Hollywood: Rock Of Ages

by Chris Solberg

  PARTY ON FRANKLIN - Vinnie Vegas

  When Cupkake came back from tour, two things changed for his band. First off, Ernie was no longer with the band and was replaced by a cat named Timothy. Timmy played a heavier style of drums with all the double bass and cymbals everywhere. It was very similar to Eric Carr joining KISS. The second change was that they changed their name to Spiders & Snakes. This came from the fact that Street Angel used to play a cover version of that Jim Statford song by the same name as a show closer back in San Diego. Because of the tour, our two bands hadn’t really met each other yet, but that was about to change. Eventually I introduced the guys in Hooligan Stew to the guys in Spiders & Snakes and that led to a lot of fun times and friendship.

  One night I threw a party at my new place, and that place still holds reverence in my life because it was the first apartment that I ever had on my own. I invited my new band mates over with the guys from Spiders & Snakes and a few chicks sprinkled in to add to the fun. Perris and Cupkake seemed to hit it off immediately, and soon reverted back to 10-year-olds as was often the case. While I was taking a piss, they took that opportunity to rifle through my drawers. They found a huge firework that Leslie had given me from New York. Now in California, our fireworks are limited to sparklers and Piccolo Petes, but apparently the East coast has a completely different idea of what fireworks should be! This thing looked like a baseball wrapped in grocery bag paper with a rope of fuse and it seemed obvious to me that it was meant to be shot off in a metal tube like a mortar. I held on to it for over a year because I was scared to fire it off. I always envisioned taking it to Fiesta Island and being able to disappear into the night once it went off. Well those two had no problem with shooting it off right there and then, and by the time I got out of the bathroom they were nowhere to be found. Apparently they had took it outside to light off behind the building.

  Suddenly the night turned into day and this beast cast shadows of the buildings as it screamed across the sky like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. I actually saw the shadows move from left to right and then it exploded high above Franklin. Now Franklin is a major artery and all the cars came to a stop as a wall of smoke blew across the street. Perris and Cupkake came blasting through the door and fell on the ground in a fit of laughter as I cursed profusely. There was not a bit of remorse, and indeed this kind of stuff went on all the time.

  The FM Station -Vinnie Vegas

  Not all of the rock clubs at the time were on the strip. The strip had the biggest ones, but there were a couple that were scattered around LA. There was a place called “The Waters Club” down in Long Beach which was heavily promoted on KNAC. They even had national acts come through, I remember seeing Hurricane Alice play there and they kicked ass! Slapkat played their first gig there, but it was so goddamned far down the 110 that you never wanted to go back. Indeed, the Troubadour itself was only one block south of the strip on Santa Monica Blvd., but that was far enough to isolate it from the crowds that roamed the strip. Liz-Bone had a huge connection with The Troubadour from his London days and I remember clomping down Doheney in our dress boots and jangling jewelry a few times to hit that club. Liz-Bone would get VIP treatment and free drinks, so it was worth the hike to me. So most of the other clubs would come and go with the exception of a place in The Valley called FM Station.

  FM station was owned by a guy named Filthy McNasty who I guess had a famous club on the strip in the 60’s. He was an older guy but always had a gaggle of young Valley chicks around him. The word on the street was that all the waitresses who worked there had slept with him at one time or another for perks. He was famous for locking the doors after 2 am, but still partying with a new batch of fresh chicks. Now at a closed bar with free drinks, you can imagine what went on!

  The FM station didn’t get many hot bands off the strip, but about once a month there would be a hot show that attracted a large crowd. Everybody in the Valley would know when that night was, and everybody would be there. On these nights there might be a large line to get in, so we’d get there early. The FM station had a small entrance room almost like a theatre with a rock “hall-of-fame” picture collage motif on the walls. One in you entered the large main room with lots of chairs stools and pool tables in the back. But with all the rocker chicks roaming around, I could never figure out why anybody would ever want to waste their time shooting pool. A lot of bands had added a semi Harley Davidson biker look to their outfits and this area seemed to be their hangout. Sometimes I’d wander into that area just to say hi, and would be met by hard looks and icly glares. Even the chicks mad-dogged me! Needless to say, I never really hung out there much!

  FM station was the best place to find chicks. First of all, it was only 5 bucks to get in, but second, it had a separate room in back where you could just kick back and talk to girls while watching the band play on video monitors. This room had it’s own bar and was separated from the noise of the main room, which made having conversations easy. The main room had one large bar and a smaller mini bar by the pool tables and front door. The stage was big and the sound system was top-notch. Surprisingly, a lot of the Hollywood clubs scimped on the decor, but FM Station was nice on the inside and actually had a few booths as well as tables in front of the stage with cool stools. It’s probably what most people visualize when you mention a rock club, colorful neon beer lights and cool red lighting. The best part is that it had a loading dock out back so you didn’t have to wheel your gear through the club.

  FM station was in The Valley so a lot of people didn’t consider it a true Hollywood hang-out, but for me, it was always a great place to be. With it’s three separate bars, getting a drink was never a problem and they even had waitresses if you were at a table. That added a bit of class to the place if you asked me. You could sit at a bar table while talking to girls, and a nice looking waitress would take your order. A few minutes later, you had your order delivered to your table. The drinks were pretty cheap for LA standards, so it gave you the opportunity to be a good tipper as well. It was a place where you were more apt to actually order a cocktail as opposed to the normal beer. All this instant access to alcohol meant the chicks were always drunk and the chances of grabbing a few was better than at most places.

  FM station had a policy of giving your band 50 tickets if you booked a gig there. These were passes which got you in for $2 a opposed to the normal $5. The tickets had a blank space on the front and they required that you get a stamp made with the name of your band. These tickets would not be valid without the stamp, and so every band had to have one made. So I collected a stash of these blank passes and being a graphic artist, I’d simply draw in the name of whoever was playing that night with a razorpoint sharpie pen and made it look like a stamp. I actually got quite good at it and we never paid full price again.

  FM Station was also on the cutting edge because they videotaped the sets and you could purchase a copy if you wanted. Back in the 80’s video was brand new so this was a huge perk. In our old band Point Blank, Cupkake’s dad actually had a video camera which he let us borrow on our first gig. Back then that camera must’ve cost $2,500 in 80’s money so it was rare for somebody to have one. Of course the official reason to buy this videotape was to watch the show and analyze it like a football team would. We’d take it home and gather around the TV while oohing and ahhing at the good parts. But the real reason was to watch yourself on TV being a rock star and reveling in the moment. Most of the shots were wide out and you’d see the entire band on the screen. But you knew that everybody was staring at themselves and I was no different. I used to like looking around the room knowing that as far as the other guys were concerned, there was only one person onstage at any time. Yes, watching this video was a time to revel in the glory of being onstage, and you’d break them out at parties and on off nights. Knowing this, I came up with a devious scheme in which I wasted the $50, and more importantly, the glory of somebody’s FM Station video.

  You see, the camera had a buil
t in microphone and I noticed that between songs, you could hear clearly what the people near the camera were saying. It was usually drunk chicks talking about guys so it gave me an idea. Some bands were notorious for being arrogant and full of themselves, and nobody liked that. So I’d hang out back by the camera for their set and let loose with a string of insults and vulgarity between songs. I’d point out in detail exactly why each player sucked as if I was talking to somebody next to me and make fun of their stage moves as well. I can only imagine the shock as they popped in the video at the afterparty, looking forward to some hero-worship only to recoil in horror as some anonymous voice picked them apart as clear as a bell. To add authenticity, I made sure to point out real flaws as opposed to making them up. I mean, to be fair, we all had them, but you normally didn’t have an obnoxious color commentator pointing them out between songs and ruining your $50 video. That must’ve been quite the ball-buster at that party, no? Oh yeah, I also used to bag on lame lyrics which would be a bitter pill to swallow since all the singers felt they were the shit. “You look at me...I look at you. I can’t wait for the things that we do.” I mean come on! There was always plenty of fodder for that!

  I went there with Perris one night and we homed in on a couple of babes hanging out at one of the tables. One of them was really drunk so my spidey senses started to tingle, and we just plopped down next to them. Being with Perris, with his blond hair and good looks, was always a plus when it came to approaching girls. My confidence was boosted by a few notches whenever he was around. As soon as we sat down, the drunk girl threw her arms around me and I just dove in with the making out. The other girl was not nearly as drunk and seemed to know what we were after, but since Perris was the other guy, she didn’t put up much of a fight. But I knew that if I didn’t get this girl home within the next 45 minutes or so, I might pass the envelope of fun. We told the girls we needed to get out of there so we cruised out to their car, and they drove us to their house. These girls had a two-seat Honda CRX, so me and rummy had to stuff ourselves into the back. Now CRXs were hatchbacks so we couldn’t even sit up, we had to lay all scrunched up in the back. Now drunk girls at 2 am were notorious for wanting to stop by Jack-in-the-Box or something on the way home to grab some food. Every guy knew that this was to be avoided at all costs because once a girl was rearin’ to go, you needed to seal the deal pronto least she change her mind. And by all means, going to a sit down place like Denny’s or Canter’s was out of the question, because that was always a two-hour ordeal were you’d end up paying to have them eat, sober up, and change their minds. I saw this happen so many times with some of the naive new guys from the mid-west.

  In the back of the Honda, I was groping and kissing while watching streetlights pass over us, not knowing at all where we were. But she kept going on and on about food, so we stopped at Tommy’s drive thru for some nasty chili fries. This girl was piling the grub into her face getting chili and cheese all over the place. Then she was shoving some in my face, and I was a mess as well. By the time we got to their apartment we went straight into her room and made out with chili-fry remnants all over our faces. Perris and I drove back to Hollywood with that familiar evil grey glow in the East looming over The San Bernardino mountains. We should’ve both felt hung over and burnt out, but we had a good night’s hunt, and instead, we felt very content and satisfied. That’s a feeling I became very familiar in Hollywood.

  THE HAUNTED HOTEL - Vinnie Vegas

  1800 N. El Cerrito was completely different from our original Shangri La across the street. This place was built during the 20’s and looked more like a hotel than an apartment building. It even had a bell hop desk with a bank of push-buttons behind it, although no bell hops had been there since the war. I learned a little bit about those days and apparently a lot of apartments were men-only or women-only. In fact it was a big scandal when the first co-op apartments sprang up. Can you imagine that? So if you had a caller, the bell-hop would buzz your apartment and you’d meet your guest in the lobby rather than in your apartment. They probably had some old crow chaperone type women as the “matron” of every apartment as to keep a lid on the shenanigans. The story I heard was that MGM studios built the apartments as a place for their talent to stay while shooting in Hollywood. And it looked exactly like one of those buildings you see in the old films. A lot of people said that it reminded them of The Shining, and indeed the tenants said a ghost lived in the apartments. They said somebody hung themselves in one of the apartments and the ghost could be seen on the main stairs from time to time. Some people told me it was a man, but most people claim it was a women. Whenever I asked which apartment was haunted, they’d get flustered and suddenly couldn’t come up with any more details. This led me to believe my apartment number 18 was ground zero.

  I don’t believe in ghosts so none of that ever freaked me out. And I never saw any ghost, so all the more reason to sleep with no worries. However after Cupkake came back from tour, he was temporarily homeless for a while and stayed on my couch for a week or two. He said he woke up in the middle of the night to see a dark figure looking down over me. My bed was by the front door which had a crazy room like a phone booth that you had to enter before you could go outside. This figure would disappear into that room and be gone by the time he got up in a panic. As for me, I slept like a baby through the whole thing. However later on, I had a weird incident that made me scratch my head.

  Across the street, people came and went every five minutes from that apartment. With this place however, I never saw anybody in the apartments at all, much less coming and going. One day I needed to go to Rock N Roll Ralph’s because I had gotten paid and my cabinets were bare. Maintaining our budget was hard enough when I lived with Cupkake, but now I was on my own and going through that same thing all over again. But now,

  somehow my keys were missing which made no sense because it was a studio apartment. They were either on the bed, in the bathroom. or in the kitchen. And you can rule out the last two because they were never in the bathroom or kitchen so I turned that bed inside out looking for those keys. I was really losing my mind because it was impossible to get into the building or the apartment without them, so they had to be in the room. I looked and looked for 45 minutes and took a breather to calm down. Then I looked one last time while letting loose a stream of profanity. I was sweating, I was breathing hard, and in danger of losing it, so I decided just to go to Ralph’s and take my chances. Now the manager had already posted a note saying she’d be out of town for a few days so getting her to let me in was out of the question. My window out to Franklin had no screen, so I took comfort in the fact that I could never truly be locked out of my house if I left that window open. So, still stewing from the key search, I stormed out into the hall to walk down to Ralph’s and figured I’d deal with the details later. One last thing, the building was so old that it had a weird locking mechanism inside the door latch that was two simple push buttons. Push that button in, and the door is locked, push the other button and it’s unlocked. But you had to open the door to lock or unlock it. Now the thing is that you could always open the locked door from the inside, but if you shut it behind you when it was locked, you were screwed whether or not you had your keys. They added a deadbolt later, but I guess in the old days you only locked your door if you were inside. If you think that is impossibly naive, think again because when I went to Austria in 02, you gave your big skeleton key to the innskeeper who hung it on a nail behind her with all the other ones. And when you came back from skiing, you told her your number and she gave it back to you. One key per room, no matter how many people you had in there. That being said, I never used that lock mechanism... EVER! This also led to a Rainman style bout of checking and re-checking that blasted button at all hours through-out the day, making sure that it wasn’t pushed in. But somehow the minute I shut that door behind me, a dread filled me and I KNEW that somehow, that locking mechanism was activated and so I turned the handle, and sure enough I was locked out
. It was so expected that I didn’t even raise an eyebrow, I simply accepted the situation an told myself that I was indeed coming in the window now.

  Of course, with no keys, I had to walk to Rock N Roll Ralphs and trudge back up the hill with eight plastic shopping bags. When I made it home with all my groceries, I needed to climb in the window, but that was not going to be easy. I popped a beer first because, hell yeah, I bought some beer! I figured this would make me less embarrassed as well as soften any pain I might endure. And I was right. My window was a good 15 feet off the ground and directly underneath it was the lone bush on Franklin which was naturally a sticker-bush. I know this because I decorated it with Christmas lights during the Holidays and couldn’t pull them back out in January. They are probably still there to this day!

  To my amazement, lo and behold... there was a shopping cart right next to the bush; I couldn’t believe my luck! So I wheeled it under my window like some Monty Python stunt and tried to cram that cart into that bush as far as I could. It wasn’t optimal, but it did the job. I climbed up on top the rickety thing and strained to get close to my window sill. I reached and strained until I finally was able to reach the sill and grab on. Then, I had to pull myself over that sticker bush like G.I. Joe. I barely made it in the window while enduring the searing pain of the window rails digging deep into my sternum. I rocked back and forth like a human teeter totter with my chest pressing on the hard steel. I couldn’t get the extra push needed to get inside the apartment. Mind you, everybody driving by on Franklin was treated to the spectacle! At that point I really wanted to quit, but I knew I made it this far and my sternum was going to hurt for days regardless, so I hurled myself through that window landing on the floor in a shower of leaves, twigs and moths. I laid on the ground for about five minutes catching my breath while the pain subsided. I then remembered that my groceries were still outside, so I got up to go grab them. The first thing I saw when I got up off the ground were my keys laying all by themselves right snack in the middle of my bed. Fuck me!