by Mike Edison
The dean emphatically did not share my enthusiasm for films like Dirty Harry and director Don Siegel. “He is an action director,” he would tell me patiently, as if he were speaking to a child, while handing me a book about Elia Kazan.
A lot of the stuff I was being marginalized for liking—surf music, punk rock, martial arts epics, gangster movies, gore fests, the talking ape genre—would later be co-opted by mainstream Hollywood and finally allowed into the canon by snooty cinephiles trying to keep up with their pop culture counterparts, but in 1982 at NYU, since I didn’t think Rules of the Game was the best movie ever made and my father wasn’t an industry Jew bequeathing me some sort of legacy as the next Spielberg, I was starting to get the notion that I didn’t belong. It did not augur well that my idea for a winning student film was a violent skinhead zombie flick.
The star of my first picture would be my best pot-smoking buddy, Dave Insurgent, singer for anarchist “peace punk” band Reagan Youth.
Reagan Youth was hugely popular, one of the first and best of the New York City thrash bands. Befitting his role as a hard-core matinee idol, Dave’s idea of prêt-à-porter was combat boots, a Che Guevara T-shirt, and chains hanging off of torn military fatigues, crowned by the kind of dreadlocks that only a nice Jewish boy from Rego Park, Queens, could cultivate. Onstage Dave led the charge, singing “We Are Reagan Youth,” doing a rigid goose step, and tossing off Nazi salutes like the bastard child of Charlie Chaplin and Frankenstein’s monster.
No matter how ironic it was meant to be, all that Sieg Heiling would not have pleased his parents, who were Holocaust survivors. Fortunately, they had no real idea of what Dave was really up to, except that when it came to contemporary preppy fashions, he had somehow missed the boat. He once took me out to Queens to meet them. Dave’s mom made us Dave’s favorite, fried eggplant, sliced thin and crispy. It was delicious. But the real highlight was his dad’s home movies of professional wrestling from the early 1950s. He was so proud. He had come to America and had seen the great Gorgeous George at Madison Square Garden!
Gorgeous George, of course, was wrestling’s first sissy superstar, a bad guy of Alpha Centauri magnitude. In the 1940s and ’50s, when professional wrestling dominated the brand-new medium of television, he was the most famous man in America. He wore lavish fur coats and had a valet who would attend to his long blond tresses with a silver-handled horsehair brush and spray him with lilac perfume from an atomizer bulb. Fans packed arenas to watch him prance around and, they hoped, get his faggot ass stomped. He got so much heat from audiences that he had to travel with armed bodyguards. George was a direct influence not only on Liberace, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, and Little Richard, but also on Bob Dylan, who called him “a man as great as his race.”
After the wrestling movie, over Dave’s strong protests, Dad showed us his other great opus, a film of Dave’s bar mitzvah, circa 1976. He may have been proud of his home movies of Gorgeous George, but looking at pictures of his son reading the haftarah and dancing awkwardly with a roomful of unformed teenage girls, he was so filled with emotion that he cried. When it was time for scenes of Dave in a leisure suit holding court at a papier-mâché monstrosity called Dave’s Disco Bar, I considered joining him.
Everything in Dave’s world was measured on his proprietary, Dada-esque scale of “hard” and “soft.” All-natural Tripple Berry juice was hard. Mayor McCheese was soft. (Dave was a vegetarian, hence things like juice, sprouts, and tofu were “hard.” His greatest fantasy was to pick up a girl at the cafeteria salad bar.) Dave was a big fan of 1970s rock stupidity, way ahead of his time in the stoner irony department. Who did I think was harder, Uriah Heep or Gentle Giant? Who was softer, the bass player in Kansas or the bass player in Styx? I don’t think there is anybody on the planet who could answer those questions, let alone have the strength to ponder them. But indisputably, Joe Franklin was the hardest.
Joe Franklin was a batty old talk-show host with the pallor of a wax dummy and hair like a jerry-rigged carport. Incoherent and nasal, Joe sounded like someone’s brain-damaged uncle who had been given a TV show because no one knew what else to do with him. He spoke. Like this. “Our next guest is Bigger than Big. He is Big, Big, Big, Big, Big.” Tiny Tim had been a guest on the show “Many. Many. Many. Many. Times.”
Joe was a nostalgia freak, the self-declared King of Memory Lane. Once upon a time, Joe would always remind his audience—his show had run since before the Jack Paar days of television—he had a kid named Barbra Streisand on the show. More recently his guests would be old-time talent scouts with wide ties and hair growing out of their ears, animal trainers, grade-Z cabaret singers, and an endless parade of self-promoting weirdos who worked on Times Square, where Joe had a real Broadway Danny Rose kind of office, jam-packed with memorabilia, decaying film reels, and eight-by-tens of every Big Star (and loser) on the planet.
Joe was worshipped by a cult of sallow New Yorkers who grew up festering in the blue flicker of black-and-white TV. The Ramones loved him and were guests on his show. Ditto “Weird” Al Yankovic.
Dave would call me at 2:00 a.m. and demand that I wake up and turn the TV on to see some retard of a magician whom Joe had introduced as “a legend in the business” before bringing out a bug-eyed hair weave of an algebra teacher who moonlighted at kids’ parties. “This guy is the hardest of the hard,” Dave would declare.
On Halloween, our freshman year, we went to a costume contest hosted by Black Sabbath. If you showed up at Tower Records appropriately dressed, you’d get to meet the band, and the winners would get tickets to their show. Dave went dressed as the Grand Wizard of Wrestling. I went as a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra, a costume I built around my bright green high school graduation gown, presciently saved for exactly this purpose, topped off with a solar space hat I built out of a bathing cap and a package of knitting needles. Our pal Paula came along as a freestylin’ heavy metal queen, with some moose antlers duct-taped to her head. Naturally, they loved us.
This was the Black Sabbath B Team. Ozzy Osbourne had been tossed out, too drunk and fucked-up to carry on, and replaced by Deep Purple front man Ian Gillan. Bev Bevan, once the drummer for the Electric Light Orchestra, had replaced Sabbath stick man Bill Ward, who was in no shape to play the drums with a professional rock ’n’ roll band.
Dave brought along a Bible to get autographed, and when we got up to the table to meet the band and have our pictures taken for Circus magazine, they were only too happy to comply. We had, by far, the weirdest costumes they had ever seen.
Ian Gillan scrawled his name, followed by original Sabbath members Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler. When Dave got to Bev Bevan, he stopped. “Hey,” he asked, “weren’t you in ELO?” Bevan beamed. Someone was paying attention! “Then you can’t sign,” Dave told him. “You are too soft.” They gave us all tickets anyway.
Our movie (we never called it a “film”) was going to be called Rock, Rebel, Rock and it would be a post-apocalyptic punk rock spoof of 1950s Alan Freed rock ’n’ roll movies like Rock, Rock, Rock and Go, Johnny, Go!
Dave would play teen idol Johnny Rebel, which was just the most contrived, idiotic, and obnoxious name we could come up with for our “James Dean Meets the Mummy” character. The gist of our story was this: Sometime in the indeterminate future, in Anytown, U.S.A. (the name of a popular Reagan Youth song), a sleepy little hamlet whose mayor was a brain in a dish, and whose chief of police was a ventriloquist dummy hooked up to an ominous mainframe computer, rock ’n’ roll was about to be made illegal. The town had been besieged by a horde of skinhead zombies, and Johnny Rebel and his band the Rebels were getting the blame. Empowered by the Spliff of Great Knowledge, Johnny takes on the Monsters and saves the town. The Evil Brain and Scary-Looking Dummy are ousted; rock ’n’ roll, and the world, are saved.
When I pitched this project in our production class—it had to be presented in front of students and approved by the professor—I was met with blank stares. Apparently, brains in dishes did
not resonate with NYU undergrads as much as, say, E.T. What’s your budget? was the first question. Fair enough. Well, we had an allotment of film and equipment time that came with the class. That, and a few bucks I could scrape up to keep everyone fed on cold cuts while we worked (and some reefer for the Spliff of Great Knowledge) was going to be it. We were going to shoot “reversal film” to save money. This was not unheard of for low-budget student projects. Reversal film meant that the same film that came out of the camera is what you would edit and project. Normally you would use “negative film,” make a print and edit that, then cut the negative to match and make another print. I didn’t have the money for all of that lab work, and had no idea how to raise it. This come-shot of a film, a blast of brains in dishes, zombies, teenage punks, and all-knowing Rastas needed to be made now. Why complicate things?
I remember one of the other projects pitched in that class. Someone wanted to make a film about her grandfather, this great man who even at seventy-six years old got up every day to jog. The budget was ten grand. The class cooed, the project was immediately approved, and I wanted to puke. I asked the girl where she got ten grand to shoot a portrait of an old man. “From the old man,” she told me. Duh. This was not my world. I told my father I could use some help. He told me I needed to grow up. Some encouragement would certainly have helped, but the truth is that I was totally unprepared for college. I was neither humble nor hardworking enough to make it work.
I spent the summer of 1984 driving the chase car in a caravan of hippies, punks, and freaks, and performing a “comedy” act strategically designed to piss them off.
It was Dave’s idea to bring me along on the Rock Against Reagan tour, a spin-off of the Rock Against Racism tours, one of the last hurrahs of the Yippies, the late-sixties poster boys for radical politics.
The Yippies boasted such heroes as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. In 1968 they ran a pig for president (they actually had a real live pig, a pink one, named Pigasus) and were instrumental in creating havoc that year at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Dave was great pals with their remaining crew, who usually holed up at their Dr. Caligari–like safe house on Bleecker Street. He took a lot of the militant idealism in Reagan Youth from their legacy of lunacy and their seemingly undying dedication to undermining the United States government. They also organized the May pot parade, Dave’s very favorite day of the year. He loved to smoke pot. He called it “busting corn,” as in “let’s go bust some corn.” We were always busting corn, more often than not in five-dollar increments bought from a fake candy store on Avenue C.
Since I’d grown up on a steady diet of punk rock and 1960s counterculture, a grassroots rock ’n’ roll tour to jar American youth out of their comatose state—and put the rest of the country on notice— made perfect sense to me.
I was far more terrified of the ultimate tragedy happening as a result of Reagan’s Cold War arms race with the Soviets than I ever have been in a post-9/11 world. Reagan may have seemed like a nice guy— he was subversively charming and aw-shucks polite—and he had undeniably astonishing charisma, as if they had invented television just for him. But behind the scenes he was a venomous, frothing fanatic, seething with hatred, blind to a global AIDS epidemic, and balls-deep in a gooey love affair with Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. Reagan was a warmongering, minority-bashing despiser of all people poor, hungry, or sick; an enemy of women’s rights, civil rights, and especially antitrust laws; an anti-environment just-do-whatever-the-fuck-you-want whore for big business; a smoke-and-mirrors trickle-down supply-side huckster who ratcheted up the national deficit to galactic proportions with tax cuts, unchecked nuclear proliferation, and a little help from the “Star Wars” antimissile dodge. He fostered a mind-numbing might-is-right culture of greed where Beemer-driving douche bags in alligator shirts ruled the roost and having a brain was not merely frowned upon but considered a liability.
I am also fairly certain that he was responsible for all those crappy synth-driven power ballads that became the cornerstone of corporate rock in the early eighties, although I couldn’t prove it.
The Rock Against Reagan main tour vehicle was a 1972 International Harvester school bus with most of the seats torn out and replaced with mattresses. It was a teenage stoner dream. When we got to the West Coast, there was never less than a couple of shopping bags full of weed on board, donated by the Humboldt County Growers’Association.
I was driving a Ford Escort that someone needed moved from Washington to San Francisco and, thankfully, was in no great hurry to get it there—a fine thing, too, since it shook violently at sixty-five mph. It had to be the most unsafe vehicle ever to hump an American highway. I could have crushed it with my hands like a paper cup.
Dave had conscripted me to open the shows for Reagan Youth after witnessing my latest NYU talent-show outrage. Posing as a twisted Borscht Belt comedian, I didn’t tell jokes so much as I just drunkenly barked the most tasteless, offensive shit I could come up with. “A bum stopped me on the way to work. So I fucked him up the ass!” Bada-boom! I was bombed, as was my friend Cindy, who sat behind me with a snare drum, cymbal, and lipstick smeared all over her face, punctuating my idiocy with sloppy rim shots. After sodomizing the homeless, I moved on to a series of dead Jew jokes (“I got six million of ’em!”). The reaction was better than I ever could have dreamed: a nearly instantaneous tsunami of flying drinks, and my old friends, the best and bravest of NYU’s rent-a-cop program, trying to restore order. When I got hit in the head with someone’s keys, I stood up on a table, and stealing a line wholesale from Iggy Pop (cf. Metallic KO, the third-greatest live album of all time), declared, “I AM THE GREATEST.” That pissed everyone off even more than the Holocaust crack.
I am a big fan of the riot in the theater—Igor Stravinsky pulled that trick in Paris in 1913 when he premiered Rite of Spring, and Tristan Tzara caused pandemonium at a Surrealist rally in the 1920s when he declared that he would write the greatest poem of all time by pulling words out of a hat. But they were smart people. I was just an obnoxious teenager trying to piss off a roomful of matriculating sheep. It was like ringing a bell.
Dave loved it. One of his main messages with Reagan Youth had always been Liberate yourself. Don’t react—that’s what they want you to do. You are being handled. You are being controlled. Do not be manipulated. Think for yourself.
Playing among a crowd of earnest, humorless bands and dyed-in-the-wool liberal speakers who all sounded like they were reading term papers or articles right out of The Nation, I was about as welcome as a yeast infection. I wielded my green madras jacket, slicked-back hair, and fat cigar like talismans of great power. In front of thousands of people at the July 4 Rock Against Reagan rally in Washington, D.C., the joke took on an evil political bent. After a few cracks about ass-fucking indigents and advocating for the chemical deforestation of Nicaragua and El Salvador, a real sore spot among leftists in those Reagan years, I’d move into my fail-safe material: “Wanna end Apartheid? Then just kill all the blacks!” Bada-boom! In this case, the rim shot was hit by Rick, the Reagan Youth drummer, an African American punk rocker dressed like a down-market Jimi Hendrix, which should have been a hint that this was all a great big put-on. But the drinks and bottles just kept on flying.
We pulled this stunt in front of enormous crowds. In San Francisco, outside of the Democratic National Convention at the Moscone Center, where the Democrats were busy nominating yet another pathetic, unelectable team of schlubs in Walter “Fritz” Mondale and Geraldine “My Husband Is Not a Mobster” Ferraro, thousands came out to see a free show and rally headlined by the Dead Kennedys. A few weeks later we’d do it all again in Dallas, outside of the Republican Convention.
San Francisco was the first time I ever saw disposable plastic handcuffs. There were massive—legal—protests in the street, but the SFPD had zero patience for any such shenanigans. The cops rode modified dirt bikes, ripping through the crowd, picking off protesters and tossing them
in the jug with abandon. It was hard to believe that in San Francisco, a town so liberal it makes New York City seem like Nuremberg, the local gendarmes hadn’t developed any tolerance for marches and dissent. They were out to squash the freak show and keep it off the nightly news.
On the way to Texas, in Taos, New Mexico, Dave, Reagan Youth guitar player Paul Cripple, and I dropped some acid and spent the night in the natural hot springs that shot under the Rio Grande, laughing under a starry, luminous night sky. No self-respecting acidhead would have failed to be moved by the experience.
It made us thirsty.
“Do you think this water is radioactive?” This wasn’t that far from where they used to test atomic bombs.
“Sure, but no more so than we are at this point.”
We thought about that for a while and then drank from the river. Still, a beer would have been nice, so we headed back to the school bus, where there was an outside chance there were a few cold ones left in the cooler. (At one point I was so stoned that I had convinced myself of the existence of a natural beer spring. You could see it, right?)
On the way, we ran into the Peace Pole Guy, an Age of Aquarius drug casualty with a Moses-like beard and a seemingly endless supply of tie-dyed shirts who had been carrying (what else?) a “peace pole” around the country, praying for nuclear disarmament and, I am sure, many other positive things. Many. Many. Many. Positive. Things.