DREAMBOAT ANNIE (SANTA MONICA AND LA BREA)

I have just dropped a guitar amp at a repair shop in West Hollywood. The repair shop’s diminutive parking lot is full, and street parking is a clusterfuck with cars being towed and ticketed with the splatter logic of the city, so I have to carry the amp for blocks, grunting and sweating and cursing the population and the half-baked civil engineering of Los Angeles. Having deposited the amp at the shop, I have to walk back to my car, a few blocks north of the intersection of Santa Monica and La Brea.

Under the shadow of a massive billboard plugging the unspecified services of an apparent supermodel with a 1-800 phone number, I carry a guitar –– which was just repaired –– in a battered case. A beater Volkswagen Bug pulls up next to me. I walk at an approximate speed of 4 miles per hour. The Bug is traveling at the same speed. Besides the percolating putt-putt-putting of the air cooled engine, the other sonic distraction is an old Heart record playing off of what sounds like an 8 track tape player.

“Annie, Dreamboat Annie...” It is some song that I remembered lovesick white girls listened to in High School. I heard it too many times then and am in no mood to hear it now, nor ever again. I keep walking, trying to ignore whatever it is that is happening to my left.

“Hey! Are you an artist?”

It is a young woman’s voice. I try to keep my gaze focused forward.

“Hey! Are you an artist?”

This is unbelievable. Nobody in this town can leave anybody else alone. Against my better judgment, I turn my head counterclockwise.

“No. I am not an artist.”

There are two of them. Both women: a cute one in the passenger seat, sandy blonde hair and a most reasonable upper torso. She is doing the talking. The driver is sandier and chunkier and is sporting a smile only “Dreamboat Annie” over a Volkswagen tape deck can inspire.

“Well... you look like an artist.”

I am being worked and I know it. I just can’t figure out the angle.

“No, I am not an artist. There is a guitar in this case, not a paintbrush.”

“Awww, you know what we mean. You look artistic. We both really dig people who are creative.”

“Well, I am not an artist.”

“Do you like poetry?”

“No.” What is it with these chicks? Why am I being hit on? Do they want to take me to a motel and fuck me? Is this fodder for the letters section of Penthouse magazine? What?

“Well, we host celebrity poetry readings every Sunday night and we thought it would be fabulous to see you at one.”

“The only thing I loathe more than poetry is celebrities.”

“You should lighten up. There are plenty of attractive women at these readings.” They both smile.

“Okay. Where are these poetry meetings?” I’m thawing.

“Franklin and Bronson, across the street from the Mayfair market.”

“Wow, I live just a few blocks from Franklin and Bronson, up on Beachwood.”

“Great! Well you should come by Sunday night, listen to some poetry, hang out with us and maybe get a free personality test at our Celebrity Center.”

Free Personality Tests. Celebrity Center. It all coalesces. I have an immediate, involuntary recollection of young Scientologists dressed in black shorts, shirts, socks and shoes, running in formation down Bronson as some sort of punishment for failing to recruit enough new disciples.

“You guys are Scientologists. Aren’t you?”

“Why? What have you heard?”

Their collective smiles freeze. It then collapses on the chunky one. It becomes more acute on the cute one.

“Look, if you two teenyboppers want to worship a prophet who started his so-called religion on a bet with science fiction writers and based the theology on a comic book, that’s great with me. I mean, bully for you. But I have no desire to get sucked into that con game and enduring brain-damaged so-called celebrities read endorsements of your religion masquerading as poetry, all under the vague subtext that the three of us are going to a motel.”

They puttered off, in search of another “artist,” who had just gotten the bus from, say, Iowa or Nebraska or somewhere, and was out here to ply his trade in the city of dreams. “Annie, Dreamboat Annie” Doppler’s into the distant parallax of the city.

AIRPLAY

In order to keep sleeping on Phlegm’s couch, I have to start contributing for the Top Ramen.

I get the aforementioned gig at the cafeteria at Cal State Long Beach. The green haired artist and I are still fucking, but I also meet the Math Major with Purple Hair and JenJen, the Post Punkette Louise Brooks.

The Math Major, I fall in love with immediately. It takes a decade or so for JenJen.

*****

Outer Circle has this weird sound. We are signed to a label out of Torrance, CA. Rather than be weird and interesting, the record label’s Artist and Repertoire men mix the record to death, suck the life and inspiration out of it, eviscerate whatever is interesting about the sound, and play up the drum beat.

The record gets some airplay, but whatever it is that is on the radio, it isn’t six weird guys with drum machines and synthesizers. Both Ikky and the Bearded Synth Player quit in frustration.

Ikky moves to Hollywood. I move to Hollywood. Our paths cross intermittently for the next decade. Eventually we collaborate on an ambitious musical endeavor, hell-bent on dropping the drawers on 20th century culture and its dehumanizing ethos. We will fail, but we’ll attempt to console each other by embracing the Japanese concept of the nobility of failure while eeking out livings as production mixers on game shows and porn films.

PURPLE HAIRED GIRL

Initially, it was the Purple Hair, I guess. The hair changed constantly, even as she graduated, and then settled down as a teacher in the ghetto. The kids there called her “Olive Oyl.”

For eight years, I fought to untangle the two of us from a love triangle, with her granting parlor privileges to some motorcycle-riding post-beat poet.

Ultimately, I win this battle of attrition. At least provisionally, anyway. She leaves me, however, for a country music songwriter when I focus more on making the Braindead Soundmachine record, Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby, and very little on maintaining a relationship. After eight years of an emotional roller coaster, we would only schtupp when I come home drunk from a Japanese cross dresser bar.

THE SALAMANDERS ARE COMING

The host of the television show is trying to come to terms with the little Japanese cross dresser, who is not even in the rock and roll band, but has been brought onto the sound stage at the band’s behest as their guru and spokesperson.

Beyond the language barrier with Yoshi, communication is strained during the entire interview.

Every time Reality (the “throat cancer patient”) keys his mic, a squall of distortion and feedback wipes out all other conversation and pegs every decibel meter in the sound booth.

*****

The television presenter is asking Yoshi questions, but the verbiage is beyond Yoshi’s comprehension. “See Spot run,” is beyond Yoshi’s comprehension.

Yoshi stares at the camera’s red eye as it glows like a demon.

A camera trucks across the sound stage as if it is a hawk diving for dinner. But there is confusion in the camera operator’s movements — it is unclear who is the hunter and who is the hunted. The cameraman is attempting to focus on a fun house mirror and everything in his viewfinder is coming up as twisted reflections.

Reality fields the question instead. He speaks into his field surgeon’s telephones, twists a couple of knobs on his micro-amplifier and begins reciting a soliloquy from BZ’s un-produced play, “The Sands Will Come Again,” on 200 mph winds blowing out of the Pacific Ocean and obliterating the city of Los Angeles — followed by the rest of Western Civilization — and leaving nothing but the parking lots, whereupon Yoshi will be forced to mate and breed with coyotes, creating the next mutation in humanity, a development that is perhaps the most profound advancement since Homo Erectus developed opposable thumbs.

Unfortunately, the waves of feedback emanating from Reality’s micro-amplifier obliterate any articulation of his impromptu message-cum-manifesto. He is completely unintelligible, yet as loud as a fighter plane in a gymnasium. It is utter performance art. The hostess has a frozen-but-wilted half smile, which showcases only half of her dental work, but her countenance is sagging in a rather unbecoming fashion. There is more silence, as nobody is sure if Reality is finished or not. The hush is a damp fart.

Finally, Yoshi is asked something else by the presenter. His non sequitur of a reply is, “The Saramanders all Coming.”  Just like we rehearsed on the freeway.

The presenter asks me to translate. “The salamanders are coming,” I say.

“What does that mean?” she asks.

“It means that Siddhartha is wrong: life is not a river; life is being stuck in traffic on the I-5. And the other travelers are salamanders — primordial pond life, with no consciousness other than survival.”

“Oh yes,’ Yoshi confirms. Reality keys his mic again. More squalls of feedback. They cut to a commercial break.

THE SOFT SPOT ON A BABY’S HEAD

Outer Circle implodes — a victim of its own pronounced lack of success. The attempt at a hit record ruined whatever was neat about the band. The Hawaiian Shirt bailed. The band goes through more drummers than drumsticks. Towards the end, I am fired from the food service gig at the University Delicatessen. One of the many upsides is that I no longer have to wear a hair net.

Phlegm and I start a new band, the Baby Skulls. The inspiration is Phlegm’s fascination with population control, particularly as practiced by the Romans, who were known to plunge their thumbs through the soft spot on a baby’s head.

We make a pact: No synthesizers. No drum machines. Of course, a few years later a similarly contrary pact will be made with a different set of musicians: No drummers.

DRUM MACHINE

Years later, I am thrown out of the Baby Skulls by Phlegm, a band we started together. After getting fired, I asked, nay demanded, that the remaining Baby Skulls stop playing those tunes I wrote the music for. A week later, I read a review of a Baby Skulls’ show and notice that they kept playing those tunes anyway.  As a matter of pride, I want to break their fingers.

In a bar in an alley off of Hollywood Boulevard, I am stuffing cocaine into cigarettes and lighting ‘em up. I take a hit and pass the smokeable cocktail to a soul brother I play basketball with. We have a strange bond; I remember going over to his house to give him a lift to the b-ball court and seeing this massive painting in the living room depicting this muscular, buffed black hand and forearm coming out these white clouds and pulling apart a set of white shackles.

“Do you think I did that to your people?” I asked him.

“No man, it wasn’t you.”

Everything is jake between the brother and I, on and off the court. In the car on the way to the game, and in bars after the game, we have patched up centuries of forced servitude, forty acres and a mule and Jim Crow Laws, and for reasons that sum up the bleak states of our lives, smoking cocaine in the patio of a Hollywood bar that has been open for business since Al Jolson put on blackface at the dawn of the talking pictures.

One of the bouncers, who doubles as the handyman apparently, keeps coming out to the patio because there are complaints of the smell on the patio, which reeks of an electrical fire. The owner is afraid the bar is going to burn down due to a short in the wiring.

Smoking powdered cocaine amongst other bar patrons is no mean feat. It took awareness and the ability to stay one step ahead of whomever could ruin the experience.

So the drummer of the Baby Skulls, the band who had thrown me out — and who had fired Reality as the mixer — wanders in, replete with a punkette girlie on his arm. They have matching teased hair and mascara.

He walks up and says hello and asks what I am up to. I was too torn to say anything. What had I been up to? Fucking hell. Smoking chemicals to mitigate the anger from being thrown out of a creative endeavor I started? I couldn’t articulate this, so I let actions speak for me. I take the German beer in my hand and turn it upside down. Ass over teakettle. Time collapses and eternity passes while the entire contents of the beer bottle escapes the narrow confines of the bottleneck and plop onto the drummer’s precious punk rock hairdo.

One Mississippi... glug glug glug...  two Mississippi.... glug glug glug...

His spiky punk rock hair mats and flattens like a poodle in a car wash.

Finally I string a sentence together. “I just bought a drum machine,” I tell him.

ROLAND TR-505

The TR-505, an early digital machine, lacked the insouciance and naiveté of Ikky’s old analog Dr. Rhythm. The TR-505’s sounds are more realistic. It actually sounds more like a real drum kit. It is less electronic sounding and therefore more duplicitous. More cynical. It is pretending it is not a machine, and anytime a machine pretends it is not a machine, trouble looms.

In Outer Circle, the whole idea of a drum machine, as espoused and embodied by Ikky’s silence as he smoked cigarettes onstage with this existential pose, is to not only let the machine do the work, but to embrace the SOUND of the machine doing the work.

Ikky’s countenance suggested that we are using machines because humans have failed us. You could watch the lines of introspection burrow and imprint on his forehead, which seemed to be spelling out some vaguely Nietzschean signifier in his furrowed brow.

But the TR-505 is a philosophical failure also. If the old analog Dr. Rhythm is true dharma, then the TR-505 is a mail order self-actuation videotape. A fraud.

Still, at least it obviated the need for some porcine drummer to grunt and sweat in one’s general direction when not complaining about the cost of replacing broken drum sticks and hair gel. Whatever a drum machine consumes in voltage, it spares the population of the planet more consumption of its precious oxygen by a drummer.

Anything that meant one less drummer on the planet was a positive thing, at least in the egalitarian sense.

GLENDALE

While I am coming to terms with the forced expulsion from the Baby Skulls, Reality, meanwhile, is engineering and producing records, mostly speed metal stuff whose target audience is a bunch of disaffected adolescent drug addicts and Satan-worshippers in Europe and South America.

He lives where apartments and mini-malls are all concrete, asphalt and stucco, separated by rebar. This is the southern point of Glendale; the part of the San Fernando Valley that thinks it ain’t in the Valley. Denial and delusional thinking are not endemic to the Locusts of Hollywood.

There are enclaves of such thinking everywhere.

A HO’ BITCH ON MTV

At Echo Sound in Glendale, Reality is engineering some tracks for Haircut Society, a group of English pop stars who have previously enjoyed massive commercial success despite the controversy of having Girl Jane — an unabashed cross dresser for a lead singer.

A few years before, at the peak of their success, the gender-bending lead singer and other members of his/her pop group had succumbed to the temptations of smoking nasty white chemicals and promptly lost their ambition, desire and ability to continue cranking out pop hits.

Beyond their narcotic addiction issues, which — it goes with saying — can hinder one’s judgment re career moves, the band makes a decision with dire consequences. They decide to jettison life in London, for a renewed start in Los Angeles.

That seals it. They have entered the milieu of the doomed. Los Angeles is a cipher. It is always the last refuge of British pop stars that have run out of ideas. (cf. John Lennon, David Bowie, Elton John, Johnny Rotten, et. al.) The flaw in their reasoning is that they think the warmth of Los Angeles will somehow stimulate their muse, and recharge their creative juices. Instead they just find every base temptation known to man, usually in the form of sexual debasement and/or pharmaceuticals, all vices easily attainable and readily available when one’s worst impulses reach full song. They have mistaken comfort and decadence for inspiration.

Which is the state where Reality finds these fallen pop stars: writing and recording songs between drug runs, feebly trying to resuscitate that old pop music magic with a monkey the size of Mighty Joe Young pounding on their collective backs and dribbling a basketball.

Across the street from the Echo Sound is the Chaco Room, a Vietnamese-owned Gentlemen’s Club. In addition to featuring Vietnamese refugees performing strip teases for an unkempt clientele of blue-collar mechanics and clerks from the local junkyards, the Chaco Room also features a full service sushi bar.

Sometimes, when artistic inspiration began to implode and contract, Haircut Society would merely abandon the studio work altogether and cross the street to the Chaco Room, and there they would vaporize royalty checks and inhale drinks while the daughters of Ho Chi Minh proffered promises of “loving (one) long time,” and tried to coax and arouse the pop stars’ flaccid members into a state of turgidity that would momentarily rewire the circuit between their cocaine-addled brains and their wallets.

Vietnamese strippers and lap dances: The daughters of boat people who survived not only Ho Chi Minh and his machetes, but also a harrowing exodus across the Pacific, in search of a better tomorrow. Now, installed in a ghetto adjacent to Glendale, the point of singularity for master meta- capitalism, the next generation of Siamese queens is dancing for round eye. It is a conceptional calculus debased enough even for the famous cross dresser to get behind, conceptually if not erotically. But ultimately the nerve ending damage from repeated copious doses of the karma deadening white shit the Girl Jane had been constantly snorting and smoking would preclude any after hours back room fuckee/suckee, so the entourage — including Reality — would motor off in a rented Lexus sedan in search of a chemical orgasm — i.e., something/anything to put up their noses or in a glass pipe.

Off they go with Reality behind the wheel, to the Little Armenia section of Hollywood (somewhere between Hollywood and Franklin, perpendicular to both Club Mugi and Jumbo’s Clown Room), where the dope trade thrives and where negroes have commandeered a couple of choice intersections by the strip clubs there.

It is hard to say what is the darker scenario for Reality and his cadre of dilettante druggies: Down on their luck rock stars buying crack from soul brothers in Little Armenia section of Hollywood, or limp lickey-mao skull fucks in Glendale from a second generation stripper from Vietnam.

Reality pulls onto a side street, and then hangs a right into an alleyway. Who knows? This could be the same alley where the singer for a project Reality and I record is later murdered, but tonight  — as of two in the morning — there is no yellow police tape.

Reality and a brother barter over cocaine and money. The dealer is nervous, his eyes darting like a searchlight in a storm. Then his eyes stop as he concentrates on the cross dresser in the back seat of the luxury sedan.

“Hey man, who’s that in your car? Is that Girl Jane? The cat that dresses like a ho’ bitch on MTV?”

“No brother, this ho’ bitch is not that ho’ bitch. That is some other ho’ bitch on MTV.” They do the deal and drive back to the studio. Six months later, Haircut Society’s “comeback” record stiffs.

FELA KUTI

Fela Kuti is performing in a concert at the Olympic Auditorium, a moldy concrete shit-hole of an arena in a neglected section of downtown LA. It is a long time coming. Every time Fela tries to leave his native Nigeria, the authorities that consider him a threat that might increase awareness of the tyranny in his homeland arrest him. His last scheduled tour of US is canceled before Fela could even get out of the airport. Fela was busted on currency violations and sent to prison.

So he is out of jail again and he is performing in an old boxing arena, spreading his message with his music, a style he calls “juju.”

I go with a couple of friends. We are the only white people at the gig.

It is a utter spectacle. Five guitar players, all playing inversions of one chord, jingling, jangling and dancing around a looping, jungle funky bass line repeated ad infinitum. Fela Kuti’s twenty-eight wives, all shaking their earthy African butts in a syncopated choreography, sway across the stage.

De-duh-ding duh-de-duh-ding duh-ding-ding...

It is utterly captivating.

“Just like that,” Fela Kuti chants about the elapsed time it takes a righteous enemy of the state to get thrown behind bars on currency charges.

One chord, one riff. It works. De-duh-ding duh-de-duh-ding duh-ding-ding... That night, I have an epiphany to use that same basic compositional approach with what will become the Braindead Soundmachine. I just have to figure out what tyranny and social injustice the Soundmachine are exposing and decrying. In Los Angeles, a land of opulence and placid, pacific weather, oppression is harder to pin down than, say, the bloodshed that is a constant in, say, Fela Kuti’s Africa. But it is there and it has a name: BZ calls it “cultural fascism,” which is a pithy way of tagging the ubiquitous soul-sucking spiritual corruption that is foisted on the average LA citizen as they walk down the street and try to come to terms with daily life and the human experience.

IF I STOP NOW I AM FUCKED

I show up at noon for a recording session. I am playing guitar, Reality is producing and Num-E-Num is engineering. Reality is nowhere to be found.

Num-E-Num and I shoot the shit and twiddle our thumbs for a while, until we decide to start rolling tape without the producer. I begin to make the guitar caterwaul and screech and scream in a most recalcitrant feedback.

A couple of hours later, Reality comes swinging through the studio doors with his back to me. He has a quart of fresh squeezed orange juice in his right hand.

Admiring the choice of beverage as a holistically correct one — all antioxidants and Vitamin C — I think to myself, “We are going to get a lot of work done in a healthy environment.”  As Reality continues his pirouette through the door. 180 degrees later I see his other hand grips the handle on a quart of Jose Cuervo tequila.

It is obvious he hasn’t slept in the last 36 hours.

“If I stop now I am fucked,” Reality blurts.

We make three gold and o.j.s and start work in earnest. Obviously today’s session is not about making music. We roll tape anyway. The entire day’s session is comprised of inexorable blasts of feedback, the pitch of which I manipulate with the guitar’s wiggle stick.

When we finish, Reality tells me why he was three hours late for our session. He was up until after sunrise with Girl Jane, the famous cross dresser.

“He and I went to the Chaco Room after we got done recording last night. We closed the joint. The next thing I know, we are back at my house and he has convinced every dancer from the Chaco Room into doing a series of bump and grinds for us while we huff drugs and listen to the first Black Sabbath record. Over and over. They want to perform oral sex on Jane and he tells them to just keep dancing and to leave us alone. He said to them, ‘Fuck off. This is important. We are analyzing and listening to Black Sabbath’s guitar tone.’”

DOGVILLASAN, THE META-DINK

Reality and I see him late at night on the boob tube. We are slowly and methodically getting torn with music on in the background, and the sole source of light emanates from a television set. The tube’s cathode rays bathe the entire living room in a sickly pale blue.      

My eyes are pulled away from Reality and focus on the form of Toby Hobbins, this 6 foot 7 inch giant of a snake oil salesman, who is pitching whomever is up at 3 in the morning some self-help videotape. Apparently, Hobbins considers it his destiny, his raison d’etre to empower life’s losers to overcome their personal limitations and GROW AS HUMAN BEINGS — to explode through the restrictions inherent in a post-industrial, Infotainment Age. Seminars, videocassettes, audiotapes for the commute into work in the morning. Personal Growth is a mother of a cottage industry.

With the sound muted, Hobbins’ stage presence is very hypnotic and strangely compelling.

Reality and I continue getting torn. Similarly, the broadcasts get stranger. The next one features a squat Asian man, Tom Fu, blurbing the dates of his next real estate seminar, occurring at a hotel ballroom near Los Angeles Airport.

Arguably, this pitch is even closer to a Hyper-Capitalists’ Nirvana than that of Hobbins. It turns out that Vu is a real estate magnate from Vietnam. (“Who’d a ever thought that Vietnam would be the alma matter and training ground of the new Infotainment Capitalists,” Reality whistles.) Vu’s path to the road to Financial and Spiritual Nirvana is that of what the real estate wonks called “distressed properties.” These are houses, estates, and farms whose previous owners couldn’t make the nut and lost their property to the bank. Maybe the breadwinner worked himself or herself too hard and, when money was its tightest, was stricken with a stroke or an aneurysm at the crucial point when money needed to keep pouring in.

“Distressed Property.” Vu is a bottom feeder who excels at his sharking when the bottom falls out. Order your tapes and find out how! Vu’s pitch is particularly brilliant. It features himself, this 4 foot 10 inch Asian dwarf with teeth as white as Toby Hobbins, on a yacht cruising the marinas of So Cal with a bevy of buxom blondes in bikinis, all of whose mammary glands come eye to eye with Vu’s forehead.  Tom Fu: The Meta-Dink.

The broadcasts continue. Not nearly as interesting (although almost as perverse and surreal), but by far the most banal is an infomercial for something called the “Thigh Mistress” with Suzy Winters, an unemployed sitcom star, as its designer and shill. Apparently, as demonstrated by Winters, one would squat and contract one’s chapped and flabby gams around this cold alloy metal contraption shaped like an old man’s perambulator folded into itself, and squeeze, contract, exhale, expand, retract, as if one were either birthing babies or aborting them without anesthesia.

“It’s like she is sticking an obelisk between her legs,” I say.

Indeed, the exercise apparatus -- the bent and folded monkey bars -- transform into some totem of Infotainment Age Self-Actualization, tapping into the weird, atavistic need to grope the Silver Shiny Thing.

“Yeah. And once you’ve touched it, it is tainted, spoiled and no longer desirable,” Reality adds. “More fucking Infotainment detritus.”

“Hobbins. Tom Fu. Suzy Winters. These people are the Holy Trinity of Self-Absorption.”

As the sun begins to tickle the living room windows, we talk about how Dogvillasan, the Coyote God from Vietnam and the deified embodiment of duality, has bought hisself some airtime and has assumed the faces of self-help gurus, real estate vampires and half-witted sitcom starlets. An infomercial about Scientology and its best selling self-help manual, Dianetics, plays into the void. Edited into the pitch are various character actors and musicians who are giving testimonials on how Scientology allowed them to get “clear,” and remove the obstacles to achieving the success to which they had always been entitled.

“This is beyond fucked up,” I say.

“Scientology is boring.  It lacks sex appeal. Tom Fu is really Dogvillasan’s darkest side,” Reality calculates.

Then he says, “Obviously this stuff is aimed at folks who never had a handle on things. But... what if you know what they are on about? The corruption, the debasement, the exploitation of other’s misery and complete lack of self-esteem? What if you embrace that? How fucking Zen is that?”

FOLLOW YOUR HEAD

To generate money to buy studio gear, I take a job as a technician working on a television talk show that considers itself cutting edge. To my way of thinking it is just more infotainment bullshit — a 90 minute infomercial with slightly better lighting and graphics than, say the Thigh Mistress adverts, but somehow more dishonest than the Toby Hobbins’s broadcasts, which are absolutely brazen about their bullshit quotient. This talk show gig is strictly mercenary for me, not unlike Reality’s gig making speed metal records for adenoidal teenaged mutants, or BZ’s job writing horror movies for Avton Pictures. We all break bread with the devil in this town, but it is unclear what the psychic cost is from such a transaction. Is it more damaging if one is aware of the malevolence and nefarious nature of the partner? Or is there a more draconian price to be exacted if one is absolutely ignorant about the creepiness of the deal?       

The show’s producers are particularly proud of the talent it books: musicians, politicians, filmmakers and other arbiters of culture. And occasionally they do get it right. I come to work one afternoon and find out that King Sunny Ade, the other leading practitioner of juju music out of Nigeria besides Fela Kuti, is performing as musical guest.

When the ensemble arrives outside the sound stage, the elephant doors open and King Sunny Ade and his massive entourage enter.

Immediately, the stench is overpowering. Crewmembers, writers and producer-types are trying to hold back their lunch. It seems that hygiene has a different flavor in Nigeria.

*****

Like Fela, King Sunny has five guitar players who jam on one chord for twenty minutes, in a funky, lilting manner. They ching-ching-a-ching over and over and over. Likewise the percussion percolates and lilts.  King Sunny Ade is dressed like Vegas Hilton-era Elvis Presley, and smiles and smiles and smiles. He never breaks this countenance, as he chants, “Ja, Ja Fumi.”

This spectacle is more empirical confirmation of what direction the Braindead Soundmachine should take. But since there will only be one guitarist, me, I figure if I process the guitar through a bunch of echo-y sound effects, I can mimic the five guitars.

When the broadcast is done, the entire crew is confused and bewildered about my enthusiasm for this strange, repetitive music from the Dark Continent.

I am nonplussed. I catch King Sunny Ade in the green room and ask him what “Ja Fumi,” the title of the song they performed means in English.

He points to his noggin and taps on the front of his skull. “Follow your head,” he nods.

REALITY AND YOSHI ARE PLAYING FOOTSIE

“This is the Braindead Soundmachine,” the television presenter says, coming out of a commercial break, as a song from Come Down from the Hills And Make My Baby plays accompanying a video of dragster crashes and explosions. Reality and Yoshi are playing footsie. Cameramen and the stage manager look genuinely disturbed at their playfulness. I sip espresso from a thermos.

Dead air fills the studio, except for Yoshi’s giggling.

“Can we get a close-up of Yoshi’s shoes?” I ask. Obsequiously, the camera zooms in. Reality begins a garbled and distorted dissertation on how Yoshi cribbed his/her footwear from the Wizard of Oz. He’s right: Yoshi has carved out a certain fantastic parallel existence for him/herself. Yoshi — disinherited and shunned from his family in Japan — has recreated a life on the other side of the Pacific, where Asian cross-dressers are just another vignette in the Dream Machine. And so if Yoshi imagines him/herself as an Asian re-invention of Dorothy or Judy Garland, fuck that is as valid as anything else, yeah?

THE WIND TUNNEL

Ikky, Reality and I jam to a drum machine in what we call the “Wind Tunnel,” which is in an apartment building in a lower-rent section of Beachwood Canyon in Hollywood.

Trying to park on Beachwood Drive is to defy the law of ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. Further north, Beachwood is a boulevard of beautiful people and sit-com stars, but the south end is its barrio. Not even relatively speaking, it is utter and genuine squalor, a ghetto amongst the palm trees that form a parabolic, a parallax pointing towards the Hollywood Sign.

It is the housing for the low-lifes who are barely making it. The ones who bought the Dream Factory’s pitch hook, line and sinker.

Technicians, actors, musicians, screenwriters. They don’t stand a chance against the sharpened teeth and tentacles of a machine that is brutal in its indifference to human suffering. They are cannon fodder for the modern entertainment industrial complex.

So, because the supply of dime-a-dozen wannabes overwhelms the availability of low-rent housing, these folks huddle in crumbling apartments like a nest of dirt daubers drunk on the promise of a nectar that dried up a long time ago.

Ergo, there is no parking. City enforce “Street cleaning” days make it worse as one half of the street is off limits to automobiles, so tenants double up and park on each other’s lawns, creating a mise-en-scène of disheveled rapture, general antagonism and literal turf wars.

Scientologists, panhandlers, strippers, heavily-opiated guitar players, aging queen barflies and actors who can only get a gig as telemarketers, all trying to find a place to park, and all pissed because the laws of supply and demand do not exist below the poverty line. Particularly on Street Cleaning Days.

*****

Both my upstairs and next door neighbors come from foreign countries, both play guitar and both smoke heroin. The French guy (upstairs) wants to write the next “Sweet Jane” and hammers out variations of that chord progression for hours on end, only stopping, it seems, when it is time to score more scag. The Canuck (next door) is nice enough guy for a heroin addict and is in more existential pain than he can articulate, even though he is a bright guy and can actually string a sentence together. So the walls moan as he spends all night manipulating his guitar’s wiggle stick and his echo machines. Then the moans stop at 3 AM and he raps on my door, with his hair out of his eyes and asks to borrow some aluminum foil. He would hit up the frog Lou Reed, but then Frenchie would know that the Canuck had some dope and the price of aluminum foil would get prohibitively expensive.

Still, when the echo-y moans stop, so does “Sweet Jane,” as the Frog knows something is up with the Canuck.

The constant tension of trying to stay alive in the bowels of Beachwood Canyon is underscored by the guitars wars that seep through the Wind Tunnel’s walls from perpendicular axes. Life’s losers cusping millennium — an update of Nathanael West’s bit players from The Day of the Locust, only this time they got no place to park.

It is under this setting that the Soundmachine thrives. Or at least practices and records.

WE REHEARSE ONCE

The Braindead Soundmachine started with a drum machine.   A Roland TR-505. It is pretty simple to program.

After I figure it out how it works, Reality and Ikky come over to record some stuff at my black hole of an apartment.

It is decided we will be a trio. We call ourselves the Braindead Soundmachine because we figure the only way to connect with the culture is to, as Ikky puts it, “get as braindead as possible.”

We get a gig in Hollywood. The venue is a punk rock dive with a completely incongruous Middle Eastern name. We rehearse once.

Ikky has some old synthesizers that are twenty years obsolete. Approximately.

He can’t read music, which is okay, because we are in mute agreement that we are doing isn’t about music.

Ikky understands. He contorts and pulverizes electrons through filters, oscillators and envelope generators. He is the right man for the job. What he is creating is not music.

Reality has borrowed my Japanese bass. Except in matters relating to the consumption of chemical effluence, he is a fiscal conservative, and an out-and-out tightwad when it comes to giving any facet of the music business any money whatsoever. Ergo, the borrowed gear. He runs the Japanese bass through a series of Ikky’s transistors, nanotubes and micro-signal processors, a functionality ultimately turning every thing Reality does into one big square wave. He only hits two notes per song, but he makes it sound like one.

Reality has a binary approach to playing the bass. Square wave on = one; square wave off = zero.

I start the drum machine and then chink-a-chink ala Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade on three guitar strings, as trebly as possible.

Nobody wants to sing with us, so we figure that for gig we’ll have the Missing Eyebrow, our hippie soundman, run cassette loops of Tammy Wynette through an answering machine for us. He will raise the Tammy Wynette phone machine fader whenever he feels the tune could use a vocalist. (“When is the right time to raise the fader?” he asks. “There are no mistakes,” Ikky tells him.)

During the rehearsal, Ikky makes meticulous notes and precise markings about the filters, oscillator and envelope settings.

After he leaves, as a prank, Reality and I dumpster his notes and replace them will pieces of paper that read, “skronk, screek, woop!  boop boop boop! sshrree-AAAHHH! gack gack bleep”... This is what his music sounds like.

The next night, we set up onstage. No sound check. Ikky notices the onomatopoetic scrawl from Reality and me has been replaced his crib sheets. Ikky will have to improvise. He shrugs.

I start the drum machine. We play for twenty minutes. We stop playing. I turn off the drum machine.

There is an awkward silence in the darkness, then some righteous applause. Ikky shrugs.

In our collective history of notes and dots and chords, this is our finest moment.

After the gig, Reality and I walk down Hollywood Boulevard to a liquor store. People pass by, roll down car windows and yell things — positive things. “That was cool.” Sundry encouragement. Apparently they saw the performance and then left, ignoring the bands they actually paid to see. On a night when Ikky, Reality and I tried to do nothing right, we could do nothing wrong.

Reality and I laugh.

THE JESUITS

In the 1920s, Jesuits bought up small parcels of Hollywood, Echo Park and Silver Lake, lined the streets with stone, and built quasi-craftsman style dormitories for the devoted practitioners of their fringe branch of Catholicism.  (A couple of decades later, famous writers of meaningful and internationally renowned works of literature — Faulkner, Anais Nin, Huxley and others — would swallow their pride, take a sabbatical from writing important books and write treatments and screenplays for the film studios instead. It would be a hike in pay and a cut in dignity. Their home offices were some of the same dorms built and then sold by the Jesuits.)

The Jesuits are ascetic in discipline, and ergo their ceremonies and rituals are not nearly as hellzapoppin’ as the plethora of cults and wham-bam faith healers that would take Hollywood by storm. With no sense of spectacle, the Jesuits were doomed to implosion once real estate values ballooned and shadowed the means and wherewithal of a such a simple sect.

If the Jesuits’ lack of pizzazz and melodramatic flair meant small box office dollars, such production values which could be found in spades down the street at the Angelus Temple in Echo Park. There, faith healer extraordinaire Amy Semple McPherson had the Jesuits’ and the people’s number, with a glitzy, gallant approach to faith healing punctuated by live radio broadcasts and crisscrossing klieg lights lighting up the skies like the Second Coming of the Messiah was in the can already.

This too was fleeting... After years of top billing, McPherson was bumped off the marquee when she was busted en flagrante, after eloping with her Latin cabana boy in the Great Southwestern Desert. She claimed she was abducted and held for ransom, and for a while her flock and the newspapers believed her. But law enforcement reckoned that when she was found in the desert, she just wasn’t dirty enough to be a kidnap victim.

It was a ruse. Amy just wanted to get her freak on and avoid scandal. It backfired.

Again, all of this theater — salvation, greed, sex and the Inevitable Fall — took stage in the Silver Lake/Echo Park area of Los Angeles, halfway between downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood.

Around the same time McPherson’s lust and wanderlust became her undoing, Raymond Chandler wrote that Los Angeles considered Hollywood a sort of bastard or redheaded stepchild. Moreover, he maintained that dynamic was 180 degrees bass-ackwards. Los Angeles should be grateful Hollywood was around to give LA some kind of identity, because other than that of being a satellite of Hollywood, it has none. Los Angeles is a black hole of a city, persona non grata in a world highlighted by real metropolitan centers such as New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris or Milan. In Chandler’s day, Los Angeles was more like Bakersfield with bigger buildings.

So there was Silver Lake/Echo Park, caught in the crossfire of a sibling rivalry of Hollywood and LA, two towns suffering from dueling identity crises. Adding to the schizophrenia?  The post Jesuit-meltdown and McPherson’s career immolation, which created a pop theology vacuum ultimately satisfied by Scientology, a “religion” started on a wager among a social club of science fiction writers.

*****

Yeah so, Echo Park is where the real writers gathered: Faulkner, Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley, Bukowski and Nathanael West. Before getting killed in a car crash on his birthday in the 1940s, while living and writing in Echo Park West penned the pivotal, definitive tome that dropped the pretense out of Los Angeles/Hollywood: The Day of the Locust.

Its message? Los Angeles is not about art. Anybody attempting to create such is merely grist for the mill in a booshwah, company town. Another lesson of West is thus: entertainment is illusory. Illusion begets disillusionment begets violence. Once the moviegoers populating the darkened theaters see through the smoke and mirrors and the silver emulsion, they begin to feel cheated. They not only want their money back, they want a karmic eye for a karmic eye, and a karmic tooth for a karmic tooth.

This is the energy the Braindead Soundmachine is trying to explore, come to terms with and possibly exploit. The Soundmachine is an Infotainment Age exercise: A pop music combo with a pedantic running commentary on a culture of saturation as its ethos. An update of The Day of the Locust, with the uroboros of modern culture as its motif. “The culture is going down on itself,” BZ said to me one night in a Hollywood watering hole where Raymond Chandler used to order vodka gimlets.

And here we go, in the Pacific Rim on the Cusp of what BZ would call “the Zulu Dawn,” as Garden Grove becomes Little Saigon and dreamers fail to make ends meet and property repossession merely means opportunity for those who have attended Tom Fu’s seminars and the Church of Scientology updates McPherson’s psychic snake handling with the banality of Self-Actualization and Free Personality Tests.

CHAIN CONVENIENCE STORE

Reality is between vehicles, due to discrepancies between his checkbook, parking enforcement and the Department of Motor Vehicles. But another man’s misfortunes are Reality’s providence...

Reality and I are motoring through Hollywood in Num-E-Num’s brother’s Ford Ranger. It’s a Four Wheel Drive number, a cartoon of a monster truck and barely street legal, pearl white.  The truck’s stylistic coup de gras is its brown mud flaps with silver silhouettes of Vargas-type girls sewn on. The flaps are of mixed efficacy, if the splatters of the mud lining the wheel wells are any indication. Reality tells me that Num-E-Num’s brother is in jail for outstanding warrants related to a battery of moving violations, not to mention DUIs and possession raps. Num-E-Num’s brother lent the truck to Num-E-Num who, seeking to curry favor, lent it to Reality, all while Num-E-Num’s brother stewed in the hoosegow.

Reality is grinding through the gears, a process that seems to be inspired by the shrunken skull four-on-the-floor shifter. Pedestrians are genuinely frightened. Reality is genuinely oblivious to their fear. To Reality, the 4WD is a Panzer tank, he is Rommel and the entire city is now the North African Desert.

“So when he not in jail, do you think he eats a lot of sticky bush in this thing?” I ask.

“Between Coors Party Balls,” Reality says.

And with that he manhandles the steering wheel to the right, climbs over the curb and power drifts into a Chain Convenience Store parking lot.

As we slinky into the parking lot of a 7-11, a street person is pacing to and fro in front of the store, waving at us and shouting, “HEEYYY!!!”

We wave back and return his greeting.

“HEEYYY!!!”

“HEEYYY!!!”

More waves and smiles from all parties. There is a man wearing a turban on the other side of the glass, behind the counter, and he is shaking his head and scowling.

The street person gives us one last wave and “HEEYYYY!” and then changes gesticulation and points.

“Yawl’s musicians!” he froths.

“YESSS!”  I say. “YESSS!”  Reality says. We both point. To ourselves. To each other.

The street person continues to bond. “I’m a musician too!” He sticks a finger in his chest and then does some impromptu air guitar gesticulation.

“YESSS!”  I say. “YESSS!”  Reality says. We both point. To ourselves. To each other. Any combination thereof.

“I play the bass.”

“ME TOO!” Reality says. More pointing. More brotherly congeniality.

“Right o-n-n-n-n! Hey man! How’s about helping a fellow musician and bass player out with some ch-ay-nge-uhhh for some new strings.”

“Fuck no.”

“Forget it. Fuck off.”

Reality and I enter the Chain Convenience Store and the Turban behind the counter continues shaking his head.

*****

Street people, music biz types, Scientologists. One cannot even drive to the nearest Chain Convenience Store for a twelve pack of watery beer without getting hustled for something by some pod of a human being, looking to scam enough spare change to buy crack.

No wonder Reality relishes and thrives upon every opportunity to run over the sidewalks.

PINK TITS AMONG THE PALM TREES

Jutting through a caustic gray sky choking on its own smog and dirty hydrocarbon vomit is a billboard pink as Pepto Bismol and red as a junkyard dog’s dipstick. The billboard is an advertisement for Amberlyne, a sort of fashion model or actress or singer, a hyper-blonde caricature of a human being with breasts whose enormous girth threatens to alter the pull and tug of the entire cosmos. These milky pink orbs are massive, and their dimensions are hyper-accentuated by the glossing techniques used on her original photograph, before it was blown up, color corrected pixel-by-pixel and expanded to the size of a flat pink planet.

Amberlyne’s patron leases this billboard. He owns the billboard company. This billboard could only be suspended in the space-time of Los Angeles.  There is a hideous quality to the image. Everything about it accentuates the bimbo’s plastic surgery. Everything about this billboard is an airbrushed lie. It is brutally honest in its own fraudulence.

It is a two-story totem to the shrill, neurotic cry for attention as pandemic. It represents entire generations failing to come to terms with the passing of adolescence, and failing to acknowledge that youth, beauty and perfection are fleeting, and that first gravity and then the carbon cycle will squash terrestrial vanities and precocity into moot, inconsequential pancakes of dirt.

Los Angeles. Where the precious gather and converge, summoning a mass hallucination where they delude themselves into believing that the sun shines out of their behinds.

The smog and toxic gas is a compendium of what comes out of this collection of humanoids’ various orifices. Every self-important fart and belch is so much pollution.

This foul miasma is from the exhaust of the unchecked ego. And this billboard is a monument, a totem, a shrine to the unchecked ego and what happens when vanity meets too much money and free billboard space.

Drive down LaBrea Boulevard and look at the pink tits and the palm trees. And realize that the grotesque self-parody of the Uber-bimbo would end up singing for the Braindead Soundmachine. And later still, would run for governor of the state of California.

RAPPER’S HALL OF FAME/WOODSTOCK BAD 

1988. The Indie Rock Manager and I go to a loft to visit some friends, King Hang and his roommate, Tex. I have just gotten a bootleg rap cassette tape called Rapper’s Hall of Fame, from a soul brother who is employed as a grip on the same television talk show we work on together.

The grooves on the tape are indisputable. The four of us hang our legs over the ledge of a five-story building and listen to the “dope jams,” as it known in the idiom of Compton, where these records were recorded.

“Rap is cool because drum machines are not utilized they are embraced,” I say, as we continue to dangle our legs. “Embracing the machine is crucial. It is Zen.”

“It is also postmodern,” Tex says.

Tex once threw a television set off of the fourth story of his building, because King Hang was watching too many daytime talk shows and the constant bombardment of marketing and entertainment drove him to distraction.

“I have to have that drum sound,” I tell Tex, King Hang and the Indie Rock Manager.  “The sound” is a TR-808, a machine discontinued by the manufacturer because its drum sounds are not “realistic” enough.

****

As I explore the drum sounds off of rap records, a few blocks away from King Hang and Tex’s loft, Reality is in jail for traffic warrants.  He had been pulled over for driving on the sidewalk in Num-E-Num’s brother’s monster truck. He is down in LA County, wearing an orange trustee jumpsuit and trying to not get killed or molested by the Crips and the Bloods.

Like sharks, the gang members smell blood on a white boy with hair down to his waist. Because of his hair length, the brothers call Reality “Woodstock.”

They want  “Woodstock’s” white tennis shoes, but Reality uses his wit to keep his possessions. He encourages the gang members to play a game of name that tune.

“Hey Woodstock, what song is this? OOHHHH-WWHHEE-OOHHH”

“That’s the harmonica part for “The Wizard” by Black Sabbath.”

“That’s RIGHT. That’s Black Sabbaths! Homey, Woodstock bad.”

So that is how Reality and the other jailbird passed the time: By playing stump the band and humming and whistling heavy metal riffs to each other.

In a strange symmetry in downtown Los Angeles, the black man is mimicking heavy metal guitar sounds. The white man is listening to rap records — and trying to nick the drum programming.

BAD VISHNU AT JUMBO’S CLOWN ROOM

Reality’s day job is making speed metal records for music fans that don’t speak English so good.

It is a caterwaul of white noize, and a squall he is not particularly proud of. He equates what he does with the making of cheese logs.

He has other sources of income that are rather clandestine, but seem to involve junk bonds in Japan.

Whatever the pitch, there seem to be no shortage of venture capitalists willing to cut him a check.

He wants to expand his professional and artistic palette, and he has been approached by Flame Starr, a stripper who dances with a boa constrictor at Jumbo’s Clown Room in East Hollywood. She has some “backing” (whatever that means to a lap dancer) from some industry types whom she has convinced that she can sing and so now she wants to make a disco record. She says she has a record deal in Australia.

Reality wants me to write some chords changes, play guitar and program the drum machine. It is agreed that we use the one and a half chord dirges we had foisted upon one hundred people in Hollywood. The difference being that we add another chord or two, and instead of the Tammy Wynette loops recorded on phone machine tapes, the stripper will warble about whatever it is she finds necessary to share with the world. It is my understanding that the lyrics are all vaguely about various New Age themes.

“So this has to have a didgeridoo,” Flame Starr the Lap Dancer says. “At it has to be tuned so that it resonated with my shakra. My third eye.”

Reality takes the money, books the studio time and tells her she’ll singing to a new beat. “It’s metaldisco,” he sniffs pedantically.

“With a didgeridoo?”

“Yes. With a didgeridoo.”

“Oh goody. But the waveforms must be tuned so that they resonate with my shakra.”

“Your what?”

“My shakra. My third eye.”

We lay down a rap beat. Fuzz bass. Funkafied guitar chords. Simulated didgeridoo on a Casio micro-synthesizer.

Over the basic tracks, the Lap Dancer begins caterwauling about various Vishnu platitudes, while writhing suggestively and simulating intercourse with the snake.

“What’s up with the didgeridoo?” I ask Reality. “It’s not like aborigines are going to be buying this record.”

She can’t sing. Reality is attempting to assemble a useable vocal syllable-by-syllable. It doesn’t work.

The whole process is excruciating and time consuming. On one song, she has nailed the phrase “You and Me-e-e-e...” On just those three words, it’s like she has perfect pitch. I ask her to sing “you and me-e-e-e...” on a spare track throughout the entire song. “It’s like a mantra,’ Reality tells her. “Just sing it over and over and over.”  “It’s for the re-mix,” I lie.

So she does it. “You and me-e-e-e...” (beat) “You and me-e-e-e...” (beat) “You and me-e-e-e...” etc., for three minutes.

We begin mixing and editing. In every instance of her singing flat or sharp, we just insert “... you and me-e-e-e...” in lieu of her half-baked Vishnu drivel. “It makes as much sense as the rest of her lyrics,” I say.

The record tanks. Even in Australia.

About a year later, I read in the paper about a lap dancer-hyphenate-aspiring pop music singer killed in the alley behind Jumbo’s. A lot of good the third eye and that snake did her, I say to myself.

I make another pot of coffee.

INFO:

Orígenes musicales:	Hard rock, blues,rock psicodelico.
Orígenes culturales:	Finales de los 60 en el Reino Unido
Instrumentos comunes:	Guitarra, bajo, batería y ocasionalmente teclados

]]> http://geekwrestler.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/in-for-the-kill/ Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:48:13 +0000 Ashish http://geekwrestler.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/in-for-the-kill/

Now now, before all of you come at me with knives and sticks, I'm just testing my new ScribeFire addon on the new Mozilla Firefox 3. I guess its rewarding to be late as all the crashing issues seem to have gone. Yay for my brain!!!

Oh and the song isn't that bad either. It was a Tony Iommi solo album gone Black Sabbath so you can expect it to be better than my normal fair. Plus Glenn Hughes is singing!

Yeah, this is a fairly pointless blog post. Sorry for wasting your time.

The Plan:
A few months ago, I received a copy of Testament's new record, THE FORMATION OF DAMNATION, for review. I listened to the album, wrote the review, and passed the link along to my contact in the band's promotional camp. I also happened to mention that I was planning on catching the show and that I would send a concert review as well. I received an email back from the promo people that I was invited to see the show as Testament's guests. Very cool! Now this is back in May so fast forward to the beginning of last week and I email my contact in the Testament organization to confirm that I am all set: two tickets, Testament's guest list, show my ID, enjoy the show!

The Journey:
I was flying solo to the show but I decided to invite my brother to come along. My brother is five years younger than I am, and he is not a Metalhead, but he knows all the stuff from my brainwashing him as a young child. The plan is for him to take the bus from Port Authority in New York City to the casino and we'll hook up. Plans changed mid-week and he decided to take the bus all the way to Providence so we could hang a little more on the hour drive to the casino. No problem.....

My brother's bus was to arrive at 5:15 giving us almost two hours to drive, get the tix, sit in our seats and relax. I get a call from him around 5, the bus is stuck in traffic and it will be a 30 minute delay. No problem. I get another call at 5:30, the bus hasn't moved, it's going to be 6. No problem. The third call comes 15 minutes later.....go without me. Now I can't do that to my own brother (although I did consider it!) so I waited. Around 7pm, my brother's bus arrives. In the meantime, Testament has just taken the stage! We are an hour away so now I'm just trying to make it in time for Heaven & Hell.

The Tickets:
I made the drive in an hour easily, cars do great things when you put the pedal to the metal! So we park in the garage behind the arena and I can hear Heaven & Hell on stage! So we run through the casino to the call window. I give my name and ID to the girl at the window and she tells me that I AM NOT ON THE TESTAMENT LIST! I give her the name of my contact and she was nice enough to check all of the guest lists, the tickets that hadn't been picked up, and she even tried to get me a pair of tickets anyway because the show was half over. Unfortunately her boss said no. So we are screwed and Plan B is to pull out the VISA card and drop close to $200 for a pair (tix were $85 & $65). As we were debating the next move to Dio belting out 'Die Young', an intoxicated gambler comes over with a pair of tickets to sell. He had gotten comps for gambling so much but his wife didn't want to go, the offer was $50 for the pair. SOLD!

Heaven & Hell:
We got into the arena just as Ronnie was introducing 'Heaven & Hell'. We had great seats on the Iommi/Tipton side (stage left for the band, right if you're facing it) and we were halfway down in the "high-rollers" section. We caught the last two songs of the Heaven & Hell set and they were really good: 'Heaven & Hell' & 'Neon Knights'. Lucky for me I had seen the tour twice last year so I knew what to expect. I'll say this though, from the two songs I heard, it sounds like Ronnie James Dio has strengthened his voice. The last few years he has sounded like he was straining, especially on the highs. When the band left the stage it was off to the t-shirt stand for a tour shirt. $40 got me my Heaven & Hell shirt with the U.S. dates on the back and the album cover on the front. I flirted with the idea of double dipping and also getting a NOSTRADAMUS tour shirt but another $40 was too much.

Judas Priest:
"Friday night and the Priest is back!" I saw Judas Priest twice on the ANGEL OF RETRIBUTION tour, once here at the Mohegan Sun Arena, so I expected a great show. I had seen the setlist online from the previous tour stops so I knew what was coming:

Dawn Of Creation (intro)
Prophecy
Metal Gods
Eat Me Alive
Between The Hammer And The Anvil
Devil's Child
Breaking The Law
Hell Patrol
Dissident Aggressor
Angel
The Hellion / Electric Eye
Rock Hard, Ride Free
Painkiller

ENCORE:
Hell Bent For Leather (w/motorcycle)
The Green Manalishi
You've Got Another Thing Coming

This was a solid setlist geared towards dieheards like myself. I have to give Priest credit, they could have easily come out and played their most popular songs but they kept it fresh for themselves and threw in some album tracks. 'Dawn Of Creation' was a tape straight off the NOSTRADAMUS album but 'Prophecy' came off really well live. I was honestly expecting a couple more tunes from the new record but a shorter time slot stopped that even though they were the headliner. What I don't like is Rob Halford's staring at the ground during new songs and songs he hasn't done for a while. My guess is he's using notes or a teleprompter (like Ozzy!) but it was extremely annoying to have him looking at his boots and clutching the mic with both hands for half the set! He did the same thing on the last tour, especially during the songs from ANGEL OF RETRIBUTION.

'Metal Gods' is a classic I never get sick of hearing but getting 'Eat Me Alive' off DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH was a treat, DEFENDERS is my favorite Priest record. My brother had forgotten that song and was in hysterics watching me scream the words while all the high rolling gamblers stood motionless and emotional-less. 'Between The Hammer And The Anvil' was another welcome addition to the set from the PAINKILLER album and the band was in fine form. 'Devil's Child' was up next and that's another favorite for me (off SCREAMING FOR VENGEANCE). I tried to match wits with Halford on the high notes but he won easily as my voice cracked and I barely sputtered out the last few lines. I could do without 'Breaking The Law' but I understand the band has to play some of their big songs to keep the casual fans happy. Halford needs a new intro for that song because the one he has is easily 25 years old! It was good though, very well done.

By this time I've already forgotten the setlists I saw online so when another deep track from PAINKILLER, 'Hell Patrol', was announced by Halford, I went ballistic! Most shows I see have the bands play 2 to 4 new songs and a classic set but here we are mid-set of Judas Priest and they are laying waste with songs that haven't played live in many a year! 'Hell Patrol' was blistering even if Rob was looking at his boots/notes/teleprompter the whole time. He came alive again for the ultra-heavy '70s classic 'Dissident Aggressor' (from SIN AFTER SIN) but went back to his position in the middle of Glenn & KK for 'Angel'. Not sure why 'Angel' made the set, especially with a new record out, but I guess they still enjoy playing songs from ANGEL OF RETRIBUTION. It was good. I liked that album a lot so I didn't mind at all but the crowd overall hit a quiet spot. Up to that point the crowd was rabid, especially the many diehards, so I guess they needed a little break.

The crowd rose again when 'The Hellion' came from the P.A. and Priest tore into 'Electric Eye'. The band opened with this duo on the last tour so it's always a highlight of the show and one of their more popular songs. DEFENDERS track #2 came with 'Rock Hard, Ride Free' and I completely lost my voice! That's an album track, I'd expect to hear 'Freewheel Burning' when they do a DEFENDERS song but I was psyched for 'Rock Hard'. There was some audience participation initiated from Rob so that took away from the overall performance but that is how 99% of the bands keep the crowds into the show: "Let's get the crowd singing along." It's good that they kept the fans involved because Priest then hit everyone over the head with a killer version of 'Painkiller' which destroyed what little voice I had left.

The encore started with Halford riding his Harley on stage in full regalia for 'Hell Bent For Leather' and the surprise of 'The Green Manalishi'. Normally, the second song of the encore is reserved for the hit 'Living After Midnight' but they thankfully cut it from the set for the Fleetwood Mac cover from 1978's HELL BENT FOR LEATHER. The band could have easily just stopped right there because they had put in a masterful performance but they had to play their anthem from SCREAMING FOR VENGEANCE: 'You've Got Another Thing Comin'. There's nothing I can say bad about this song, it's like KISS playing 'Rock And Roll All Nite' or Iron Maiden playing 'Run To The Hills', people expect it and want it. The band didn't disappoint and there was some audience participation sing-a-long again.

Bottom Line:
With all the bad luck that started at 5pm, everything turned out for the better. We got in and saw Judas Priest play a superb concert geared for diehards. I don't think you could ask for more variety wise although if they had played 'Grinder', 'Riding On The Wind', or 'Sinner' in place of 'Breaking The Law' I would have been much happier. No complaints though. The band was tight: Ian Hill & Scott Travis are a killer rhythm section, Glenn & KK are one of the best guitar tandems in Metal history, and Rob Halford took a page from the Dio playbook and sounded stronger than he did the last tour. Now if he could just look into the crowd instead of at the floor on the less popular songs! All in all, a good show.....too bad we missed Testament and most of Sabbath.

(And just to keep things clear, I don't like the name Heaven & Hell. It will always be Black Sabbath to me! I don't know what spell Ozzy has over Tony Iommi (who owns the name Black Sabbath) but I don't think it's fair to the music to call it something different than what it is.)

My cousin Sue had two extra tickets to the Eagles in 1975 so I snatched them up for myself and a date. We ended up sitting next to my cousin and her date, a young fellow who eventually became a Mayor, State Representative and State Senator here in Ohio. (Dan Fogelberg, who recently passed, was opening act).
 
KISS mania had taken hold at high schools all across Ohio and everyone had KISS Alive and Destroyer. We hardcore KISS fans had everything they had done of course. For the March 9, 1976 KISS/Artful Dodger appearance at the Richfield Coliseum Flash and I went to the Ticketmaster location at the Belden Village Mall and bought three complete rows of seats. One row was around six rows below the other two rows. So we went to Orrville and sold most of them (at cost) to our pals (so we could control who we sat with). I had people in school (my senior year) who never spoke to me coming up asking if I had any tickets left and pleading for one. The power! A few tickets we gave away to some very charming young ladies and we kept two each. (I’d tell you the ‘details’ of that night but I have five grandchildren who may read this someday.)
 
I remember the Foghat/Starz show on February 20, 1978 because my pal Rog caught a flying drumstick from Foghat drummer Roger Earl. The two bands always kicked ass live.
 
I remember the January 8, 1978 KISS concert at the Richfield Coliseum because it took 20-25 minutes to get there and after the show we went to the car to be greeted by a mountain of snow. We had two blizzards that year (the second one, even bigger, in March) and the night of KISS was the first one. It took nearly three hours to get home, dodging sliding cars going backwards down Route 21 past us as I kept the hammer down on the Cutlass trying to get up those big hills with what seemed like five feet of snow and more coming down. We made it back to Orrville and were snowed in for three days.
 
I remember seeing Alice Cooper again later that year in ’78 because that was the first concert my older sister Cheryl had ever been to (we broke her in with that one!). That was May 5 and Jay Ferguson opened. A good time was had by all, as is the case anytime you see Alice Cooper.
 
I remember not expecting much out of Rod Stewart on November 4, 1977 because he didn’t have Faces with him (they were killer in ’75 at the Stadium). Wrong. Stewart kicked ass that night, had everyone out of their seats and had the audience n the palm of his hand.
 
New Year’s Eve 1977 was celebrated at the Richfield Coliseum seeing Todd Rundgren’s Utopia and Derringer. A friendly law enforcement officer stopped us on the way home and inquired about our health and sent us on our way after promises of getting to Orrville ASAP and staying there. Derringer owned the night.
 
I remember taking three or four people for their first Angel concert on March 8, 1978 and them being blown away by Angel’s stage show.
 
New Year’s Eve 1978 at the Richfield Coliseum: Bruce Springsteen. Nuff’ said.
 
Ian Hunter & Mick Ronson on September 22, 1979. One of my favorite concerts at the Coliseum. Too many reasons to list. But what a night!

[caption id="attachment_179" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Ian Hunter & the late, great Mick Ronson"][/caption]

Boston and Sammy Hagar on my birthday in 1978. Boston was good but Sammy laid the smackdown.
 
The Who on December 9, 1975. Nuff’ said.
 
In 1978 went to see Black Sabbath and Van Halen. Had heard maybe one or two Van Halen songs on the radio at that point and none of us that went gave them much thought. We were there for Sabbath. Result: Van Halen whipped Black Sabbath performance-wise and musically like a bastard redheaded stepchild.
 
Led Zeppelin on January 24, 1975 that saw a mini-riot erupt and thousands and thousands of dollars worth of broken window glass by a group outside who were unable to get tickets. That made the papers.
 
I think I saw Aerosmith there at least four times at the Coliseum and only once was the sound working right and you could actually hear the band. Guess they were just jinxed there.
 
After a Ted Nugent/J.Geils Band show Bug, Mott & myself shaking hands with Peter Wolfe. As we came out of the Coliseum we walked by a couple limos and in the back of the first one with the window down was Peter Wolfe sitting between two lovely ladies with a drink in hand. We stopped, told him, “You guys kicked ass!” His response? “I know!” He slapped us each a high five and off we went.
 
Led Zeppelin on April 27 and April 28, 1977. Tickets were available via mail order only with a minimum number of tickets per order. So Flash and I got our money orders prepared and each ordered the maximum number allowed for both nights. We went to the Richfield Post Office and at midnight of the date orders could be postmarked we dropped our order in the mail (along with probably 100 others lined up). We got lucky and each got four tickets for both nights. First night was with dates, second night with buddies. The April 27 performance is a huge bootleg bestseller on the black market. Full details on this night can be found here: http://doclehman.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/
 
There’s more, lots more, but you get the idea. I’d like to hear from others about their experiences at the Richfield Coliseum.
 
I know I saw well over 100 bands there during the 70’s and very early 80’s. A couple performances I missed that I always regretted were not seeing George Harrison (’74) and Paul McCartney (’76) on their respective tours because tickets were mail order and my orders didn’t get picked. I also went as far as making plans to buy tickets to see Elvis in 1977. One of my cousins saw him at the Coliseum in ’75 and convinced me I had to see him at least once. But right before the Cleveland tickets went on sale he died.
 
Lots of good memories there and lots of good bands came through many times. I think I saw KISS there four or five times, Aerosmith the same, Alice Cooper four times, Fleetwood Mac four times, the list goes on….
 
With the opening of Gund Arena in Cleveland the Richfield Coliseum was doomed. It shut down in 1994 and in 1999 was demolished and the property returned to woodland and under stewardship of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.  You can find more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richfield_Coliseum

Along with Unsane and Helmet, Today Is The Day represent one of the few active acts associated with AmRep.  While they never had a hit like "Unsung" or "Scrape", they were still able to find their audience and tour/record new music, even after AmRep fell apart.

They formed in the early 90s in Nashville, Tennessee and debuted with self-released EP called "How To Win Friends And Influence People" in 1992, which attracted attention of AmRep. They were signed to label in February of 1993 and released "Supernova" later that year. The following year they released "Willpower", followed by "Clusterfuck" EP with labelmates Chokebore and Guzzard.  Their self-titled album released in March of '96 became their final record for AmRep.

In 1997, they signed to metal label Relapse Records, which released "Temple Of The Morning Star" (1997), "In The Eyes Of God" (1999), "Sadness Will Prevail" (2002), and "Kiss The Pig" (2003), as well as compilation called "Live Till You Die" (2000). "Kiss The Pig" was the last record that they did for Relapse, while "Axis Of Eden" (2007) came out on band leader Steve Austin own label Supernova Records.

Musically, they post-AmRep sound shifted in more metallic direction (not surprising, given the fact that they were signed to Relapse), but they never abandoned trademark quirkiness - compilation album "Live Till You Die" included cover versions of songs by Bad Company, Chris Isaac and The Beatles, while double album "Sadness Will Prevail" is mixing noise/ambient and heavy metal in equal proportions.

Associated Bands - Mastodon, Aurora Borealis, Blotted Science, Divine Empire, Hate Eternal, Malevolent Creation, Nile, Esoteric, Circle Of Dead Children, Lethargy, Taipan

Fun Facts

- TTID are well known for their use of samples from movies, songs and commercials. Snippets of dialogue from movies "Rebel Without A Cause", "Paradise Lost", "Carrie", "The Last Temptation of Christ", "The Illustrated Man", "Memento", "Rosemary's Baby" (among many others) can be heard on their records.

- Former members Brann Dailor and Bill Kelliher went on to play with Mastodon

- Steve Austin is not related in any way to WWF figher Steve "Stone Cold" Austin

- Steve owns "Austin Enterprise" studio in Nashville, TN and he also runs his own label Supernova Records. Some of Supernova acts include TTID side project Taipan, Defcon 4 and Roanoke.

- TTID portrayed a christian rock band in black comedy "Duck! A Carbine High School Massacre" (1999)

Discography:

How To Win Friends And Influence People EP (1992)

I Bent Scared 7" (1993)

Supernova (1993)

Willpower (1994)

In These Black Days Volume 3 (Split With Coalesce) 7" (1997)

Temple Of The Morning Star (1997)

In The Eyes Of God (1999)

Live Till You Die (2000)

Sadness Will Prevail (2002)

Kiss The Pig (2003)

Zodiac Dreaming (Split With 16) Mini-CD (2001)

Descent (Split With Metatron) (2001)

Axis Of Eden (2007)

Descent

This Machine Kills Fascists

Spotting A Unicorn

Vídeo da BANDA PSICOSE gravado por Dash Produções na Led Slay (War Pigs):

Claro que eu recomendo a você, que também gosta de Black Sabbath, vale a pena deslocar-se até Santo André no sábadão, 16 de Agosto a partir das 22h, para vê-las empolgando a galera! Elas fazem shows freqüentemente. Para estar sempre bem informado, faça parte da comunidade delas no orkut.

CASTELO DO ROCK
AV. DOS ESTADOS, 6061 – SANTO ANDRÉ (em frente à Rhodia – fácil de achar!)
Mais informações: 4475-8480. Estacionamento ao lado.
Aceitam DinersClub, Mastercard, RedeShop, Credicard, Mastercard Maestro

Por Darlene Carvalho

Monoshock

Walk to the Fire (Blackball 1997)

http://www.divshare.com/download/5167001-aac

Oh Sweet Jesus, where in the world have you been all of my life. Monoshock's Walk to the Fire is a overload of psychedelia, rock and punk that falls somewhere in between Japanese band High Rise and Hawkwind at their most abrasive and fucked. I picked this album up long ago and tossed it aside because it was such a spastic mess, but that says much more about me at that time than this glorious album. It is a criminal racket that was recorded so that it sounds as if your ear is pressed against a massive amplifier pressing into the red at every moment.

Think Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath and the Stooges, but without a hit song to distinguish them. This is anthemic, unhinged and unhealthy music that pushes psych, metal and punk to its most mind altering limits. Music is phased to oblivion and reverb cascades over each brutal, but well-played riff as the band just pummels the living shit out each song. This music makes me uneasy, but it also can be catchy in its own caveman way. Each time I listen to this I am amazed at how Monoshock abused the guitar and created such a claustrophobic sound. These are anthems for riding a goddamn asteroid into a planet. Walk to the Fire deserves every cosmic, hippie adjective you could humanly apply to it.

-Not Official! - Extracted from 5.1 Dolby Album Version or Video Game Mogg-

Download Link:

Part 1:

Part 2:

External Links

• Official Website
]]> http://gearsofrock.wordpress.com/?p=161 Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:13:03 +0000 gearsofrock http://gearsofrock.wordpress.com/?p=161 Ozzfest '97 featuring Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, Pantera, Marilyn Manson, Type-O-Negative, Machine Head, Fear Factory, Powerman 5000, and Coal Chamber at Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, NJ, June 15, 1997

This quote from the New York Times sums up this legendary show:

This made the very premise of the concert one of rebellion, infusing it with the notion that rock-and-roll is more powerful than the state.

Backstory: I'll never forget waking up super early on a Saturday morning to stand in line at the Ticketmaster window only to find out that this performance was CANCELED! What? Huh? NOOOOOO! It turned out that the state of New Jersey would not allow Manson to play this gig, so Ozzy sued the state in Federal court. New Jersey had no leg to stand on and the tickets finally went on sale a few weeks later. Whew. Then, after that silly fiasco, my parents asked me not to go because they heard a bunch of awful rumors about Manson killing 666 goats on stage or something like that. Well, my parents ended up losing that argument to this "rebellious" 17 year old.

As for the highlights of the actual show:

Fear Factory got the party started on the main stage early afternoon. I was a crazy Fear Factory head in these days. They put on a great performance, consisting mostly of songs off Demanufacture. "Replica" and "Demanufacture" were the best songs of the set.

Type-O-Negative ruled the main stage with solid performances off of October Rust, as well as classics such as "Christian Women" and "Black #1." At the conclusion of the show, Peter Steele ripped out all his bass strings. He's really strong.

Marilyn Manson went on during the daylight and still performed really well with his usual wild live antics like Bible-ripping and wearing practically nothing. Despite what the NY Times review says, the stadium was shaking during "The Beautiful People."

Machine Head played on the second stage in support of The More Things Change. During Machine Heads final song, the power was pulled so Pantera's set could begin.

Pantera was the sickest band to play and the highlight of rebellion with hundreds of people spilling on to the floor, and body-tackles administered by Giants Stadium staff to some of these people. Hey, Phil Anselmo invited them to come on down. Phil later thanked everybody for this support during a performance at Roseland Ballroom the following year (another classic show). Pantera sounded amazing by the way, with a setlist of classics and supporting The Great Southern Trendkill.

Ozzy Osbourne's set was pretty good. It wasn't very long since he had to play with Sabbath later. He seemed to be conserving his energy for most of the set. Joe Holmes was still on lead guitar duty at this point.

Black Sabbath was awesome and sounded way better than Ozzy's solo set. Ozzy was also a little crazier too. I haven't seen Ozzy perform this well since. There were laser light shows for tunes such as "Children of the Grave" and "Iron Man." I left this show with a big smile and a $30 Black Sabbath tee-shirt.

If anyone has a bootleg from this show, please contact me at gearsofrock@gmail.com.

]]> http://rolltherock.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/lbum-paranoid-em-verso-tripla/ Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:20:03 +0000 Carlos Henrique Castilho http://rolltherock.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/lbum-paranoid-em-verso-tripla/

O segundo álbum do Black Sabbath, Paranoid, será relançado em uma versão especial, um CD triplo. O primeiro será a mixagem "normal", o segundo será uma mixagem quadrifônica de 1974 e o terceiro será versões instrumentais e alternativas das músicas do disco.

Disc 1 (Original Album):
1. ‘War Pigs’
2. ‘Paranoid’
3. ‘Planet Caravan’
4. ‘Iron Man’
5. ‘Electric Funeral’
6. ‘Hand Of Doom’
7. ‘Rat Salad’
8. ‘Fairies Wear Boots’

Disc 2 (1974 Quadrophonic Mix):
1. ‘War Pigs’
2. ‘Paranoid’
3. ‘Planet Caravan’
4. ‘Iron Man’
5. ‘Electric Funeral’
6. ‘Hand Of Doom’
7. ‘Rat Salad’
8. ‘Fairies Wear Boots’

Disc 3 (Previously Unreleased Bonus Tracks):
(Tracks 1-8 recorded at Regent Sound Studios, June 16th and 17th, 1970)
1. ‘War Pigs’ (instrumental)
2. ‘Paranoid’ (alternative lyrical version)
3. ‘Planet Caravan’ (alternative lyrical version)
4. ‘Iron Man’ (instrumental)
5. ‘Electric Funeral’ (instrumental)
6. ‘Hand Of Doom’ (instrumental)
7. ‘Rat Salad’ (instrumental)
8. ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ (instrumental)

Tudo indica que vai custar o "olho da cara", mas muitos como eu, que são fãs da banda, vão desejar muito este álbum!

Via Whiplash

]]> http://rolasymusica.wordpress.com/?p=214 Sun, 10 Aug 2008 20:08:31 +0000 rolasymusica http://rolasymusica.wordpress.com/?p=214 El legendario Ozzy Osbourne, quien fuera líder de la banda Black Sabbath, comunicó que está por grabar un nuevo disco, pero que el fin de su carrera musical está cerca. El Rey de la Oscuridad, a sus 59 años (el 3 de diciembre serán 60), comentó que probablemente sacará dos álbumes más y se retirará.

Hoy en día se encuentra casi empezando la grabación de su próximo disco y declara que debido a su edad está tratando de hacer todo el material que pueda. Luego de una agitada carrera musical y de un paso por la televisión, en el reality show que hizo para la cadena MTV, parece que a Ozzy le llegará el descanso.



Con respecto a la grabación del próximo álbum comenta:
”Estaré grabando un nuevo album pronto. Tengo el ProTools en mi casa y estoy grabando desde ahí. Cuando alguien que sabe lo que hace lo maneja es muy fácil grabar discos con eso. No tiene gracia, el arte de hacer discos se está desvaneciendo. Le está sacando la pasión. Pero voy a tratar de dar lo mejor de mí”.

Lee más sobre Black Sabbath.

]]> http://godshatmyipod.wordpress.com/?p=79 Sun, 10 Aug 2008 19:04:24 +0000 godshatmyipod http://godshatmyipod.wordpress.com/?p=79

Everyone knows that the King ov Rawk is the one, the only, Ronnie James Dio, whose pipes of power have reigned o'er us for aeons, since the days of Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Dio and Heaven & Hell.

Some may even remember the diminutive one from his time with the appropriately named Elf and / or Electric Elves. But the Ronster, as no-one calls him, predates the age of rawk, having first come to light in medieval times as a court jester, village idiot and prototype munchkin.

And it is back to those shameful times that we're going today, torches in hand, garlic round out necks, peering into dark crevices where no man should venture unlubricated.

Back in 1058, Dio was bass player with Ronnie & The Redcaps, leaving the vocal duties up to the brilliantly named Billy De Wolf, releasing a horrendous single called 'Lover'.



Dio finally started to rock the mic when the band changed name to Ronnie & The Prophets, giving it some Ray Charles on a 1460 B-side with 'What'd I Say'. The Prophets also had a crack at 'Love Potion No 9', even if it does pale next to the Tygers of Pan Tang version.

But most shameful of all is the following track. It's your drunk uncle at the wedding reception all over again, as the King ov Rawk gives it his all on 'I Left My Heart In San Francisco'. That's the sound of my heart breaking.



So here's the Tygers showing us how it should be done.

Go John Sykes, go!


]]> http://hardrocknights.wordpress.com/?p=20 Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:22:43 +0000 JT http://hardrocknights.wordpress.com/?p=20 The first show is over, the playlist is posted (see below). Any requests for next week? Make them known in the comments section to this post!

]]> http://blackzidul.wordpress.com/?p=3 Sun, 10 Aug 2008 02:30:07 +0000 blackzidul http://blackzidul.wordpress.com/?p=3 This weekend’s edition of The New York Times Magazine features an excellent report titled “Is Obama the End of Black Politics ” It’s an incredibly well written well reported piece that I would love to have written myself.
edwardg.wordpress.com

]]> http://hardrocknights.wordpress.com/?p=18 Sat, 09 Aug 2008 20:32:17 +0000 JT http://hardrocknights.wordpress.com/?p=18 Hard Rock Nights debuts at 9 pm eastern t