gee,” he says, and goes into the kitchen. I get the distinct impression that Avram isn’t used to concertwear that isn’t drapey and caftanish. Rachel looks hard at me. She rips a corner off her physics homework and scribbles her phone number on it.

  “This is in case anything happens,” she says ominously. “Call me if there’s an emergency.”

  “Oh, come on,” I groan, poking my hair up another three inches. “What’s gonna happen?”

  Rachel reaches over and adjusts the straps on my bra. “I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head.

  Avram disappears into the bedroom and eventually emerges wearing a purple paisley shirt and bellbottom jeans. Peering down at our lemony faces, he submits to our fashion dominance and in short order is decked out in leather pants (mine), a Cramps T-shirt (Rachel’s), and a top hat. The lid is his own, surprisingly; if psychedelia and heavy metal were graphed on a Venn diagram, the overlap would be fairly substantial—at least from the neck up. With his jewfro brushed out and the hat pushed down, he actually looks kinda like Slash. Slash with Coke-bottle glasses and a honkin’ big nose, but kinda like Slash all the same.

  With emergency instructions in hand, Avram and I proceed to the El Casino Ballroom. Danzig is just starting their set when we arrive. Glenn Danzig seems about to collapse under the weight of his own musculature. The man’s shoulders start round about the tops of his ears. He closely resembles a pit bull—a damn fine-looking pit bull. I may have my tongue firmly in cheek with the outfit, and I may snicker at the giant demon head hanging above the stage, but make no mistake, I love me some Glenn Danzig biceps. I lead Avram to the edge of the mosh pit, a teeming mass of sweaty bodies and overactive hormones. Dozens of urgent-looking teenaged boys are hurling themselves against one another with amazing force, like crazed, testosterone-driven atoms with bad skin.

  “Exhibit A—the mosh pit,” I shout above the din. Avram peers at the flailing bodies from behind his wire rimmed glasses and backs up a step. I lead him around the edge of the mosh pit to the front row. A pocket of fabulous babes are clustered at stage right, making doe eyes at Glenn Danzig as he declares that he is the Killer Wolf and he is gonna pound them home. Several apes from the road crew ogle the babes from behind the Marshall stacks, elbowing one another and licking their chops.

  “Exhibit B—sluts,” I say, meaning it of course in a wholesome family way and intending no slight against the character of aforementioned sluts. Avram looks at a red-bra-clad blonde with two nose rings and backs up two steps.

  Just then a violent mosh sends us lurching sideways. I grab the edge of the stage and hang on, riding the wave for all I’m worth. One of the roadies reaches over, I assume to pry my grubby paws off his precious stage. I raise my hands in a sign-language apology—sorry there, Bucky, didn’t mean to touch your stage—and discover that I am now holding a red satin sticker that reads “LONG WAY BACK FROM HELL—LUCIFUGE WORLD TOUR: GUEST.” Yes, I am now in proud possession of my very own Slut Pass. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit impressed with myself, irony notwithstanding. I may be joking around about this outfit, but the fact that someone’s actually buying it is flattering, in a nonironic, ego-boosting kinda way.

  I turn around and show Avram the Slut Pass. He checks out the spooky font, the shiny satin, the silkscreen of an upside-down cross dangling on Glenn Danzig’s bare chest.

  “Gee,” he says.

  We scrutinize the pass together, wondering how I, rather than an actual slut, came to receive it. Avram squints myopically at the crowd, the roadies, the band.

  “They must have picked you out for Dan. I think you guys are the same height.”

  “Dan?”

  “Didn’t you say he was the singer? Dan Zig?” Sometimes I can’t tell whether Avram is really kidding.

  Q: So is this your first-ever Slut Pass?

  A: At the risk of impugning my own character, which heretofore I am sure you all considered sterling, no, it is not. My first Slut Pass was bequeathed to me and my partner in crime Claudia Arnold by a roadie for none other than the Clash, in 1983, when I was fifteen years old, sporting a fresh peroxide job, tight army pants, and a red bandanna tied around my left combat boot. For one shining night, I was practically Lester Bangs, or at least Sable Starr. I got groped by a photographer, screeched at jealously by Ellen Foley (who was dating Mick Jones at the time but who the more mainstream among you may remember as the female voice in Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”), and grounded for pretty much the rest of the school year for cutting class, taking a Greyhound bus to Williamsburg, and then having the nerve to call Claudia’s father at two A.M. to pick us up. On a school night. And the Clash? Perfect gentlemen.

  Now that we’ve seen the view from the front, and now that I’ve got the Slut Pass (Exhibit C), I guide Avram around the ballroom, pointing out some of the more important elements of a good heavy metal show—tattoos, nipple rings, underage kids getting loaded. Without discussing it, we are both content not to try and fight our way back up front. I figure there’s no point risking injury to get up close and personal if I’m going to be meeting the band anyway,
and Avram, well, I think Avram is scared. Maybe of the mosh pit, or maybe of Dan Zig and his pointed nails and massive biceps. Whatever the cause, he looks like he is more than content to hang out at the back of the ballroom for as long as I will let him.

  When the band finishes their standard set, and before the crowd brings them out for the obligatory (and thereby utterly meaningless, in my opinion) encore, I head for the ladies’ room to make sure I look trampy enough to take the heat in the metal-slut kitchen. Before I go, we discuss the possibility of trying to slide Avram under the umbrella of the pass with me, an offer that Avram declines so heartily that his top hat flies off. Instead, Avram agrees to wait for me in the parking lot after the show until the backstage festivities are over. That’s what I like about Avram. He’s an agreeable kind of guy.

  A quick look around the bathroom is all it takes to indoctrinate me into the workings of the concert slut caste system. Studiously avoiding the restrooms at concerts is my norm, so this is a new and wondrous world to me, and suddenly I am a part of it. I can’t believe my good fortune—at least I think it’s good fortune. There is definitely a pyramid here, and I am pleased to see that, for one of the few times in my life, I am not at the bottom of it. That is where one finds the Chicks. Chicks are the T-shirt-wearing, ticket-buying, lighter-waving party girls. Some are cute, some are not—it doesn’t really matter. They didn’t come to the concert to impress anybody; they came to have a good time. And they didn’t come into the bathroom to primp; they came in to pee. Once that’s done, they leave. Nothing wrong with being a Chick. In fact, if Joan Jett, Suzi Quatro, and Runaways-era Lita Ford were here, they would all fall firmly into the Chick category.

  Just above Chicks in the hierarchy are the Passless Sluts. The middle class of metal sluttery, perhaps they didn’t quite rate, or maybe they just weren’t spotted by the right roadie. They’ve got the clothes, the hair, and the makeup, but they lack the all-important satin square. They stand at the mirrors above the sinks and primp, all the while glaring at the Backstage Betties.

  That would be my group, the Betties. The girls with the passes hog the full-length mirror and bogart the makeup table, and nobody tells us to hurry up at the sink. The Betties speak only to one another, occasionally casting scornful glances at the no-passers. They lend each other lip pencils and help out with those tough back zippers, showing a sisterly camaraderie that will no doubt fall by the wayside once backstage. At least, I assume it will. One would think that it has to. In any case, I can’t wait to find out.

  I take advantage of my newfound power and spread out my Slut ammo on the makeup table. A little more mascara, a little more contour powder, and a lot more cleavage—I may be a slut, but I’m not a dumb slut. I know how I rated this pass. Several of the other Betties are in various stages of undress in the drafty restroom, and the scene takes on a conspiratorial air.

  “My mother would shit,” exclaims a small blonde girl to no one in particular as she wriggles her bare butt into a crimson leather dress. “I mean, she’d die. I had to smuggle this out in my boot.” She rolls up her jeans and T-shirt and stuffs them behind the trash can. I notice that her pass is different from the rest of ours—it’s laminated, meaning she’s a notch above us, even. I can’t imagine how that merit badge is earned. You’d have to sell a hell of a lot of cookies, that’s for sure.

  Another girl is grunting and groaning as she tries to refasten the back hooks on her studded bra after a major boob adjustment. “Hey, help me with this, will ya?” she pleads. I dutifully do her up, and she turns around. She looks about twelve. She adjusts her nonexistent cleavage with both hands and nods in my direction. “Thanks a lot. That bottom hook is a motherfucker, ain’t it?”

  Sisterhood aside, the bathroom experience is making me feel fat, and plain, and suddenly very old. At twenty-three, I’m one of the senior Betties present, and a lot of these chicks are acting like this is just another night, one more rock star, one more dressing room, one more day in a life that plays out like one long Warrant video. I hate my life! I hate my chubby thighs and Snoopy nose and four years wasted in college when I should have been prowling for rock stars! Damn these girls! Where are their parents, and why aren’t they keeping a better eye on them? I don’t need the competition! I can see the ending now, with me muttering like the villain in a Scooby Doo cartoon— “Glenn Danzig? Yeah! I could’ve had him, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids!” I continue dutifully helping with zippers and sharing mascara, barely containing my burgeoning resentment against my new best friends.

  Self-pitying interlude completed, I pack up my tools and charge out of the restroom loaded for bear. In the Ballroom, my self-esteem is resuscitated by the number of envious glances I notice aimed at my satin square. Back straight, I nudge the passless peons out of the way and strut over to a roadie.

  “Excuse me,” I say, tapping him on the shoulder. He turns around and stares straight down between my breasts for a full ten seconds. Impatiently, I duck down so that I am staring him in the eye and wave my backstage pass at him.

  “Could you please tell me where the sluts are supposed to go?”

  He looks at me a little funny but points me in the direction of the backstage door. Several of the other sluts are already there, along with a few guys who look to be record store cashiers or college DJs—you know the look: “I make minimum wage, collect action figures, and live in my mother’s basement, but man, am I cool.”

  I take my place in the growing queue of sycophantic hopefuls. There we stand, waiting for our audience with the Satanic Studmuffin and the lesser of the evils, Eerie, John, and Chuck. Eyeing one of the record store clerks, I am reminded of a visit to Harmony Hut the summer before I started high school. Delighted to find a copy of Johnny Thunders’s So Alone, I handed over eight dollars of my hard-earned babysitting money to a Ric Ocasek look-alike who sneered, “I thought little girls your age were supposed to listen to Rick Springfield.” (I didn’t think of the perfect comeback until I was halfway through the mall: “I thought old men your age were supposed to make more than four dollars an hour.”) After a while, a manager type sticks his head out of the dressing room and looks around. A few of the College DJs make a break for the door, but the guy waves them off.

  “Just the ladies for now, please! Only the girls!”

  In we herd, wagging our tails behind us. I had been hoping to stand back and observe the bacchanal sociologically, from a distance, but in the tiny dressing room, there are no neutral corners. The other Betties are mobbing Glenn Danzig over by the buffet table, so I sneak past and position myself atop the wardrobe chest, behind a rack of shiny black clothes. Looking down, I see that I am not alone. Bassist Eerie Von is sitting in the corner, putting on his boots.

  “Hi,” I say, for lack of anything more original.

  “Hello.” Eerie does not look up. He seems intent on avoiding the entire fleshfest. Thus snubbed, I return to my observations.

  Guitarist John Christ and drummer Chuck Biscuits are sitting on folding metal chairs against a far wall, talking to a roadie about the inferior sound system at the Ballroom. They don’t seem too offended at being ignored by the swarming sluts. Peering around the comely mob, I see that Glenn looks none too upset about the situation himself. He’s signing body parts and posing for Polaroids with his arm around each girl. He looks less like the Antichrist than a somewhat sweaty, tattooed, leather-clad Care Bear— Beelze-Bear. I’m disappointed but at the same time relieved to see that there is a very regimented feel to the Betty-greeting process here. Where the Clash’s dressing room was more like a free-for-all party, this seems more like a receiving line at a wedding reception. My fears of being tossed aside as a pretender and an inferior specimen wane with the realization that, for Danzig, this is all business. With that realization in mind, I get the brilliant idea that instead of flirting, I could schmooze! The first schmooze of the trip! I take a deep breath and try and switch over from Bettie mode to schmooze mode.

  As
I prepare myself for the schmooze and the girls depart one by one with their snapshots, I am able to get a clearer view of the buffet table. Well, at least this should be good, I think. Surely Mister Lucifuge will have something sinister on his rider, something gory and shriek-worthy. Something to write home about. Raw meat? Lamb’s hearts? Sour mash drunk from a virgin’s skull? I scan the length of the table hopefully. At one end there are dozens of bottles of Snapple, all flavors, iced down in a large tub. Lining the rest of the length of the table are several silver, cauldron-sized bowls. The first contains pretzels. The second, M&Ms. The third is full of Reese’s Cups, and the final bowl is brimming with ...Gummi Bears.

  I slide down from the wardrobe chest and move closer, to be sure. Yes. Gummi Bears. Hardly the type of fare one would expect from the man who wrote “Brains at every single meal/Can’t we please have some guts.” I keep an eye on the bowl, hoping that Glenn will at least spear some of the little bears with his pointy fingernails and chomp ’em down, but no such luck. In fact, none of the band touches any of the food.

  I glance back toward the corner and see that Eerie’s been discovered. The red-bra-and-nose-rings slut from the front row has him cornered against the wardrobe chest. She’s talking a mile a minute about a green velvet dress that cost her seventy dollars in Phoenix. Eerie seems very interested in the hinge on his folding chair.

  “Really ...seventy dollars,” he is saying as he examines the hinge.

  I watch Eerie try to blow the girl off for an agonizing five minutes before I notice that Glenn Danzig is making his way around the room and he’s headed my way. Ever the gentleman, he’s introducing himself to all of the assembled beauties, shaking hands, and generally giving good schmooze. I estimate that I have another three minutes to decide how I want to play my big chance. Realistic about my Betty ranking—I’m definitely looking at “Miss Congeniality” at best, given the competition. What I really hope to do is schmooze like hell, make an impression, and maybe come out of this with one juicy contact, one name, one number, one industry guy, magazine editor, or somebody I can call when I get to L.A. and say, just casually, “by the way, I was in Danzig’s dressing room a couple of weeks ago and Glenn says hey.” I watch him moving down the line, kissing Betties, shaking hands, smiling and nodding as he pretends to enjoy himself. I try and think of a snappy opening comment but it’s no use; I think the leather bra is cutting off the oxygen supply to my brain. Sidetracked, it occurs to me that maybe that’s the problem with all Betties ...maybe they are all rocket scientists when dressed in less constrictive clothing. God knows I can barely put sentences together with my boobs cinched up this tight.