Hollywood: Rock Of Ages

by Chris Solberg

  Dominic had that distinct East Coast /Brooklyn look; eyes that drooped down at the corners, big honking Yonkers nose, pouty fish lips and no chin. Kind of like a heavy-metal Paul McCartny with a unibrow. Like all guys from New York, everything New York ruled, and everything from California sucked. I knew a few other people from New York but you never knew if they would get along because it wasn’t clear if they were a Rangers or Islanders fan. These guys rolled into Hollywood like they owned the place, but in fact, were a little behind the times with their haystack hair and spandex pants. So 1984! Thankfully by the end of the summer, they had adjusted and became LA.

  For some reason, Dominic and the guys took a liking to us. Maybe they were fascinated by our surfer accents and love for fireworks. “You guys from San Diego are fucking crazy!” When they had after-parties at their apartment, we held up with the best of them which earned us respect. In those days, bands felt it was necessary to all live in one apartment. Somehow this solidified the band and formed a camaraderie between the guys. I guess it made some sense. Of course, this also made having serious girlfriends basically impossible, but maybe that was the idea! We got along great with those guys and we would always go to their shows, even though they never went to ours. They preferred to play the Roxy, because they had a bit of a superior attitude. I’ll chalk this up to being an East Coast thing. But the Roxy had strict booking policies and this resulted in Rock Asylum playing gigs only once every three months or so. This was suicide in Hollywood. Plus, they absolutely refused to play the FM Station or anywhere else in the Valley. As a result, they just didn’t play out that often. I liked hanging out with them and hearing all their great New York stories. Our apartment and their place were basically the two major party pads of the building, so we could always count on each other if you felt like hanging out. For Rock Asylum, this was all a big business venture where they were simply counting down the days till they hit it big. Frequently, they had grey haired guys in business suits and ponytails at their parties. I’d see a couple of the dudes engaged in an intense and hushed conversation with Dominic in a back corner of the room. Dominic loved to be seen talking to these guys. Rock Asylum liked to serve expensive liquor and if they liked you, would send you into the back room with a nod and a wink for something special. The hospitality these guys showed was far above anything I ever experienced in Hollywood. I never saw more class come from a bunch of guys dressed in ripped denim and leather. Rock Asylum ruled!

  Liz Bone- Vinnie Vegas

  Living in Hollywood, you met a lot of people who influenced your life in so many different ways. Lizzie Grey was one of these people. To this day, if I close my eyes, I can still clearly recall the way he looked and the sound of his voice as if he were standing in the same room. Liz-Bone was already an O.G. in the Hollywood scene when we moved up that summer. Liz-Bone’s claim to fame was playing guitar in a band called London which once included Nikki Sixx as one of it’s members. In the mid 80’s, London was the undisputed kings of the Sunset Strip. He would tell anybody who’d listen, how he wrote the song “Public Enemy #1” off Motley Crue’s debut album. Liz-Bone had at one time or another played with just about every 80’s rock star. However in his case, he was always the bride’s maid, but never the bride. Liz-Bone lived his life like that one big break was always just around the corner. His game plan never included the orthodox way of doing things. To concentrate on writing fresh catchy songs, or to formulate a good solid original sound; these things never entered into his plan. Instead there was always some sort of scam to be pulled involving someone with a ton of money and a thing for Hollywood.

  Lying, cheating or exploiting bandmates was the order of the day, and copying the latest big trend was a business model. Liz-Bone formed the band Ultra Pop which Cupkake and his old bass player Vince Votel joined after we moved up to LA. Liz-Bone had stories of hanging out with people like Blackie Lawless and Izzy Stradlin, and his band London was featured in the cult classic: The Decline of Western Civilization: The Metal Years. Anybody featured in that film were instant stars on the strip, and that made you the feature member of your band. He told stories of partying with Larry Flint’s wife where doing coke and shooting Uzis in the backyard of Larry’s mansion was a common occurrence. Liz-Bone came from the 70’s where Mott The Hopple and T-Rex ruled, and doing tons of coke was the norm. He told stories of a legendary club called the Starwood which was long defunct, and bad-mouthed guitar legend Randy Rhoads which lead me to believe that Randy had fucked one of his girlfriends. Liz-Bone had that thrashed over-bleached and dyed black hair that made his pink scalp shine through the tresses and claimed to be in his early thirties, but we all knew better. Liz-Bone liked to take his girls into the bathroom for that clinical fluorescent-light ambiance which I figured reminded him of a doctor’s office. Liz-Bone was always in the bathroom.

  Vince Votel- Vinnie Vegas

  In 1986, Vince Votel was by far the biggest rock star of San Diego. Vince stood six foot-five with a square jaw, Colgate smile and a huge tossed salad of blond hair that would make Robert Plant jealous. Vince had founded the band Street Angel by recruiting three other blond rock gods, two of which were still in high school. This included Cupkake, guitarist Dave “Eric” Angel, and drummer Mike Kiner, who at the time, called himself “Micky Lee.” Dave’s personality also earned him the nickname “Dynamite.” In San Diego, Vince had made a name for himself by playing in a popular band called Side FX. But Vince wanted to be in charge of his own show, so he formed Street Angel in 1986. Street Angel ruled supreme over the San Diego rock scene and Vince Votel was the Caesar. The only thing missing from this rock czar was the toga and the laurels. When Vince walked into a club, a sea of people would part before him as if he were Moses. People would approach him like Oaxaccans do the Pope, hoping to get a mere head nod of acknowledgment. And I’m talking about the guys here, the women... forget about it. Women would completely throw themselves at him which might result in sporadic catfights breaking out in the wings. Vince had mastered the Hollywood technique of looking over your shoulder as you were talking to him. This was as if there was someone or something more interesting going on behind you. Some people he just flat out refused to acknowledge, as if they didn’t exist. This man was born to go to Hollywood, and so he did. After two years in Street Angel, he and drummer Mike Kiner jumped to LA to join a heavily glam band called “Ruby Slippers”. These guys came down to play in San Diego every couple of months which elevated Vince to pure god status. If there was ever a man born to walk the earth as a rock god, then Vince Votel was definitely that man.

  Vince and Mike eventually left Ruby Slippers to join up with a band called Mistreated. These guys were an upstart hard rock band with major investor money behind them. They played a lot of showcases for record labels when Cupkake and I first moved to LA. They were held in Hollywood soundstages and Cupkake and I would go to them for the free booze. Vince later jumped ship to record tracks with Liz-Bone for a project that would later become Ultra Pop. Mike stayed with Mistreated and they soon replaced their singer with a guy named Gary Jeffries. Soon after, they changed the name of the band to Asphalt Ballet. We would end up hanging out with Asphalt Ballet in Hollywood later on, and that helped us both secure some pivotal shows.

  Hyde- Vinnie Vegas

  There was another band living in our apartments called Hyde. These guys were ugly, their music sucked, and they were total drunks. Nobody ever hung out at their apartment, and they never socialized with anybody. They had absolutely no chance of ever making it, and everybody knew it. Hitting the bottle would lead to drunken band meetings, fist-fights, and one on one midnight pleading conversations with Jesus. These guys looked like Motorhead in a building full of Poisons and Cinderellas. One night the bass player who drank the most, stumbled out off his apartment to one of the pool lounge chairs and passed out drunk. I guess he had the spins or was too hot in the apartment, so passing out by the pool seemed like a good idea. Wrong! Ernie looked down on him from the third flo
or and a light bulb appeared above his head. He ran in the house and came out with a cooking pot full of water and dumped it over the edge onto the drunken fool. He was blasted awake, and soaking wet, began bellowing all sorts of profanities and threats at the top of his lungs while flailing his arms around. His challenges were meet by an empty courtyard, with the hum of air conditioners and random tv sets chattering in the distance. After a couple of minutes of rage, the booze kicked back in and he was reduced to muttering and spitting and eventually sank back into the chair to pass out again. Wait

  another two minutes and another dose of water splashed down from the heavens which resulted in more bellowing and profanity. This scene repeated itself until either out of pity, or losing interest, Ernie went back inside and watched TV.

  Pranks were common at The El Cerrito Apartments, and we got creative with the limited resources we had. There were apartments next door which we called New York. They looked like one of those brick tenement buildings from Brooklyn back in 1910. They had huge windows that swung open with no screens. Everybody had them open at night because they had no AC. We would open up one of our cup o’ noodles, and chuck the dry noodle cake through the window knowing it would explode on contact. It was really stupid, but we’d laugh our asses off while some chick was calling us assholes. Also, because the front gate triggered the tenant’s phone, you could ring anybody in the building at three in the morning. Bottle rockets were year round fun, and being pushed into the pool happened to everybody at least once. One of the funniest pranks we pulled was something that involved a perciliar black gay man that lived upstairs. His name was Jimmy.

  Flamin’ Jimmy- Vinnie Vegas

  Jimmy lived directly above us in apartment 211. Jimmy was about as “flaming” as it gets. You have to realize something... by us being from San Diego, we didn’t really have much exposure to gay culture. So seeing him prance around in his queenly glory was quite a spectacle for us. Now, we had no beef with gay guys, but there is something inherently hilarious about a man flitting around like a girly-girl. Jimmy had one of those skinny mustaches that older black men wear (why I’ll never know) made famous in the 40’s by people like Walt Disney, Clark Gable and Howard Hughes. I guess it never goes away, because now people like Joe Jackson and Eddie Murphy have it!

  It sounds stereotypical, but Jimmy would wear tight, high-water jeans and open shirts tied together in a knot. He wore penny loafers with no socks to complete the motif. He would even do the limp-wrist thing and shout out “girlfriend!” I don’t know if Jimmy did coke, but because he lived above us, you could hear him tromping around all night. Jimmy was always finding excuses to have us come up to his lair. He needed help moving his refrigerator, or needed a hand with some boxes. Once up there, he would try everything he could to entice us to stay. Somehow, Jimmy had a lot of money and his apartment looked like the typical 70’s bachelor pad with zebra skin throw rugs, African art and beads. He also liked to flaunt his affluence by serving up magnums of Dom Perignon every time he had us up. Now we were no fools, we knew exactly why he was pampering us, but we had zero money and this guy had tons of booze. The good stuff! He would always say in his heavy lisp “Now, you boys come on up anytime you want. I’ve got anything you want... no stings attached! Aw-huh-huh-huh!”

  Oh, we wanted that liquor bad, but we knew all to well that after a few stiff drinks, there was always a better chance that you’d end up doing something you normally wouldn’t consider. I’m pretty sure this is what he was counting on. So we would walk the thin line. We’d party with the guy and drink his top shelf booze, all the while keeping tabs on exactly how buzzed we were. We would take it right up to the danger zone, then get the hell out of there with our butt virginity. I realized later that we were doing what a lot of girls do to guys. We were being teases! Gay teases! And like those girls, we had no shame about it. So now we knew why girls did it, because Jimmy was a sucker and no matter how many times we drank his booze and left him empty handed, he would always invite us back up. The eternal optimist. Or just a guy. I guess we can be big suckers. Henry our manager, used to have a scam where he would tell the tenants that they could have cable TV for an extra 20 bucks a month. He said once you paid him, he’d switch it on. The truth was that the building was already wired up for cable and he would simply attach the coaxial. We found this out because Jimmy wanted cable, and his wire went up through our closet. Henry had to go in there to hook it and now the jig was up.

  Jimmy loved to throw soirées and invite all his gay friends over. It always looked like a male version of a beauty pageant with all his friends sashaying up the stairs. Jimmy’s friends loved Cupkake’s drummer Ernie, because of his Richard Marx hair. Ernie was so naive that he thought these guys were just being “cool”, and never thought twice about it. We tried to tell him different, but he wouldn’t buy it until one time some guy had him pinned up against a wall. We left him to his own accord, and by the time we got downstairs, we saw him flying up the stairs like his pants were on fire. Then he had the nerve to call us dicks for not rescuing him! Whatever.

  Jimmy loved the Los Angeles Lakers, and had a bunch of people over for a playoff game one night. In our closet, you could disconnect the cable at will, so we watched the game on our TV and began disconnecting Jimmy’s cable at all the important moments. Critical free-throws, slam-dunks, anytime it got good, their screen would turn to snow. You could hear them stomping and cursing upstairs and then you would hear Jimmy futzing with the TV, trying to explain to his friends why the reception was fucking up. For fun we would wait awhile so he thought he’d fixed it, and let them get back into the game, only to start up again. Since you could only hear the guys upstairs, it was like theater of the mind trying to picture what was going on up there. We would end up rolling on the ground holding our stomachs while trying to stay quiet. This was so much that fun we decided to repeat the process whenever Jimmy had people over. Jimmy never knew.

  LESLIE- Vinnie Vegas

  Leslie was a girl I met down in San Diego after I broke up with my girlfriend Barbara. She was an 18 year old brunette right out of High School. Leslie hung out with a pack of girls who knew Cupkake from Clairemont, and she seemed to take a liking to me from the get-go. While all the other girls swooned over Cupkake’s wholesome blond good looks, Leslie seemed to favor a darker type of man. She idolized Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P. and gravitated towards a heavier style of rock than most girls. Leslie stood about 5’ 2’’ and wore a C-cup bra. She was bold, and basically came right up to me and made it clear that we should “go out”. I admired that about her, and certainly appreciated the compliment. Like a quarterback calling an audible, she made it clear to the other girls that she was going in and they should all stay clear. And they did because as cute as she was, Leslie could kick your ass!

  When Cupkake and I would go down to San Diego to touch base with family and friends, I always found myself itching to get back to Hollywood. We left San Diego for a reason, and Hollywood was proving to be all that we expected it to be and even more. When I was in San Diego, I’d make it a point to hang out with Leslie. Something about her captivated me and I’m not sure what it was. After all, she was a smart-ass New Yorker with a foul mouth. But she was really cute, and something about her personality resonated with me. She liked to project a tough facade, but once in a while, I would be treated to a moment of utter and complete tenderness that would take my breath away. That type of thing can really have a lasting imprint with me, and I thought about her all the time. Being a New Yorker, she had disdain for all styles Californian, so she wore plaid skirts with pink converse sneakers. She had a really cute face with chipmunk cheeks and an adorable smile. Plus, chestnut hair with dark eyes that sparkled in the light, and a laugh that would always make me smile. Of course she would kill you if you ever pointed this out, that was the New York in her. Leslie became a frequent visitor to our new apartment, and eventually moved into her own place in West Hollywood.