A Tale of Rock and Roll Debauchery in a Time Before Sexually Transmitted Diseases
I’d wanted Calliope, the bass player, to be in the band because he was superhumanly pretty, and I figured he’d attract more maidens in Fred Slatten platform shoes than he’d know what to do with, and maybe some of them would regard me as a viable consolation prize. As for Thumbs, the guitarist, he wasn’t much for skirt-chasing, so we made a pretty ill-assorted trio that hot summer night in 1972 when we went together to the Sunset Strip looking for fun.
The week before, Calliope and I had been trying to lower the boom on two vixens from the Valley when the subject of age came up. On hearing that I was 26, one of them nearly swooned with revulsion, but managed to gasp, “You’re so, like…old!” She seemed to have no sense that, over time, both I and she would become progressively older, and lose our looks. But let’s get back to the Sunset Strip.
One might say that even if I didn’t walk the walk in those days, I talked the talk, to the tune of dressing like my idols, and getting $15 (in 1972 money!) haircuts. The other two were quite content with slobbishness, but such was my own charisma (and Calliope’s preternatural good looks) that when we emerged en masse from the lobby of the Continental Hyatt House, and leapt into the back seat of a limousine idling right in front of the place, the chauffeur assumed we must be the pop stars it was his job to drive, into which he put the mighty vehicle when one of us, realizing that bona fide limousine passengers usually identified a desired destination on boarding, said, “The Whisky”.
By which, of course, was meant the Whisky a-Go-Go, though no one had appended the a-Go-Go bit in decades, around half a mile west. “Leave the motor running,” I urged the driver. “Head out on the highway,” Calliope added. We both looked to Thumbs for “looking for adventure, and whatever comes our way,” but in vain, as he was having one of his episodes. But no matter. In the time it would have taken for him to intone those immortal lines, half a dozen wanton nymphets, seeing that we were in the back of a limousine and that one of us had a $15 haircut and a Rod Stewart-esque blazer from the boutique Sniff, had piled into the car. “You guys are somebody, aincha?” the most articulate of them gasped.
“We sure are,” I affirmed. “Emerson, Lake, and Palmer,” Much premarital sex ensued while the driver headed for Beverly Hills. As a younger man, Thumbs had played the saxophone in an otherwise all-Japanese-American surf band to whose accompaniment many actors, actresses, key grips, and directors of photography had frugged and watusi’d in a more innocent time. Giddy from the champagne we’d found in the passenger compartment’s mini-fridge, and from the premarital sex with girls whose names we hadn’t asked, I dared imagine that I might gain carnal knowledge of Elizabeth Taylor or Joey Heatherton, but when we got to the [REDACTED], the doorman saw us for the frauds we were, and scoffed, “No friggin’ way.”
It was a good thing that a Major Hollywood Producer whose films you’d surely have seen if you’d been an adult at the time, as few reading this probably were, took a shine to Calliope, and presumably hoped to interact with him in a way discouraged in Leviticus 18:22. But Cal didn’t have a gay bone in his Michelangelo’s David-like body then, as he might not today (we’re no longer in touch), so we headed crestfallen back toward our limousine, only to discover that the ringleader of our nymphets had convinced the chauffeur that the girls were the Go-Gos, and that they had to get back to Hollywood to be photographed for Vogue. The poor guy seemed not to realize that the Go-Gos wouldn’t form for another decade.
Oh, the ignominy! Having felt not only like real boys, but like real rock stars for around 45 minutes, Cal and Thumbs and I had little recourse but to hitchhike back to where we’d left my Porsche, Cal’s Mercedes, and Thumbs’ Beetle, which he repaired himself from time to time.
Almost a decade later, I wound up marrying one of Cal’s discards . The Go-Go’s didn’t play at our wedding reception, and the marriage lasted only six and a half years, the first four largely wonderful, and the last 30 months characterized by ever-more-acrid acrimony, and ultimately divorce.
You’ll be much the happier for having read all of these:
https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/unrelievable-suffering-be-upon-him?r=7yu5q
https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/we-will-not-let-them-ghadffi-you?r=7yu5q
https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/marjoran-murkas-new-class-couple?r=7yu5q
https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/i-was-a-teenaged-racist?r=7yu5q
https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/the-donald-g-trump-center-for-the?r=7yu5q
https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/donald-trumps-gay-fascist-kleptocracy?utm_source=publication-search
https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/your-complete-guide-to-digital-sparring?r=7yu5q
WOWZA. My brain is full. Many thanks :D
CA in the early ‘70s. Crazy ride! Have you read Carole King’s autobiography? She shares some wild tales!