by Mike Edison
Malasaña sprang up around Calle Palma, a strip of rock ’n’ roll bars in the center of town, a few blocks north of Puerta del Sol. Every bar had a DJ spinning records. That’s the way it was done. There was no such thing as a jukebox in Spain. Even tossing a CD on the house hi-fi was considered déclassé.
There was another music bar every few meters: El Flamingo, La Vaca Austera, and, around the corner, the Tupperware and the legendary La Vía Láctea (The Milky Way), all blasting punk and garage rock. And there were dozens more on top of those. Across the Plaza del Dos de Mayo was El Sol, which had a sprawling patio in front of the bar. In the summer, everyone you ever met in Madrid would be there drinking Mahou, the preferred local beer. It was the punk rock version of European café society.
The Pleasure Fuckers were the kings of Malasaña. Every week Turmix spun records at various bars, holding court in the DJ booth, chopping giant white lines, and inhaling pints of vodka and orange soda.
At the end of the night we herded over to the Agapo, a dive that didn’t even bother to open till 1:00 a.m. The bathroom was just a hole in the floor. You had to be pretty careful when you were drunk—and there was no other possible explanation for being there—or you’d end up knee-deep in some truly nasty bog water.
When we arrived in 1992, Malasaña was still wide-open. Hashish was smoked freely everywhere—the sticky black Moroccan was ubiquitous and plenty cheap—and most of the bars were functioning coke dens.
When the Raunch Hands were on the road in Spain, Turmix would come along on the dates he had booked, and he made sure that we ate in spectacular restaurants. Each region offered its own specialty, and we were as eager to try everything as he was to order it for us. In Valencia, we ate the traditional paella of chicken, rabbit, green beans, and red pepper. No seafood in that paella—that would make it paella de mariscos, and while it is also worth traveling across the Atlantic for, it’s not the real, authentic paella valenciana. The locals could be downright militant about it. Later I would discover fideuá negra, which is like paella, only instead of being made from saffron rice, it is made from thin rice noodles and stained black with squid ink. In León we ate the morcilla, the powerful blood sausage, best sliced and grilled and, paired with the devastating, near-indigo Ribera del Duero wine, a combination decidedly not for the weak. At least one Raunch Hand woke up with the sheets covered in the stuff. In Galicia, in the northwest, just above Portugal, the mariscos were abundant, and we’d feast on langostas, centollas, and nécoras—crustaceans that looked positively prehistoric. We’d wash down that whole mess with young green wine drunk from wide, shallow cups that always seemed to refill themselves.
Before every show, there would be sparkling lines of dust to get us going, and again before the encore, and then the marcha, the Spanish pub crawl, would begin. Every city, even the smallest pueblo, had at least one world-class rock ’n’ roll bar, a decadent cave run by the local lunatic-slash-connoisseur. In some places, like Alicante, it seemed that an entire barrio was dedicated to Johnny Thunders and the Ramones.
Later we would discover that Turmix’s largesse was not so much generosity as it was embezzlement. Being the booker, he had been doing business at the end of the night with the local promoter and then paying us himself. A lot of times we’d have pulled in a thousand dollars at the door and he’d tell us he collected only five hundred. And we’d still be chipping in for the drugs, for the party, for the extra round of exotic, spiny-backed lobster. We had no idea that Turmix was making a small fortune, by punk rock standards, on our backs. A few years later it became clear to everyone that this was the way he did business, and bands ran to find new Spanish bookers. But back then, still in the dark about his transgressions, we were flying like intercontinental ballistic missiles jacked on rocket fuel, and we never looked back. How much better could life possibly be?
The only rule was always bring your sunglasses with you, because at some point you’d be walking out of a bar and facing the sunrise, and then two things would happen. One, you’d be miserable because your drug-addled brain would not welcome recalibrating for daylight and would punish you mercilessly; and two, everyone would make fun of you because you were stupid enough to forget your shades, and then you’d really feel bad.
We had been advised that it would be very difficult to find apartments in Madrid. It was like New York or Paris that way, or at least that is what we were told. But against the mañana, mañana attitude that permeated a country that shut down in the middle of the day to take a three-hour siesta, a band of hustlers from New York City had no problem getting things done. We asked around and, pretending to be exchange students, checked an off-campus housing board at the local university. In just a few days I was moving into a place in the trendy Moncloa district, sharing with a couple of real students. My part of the rent was U.S. $280. It was a nice flat. A family had lived there before, and my bedroom had been their little boy’s and was decorated with choo-choo train wallpaper. The landlord offered to tear the paper down and paint the walls for me, but I liked it just the way it was. Mariconda had also found a place right away—rooming with a twenty-something-year-old acidhead who kept him up all night having loud sex with his girlfriend. That was a good thing, too. What with all of our sax players back in the States annoying other people, Mariconda needed someone to piss him off. It actually makes him happy.
Chandler, however, had gone missing.
Always a prolific drinker, Chandler had been moving south toward “unreliable.” And then he was just gone. Later, after days of phone calling and the kind of worrying that would have been applauded even by a seasoned pro like my grandmother, we found out that he had fucked off to Majorca with his girlfriend. It would be months before we saw him again.
With the Raunch Hands’ plans having gone the way of the Spanish Empire, Mariconda immediately joined a local band and began gigging with them. I just hung around doing a whole lot of nothing and enjoying the days—a favorite Spanish pastime.
Sometimes I spent my days at the art museums. The Prado is home to Hieronymus Bosch’s super-psychedelic triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. It depicts, among other joys, a tableau of a half-tree/half-frog astronaut creature preparing to devour a naked woman; an angry rabbit torturing a man trapped inside of a giant drum; bird-headed monsters measuring their prey; men holding their ears as musical instruments crash down around them (and one fellow bent over with a flute up his ass); and someone vomiting into what looks like the loo at the Agapo. I spent a lot of time meditating on this masterpiece, trying to work out whether I simply enjoyed his depraved vision for its own merits or whether I related to it on a more profound, personal level. Obviously there were a few things I still needed to work out.
When the Pleasure Fuckers came by and gave their pitch for me to join them, I agreed without hesitation. Their mercenary drummer had bailed, his name forever to be cursed, and I had two weeks to learn the set before my debut at Espárrago Rock, the annual asparagus festival in Granada, in front of about five thousand craven Pleasure Fucker fans. It would be a smash.
And thus began the New Spanish Revolution. The Fuckers gigged constantly—for the next three years we averaged about a hundred shows a year—and had the same fireballing aesthetics as the Raunch Hands. Every Thursday we’d pile into the van for a weekend’s worth of shows. If we weren’t in Catalunya, tearing up Barcelona and Figueres (where Dalí was born), we’d be in Andalucía, hitting Córdoba, Sevilla, and Jerez. We tore through La Mancha, Extremadura, Valencia, Asturias . . . there was no region in Spain that was immune from our attack. This was an action band: the campaign never stopped. To paraphrase Ulysses S. Grant, we were a verb.
We took off across France and made the European circuit. A lot of old Sharky’s Machine and Raunch Hands fans came out to see me with the Pleasure Fuckers, and it was extremely rewarding to know that someone was paying attention. We played up and around the Adriatic Sea, in Italy, and at a heavy metal club in the war-torn former Yugloslavia, in
Croatia. After that show we ate fresh venison and went to a casino and played blackjack.
Under the European Community, Europe was a lot more open than it had been in the Sharky’s Machine days, when we would be rifled by customs agents pretty much every time we crossed a border. In the old days, the rule was to always get rid of any and all drugs before we left one country for the next. Which meant that some days we were more fucked-up than others. No one would actually throw the drugs out.
With the new European Union, we’d roll up to the border and almost always get waved through. So we became a little less vigilant. We were never holding anything on our persons, but if you needed a little pick-me-up, inside the big boom cymbal stand back in my trap case would not have been a bad place to look. But no one was ever interested in searching us. They didn’t even want to see our passports. Until we got to Austria, where they were so delighted that Team Pleasure Fucker had finally arrived that they rolled the van up over a mechanic’s pit so that a task force of narcotics agents could search the underside of the vehicle while their colleagues sniffed out the interior.
The Austrian customs squad looked as if they had bought their uniforms at a Third Reich going-out-of-business sale, and I have seen smaller and less fevered crews working the pits at Indy. One guy was taking some sort of sample from the inside of the windows with a bizarre rubber suction device connected to an LED readout, which would apparently tell him if there was any residue left from the forty thousand joints that had been smoked in there. None of us had ever seen that before. It was horrifying. If they said, “Jawohl! Our THC measuring device has detected the presence of Illegal Action,” it was going to be pretty hard to refute. I just hoped that thing had been set to “zero” before they started.
Another ambitious young government charge was emptying the ashtrays; still another was vacuuming the seats and carpet, looking for evidence. This was not good. We had already given the van a good once-over ourselves, but who knew if there was a stray roach or a speck of powder between the seat cushions? There could have been a body under the bench seat for all anyone knew. All sorts of kooky things went on in that van.
Having struck out in the interior, they motioned for us to open up the back. At that point we had two worries: one, the cymbal stand, which contained enough speed to keep the Vienna Philharmonic wired through an entire Ring cycle; and two, the huge amount of merchandise we were carrying—boxes and boxes of Pleasure Fuckers CDs that had been printed in the Czech Republic, which we were hauling back to Madrid. Forget about jail—if they forced the issue, we would have to pay several thousand dollars of duty on them. Turns out they weren’t that smart. Creepy drug cops never are.
They started unloading the van. The Pleasure Fuckers backline was no joke: HiWatt and Marshall guitar amps, an SVT bass amp that dwarfed Turmix, guitars and drums, all in heavy-duty road cases. It was a lot of work, and they did not look amused. They hauled everything out, including about twenty boxes of CDs, until they found what, apparently, they had been looking for the whole time: an egg-shaped set of Russian nesting dolls, painted like Communist leaders.
You know the kind—on the outside was Yeltsin, and then you’d open it up and there would be Gorbachev, and then Brezhnev, all the way down to Lenin. It was a souvenir somebody had picked up in Prague and had thrown into the back of the van.
The Chief Customs Dude shook it knowingly. The dolls rattled conspiratorially. Evidently this was where we kept the stash. He motioned for Austria’s Finest to gather ’round and watch him unveil the bindle of high-grade smack that was going to make him Employee of the Week. He dramatically twisted Yeltsin open at the waist to reveal . . . the next doll! Of course there was nothing to be found. By the time he got to Stalin, the Chief had been exposed as an idiot in front of his posse of no-neck henchmen, and the dolls were laid out in order, like Mother Goose and her Commie Children. We were all cracking up at their Keystone Kops routine (actually, more like Hogan’s Heroes), until the Chief, tomato red and about to burst like a stuffed cabbage, yelled something in haute Deutsche that obviously meant “get the fuck out of here.” Meanies. They didn’t even have the decency to put the dolls back together.
But the van was cleaner than it had been in months.
11
THE CREATURE FROM
TEMPLE BETH SHALOM
GG Allin died last night. The phone started ringing early this morning, first with people from New York wanting to know if I had heard the news, and then people from various fanzines wanting to interview me about GG. I had been in Madrid for about a year, and hardly anyone from New York ever called. Now it seemed that everyone wanted to talk to me. I politely declined. I didn’t feel like throwing any meat to the animals.
GG was last seen tumbling down Avenue B in the East Village, buck naked (except for his combat boots), covered in his own filth. Moments before, he had been performing in a dump called the Gas Station. And as usual, after a few numbers they shut the power off and threw his ass out onto the street, where he was followed by the horde of sycophantic punk rock clowns that usually hovered around him, proclaiming him as their deity. Later he went to a party and snorted a bunch of heroin. He woke up dead.
I never knew GG to be a hard-core junkie. I’d seen him shoot dope, but he was just showing off. He never once said to me, “Hey, let’s cop some drugs.” He hated pot, but would pretty much do any other drug that was offered to him. He had no boundaries. He would try anything on a bet. He was impervious to pain and he was not afraid to die. All of this made him terribly dangerous but also wildly attractive. No sane person could ever come close to his complete disregard for his own well-being. And he could play it as a joke—like putting his head through a glass window for a cheap laugh.
The second time we played at the Lismar Lounge, an idiot fan looking to score some points gave GG some dope to snort, and it was a disaster. He was so out of it he barely performed, and instead rolled around for a while, getting tangled up in the mic cord. And then we all went home. That night GG committed the ultimate crime: he was boring. Heroin is really good for that, which is not the only reason why I never touch the stuff, although it’s one of the best.
Years later VH-1 named GG’s final gig the fourth “freakiest concert moment ever,” topping other “freaky moments” like Alice Cooper being pelted with a pineapple upside-down cake, and Quiet Riot gigging at a nudist camp. And that is exactly why I didn’t feel like talking to a bunch of fawning fanzine geeks before GG was even buried: people who didn’t know him always treated him like a cartoon, and I was sick of it. Freaky? Fuck you. A man was dead.
He had a lot of hangers-on, but I don’t think he had a lot of real friends he could trust or talk to on a level beyond his public persona. He was too funny and too smart to take himself too seriously, but sometimes he needed to be reminded. In front of a crowd of adoring fans he would strut like the leper messiah, but when he was getting shitfaced with me over a bottle of Jim Beam, we could just laugh about what an incredible asshole he was.
He had been promising for years to kill himself onstage—the ultimate rock ’n’ roll death. Instead he ended up an accidental overdose, passed out on someone’s couch—the ultimate rock ’n’ roll cliché. He had always said, “With GG Allin, you don’t get what you want, you get what you deserve.”
When I heard the news, I was certainly not surprised. The only shock was that he lasted as long as he did. He was thirty-six. His stories of being beaten up after gigs—by angry “fans,” by cops, by frat boys who came specifically to kick the shit out of him—were legend. I had played only five or six shows in his band and my life had been threatened on several occasions. One night in North Carolina some angry concertgoers followed us to our motel with baseball bats. It was a bad scene—you know you are about to enter a world of pain when GG’s the one calling the cops.
GG Allin was a classic American Story. He grew up in a log cabin in New Hampshire without electricity. His father named him Jesus Christ Allin. “GG” w
as short for “Jesus,” what his brother Merle called him when they were kids. (Later his mother changed his name to Kevin so that he might have a shot at a normal childhood, but it didn’t quite work out that way: Kevin used to go to school in drag and was routinely beaten up by rednecks and jocks.) His father was a religious kook who never let anyone speak in the house after dark.
GG called me often from the Michigan correctional institution where he had been incarcerated for two years on an assault charge brought by a woman he’d had sex with. I liked getting his calls, always collect. That was a long stretch, but GG told me that it saved his life: “I was a wreck, physically and emotionally. I had to get off the street.” According to GG, and I believe him, the sex was rough but 100-percent consensual. The women that were attracted to him were not looking to hold hands in the park. While the judge acknowledged that there were inconsistencies in the woman’s account, ultimately GG pleaded guilty.
GG’s mistake was that he later wrote a fan letter to John Hinckley, the fellow who shot Ronald Reagan. When the Secret Service ran GG’s name through the computer, standard procedure for vetting correspondence with would-be presidential assassins, the thing coughed and sputtered and lit up like a pinball machine. For the good of God-fearing citizens everywhere, they mobilized a task force and tossed GG into the clink. According to GG, “The public defender they gave me might as well have been working for the prosecution. He hated me.”
The last time I saw GG was at Rhea’s house. Rhea liked GG and had insisted that I invite him over. He had been out of jail for less than a year and was in New York to do a gig with Dee Dee Ramone—also a man of questionable judgment.
We were on the roof, barbecuing. It was a pleasant scene: both of us wearing aprons and tall chef hats, flipping burgers, and hamming it up for a bunch of friends who had come over for an afternoon cookout. GG was all up in arms over John Waters’s latest flick, Hairspray. He thought Waters had sold out. “I liked it,” GG confessed, “but it wasn’t what I go to a John Waters movie to see.” He asked me if I wanted to be on the guest list for the show the next day, and I told him I wasn’t going. “We’re having a nice time. It was really good to see you. Why would I want to ruin that vibe by going to one of your gigs?” He laughed. “Yeah,” he told me, “yer prob’ly right.”