Elon Musk Before He Was Elon Musk

On stage at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit a season or two ago, that zany, truculent Elon Musk declared, “If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.” He was referring to a number of heavy hitters declining to continue to advertise on Twitter, formerly known as Y, or maybe it’s the other way around, because he’d endorsed an antisemitic remark on the, uh, platform for which he famously paid several trillion dollars at some point in the recent past. 

It occurs to me, reading about that, that I knew Elon Musk two score years and three ago, when he was a southern California rock musician.

Michael Bishop was the singer and songwriter of a good band down in the Costa Mesa/Newport Beach area. He had talent, though perhaps rather less than he imagined himself to have. Around the time that punk was taking hold, to the small extent it took hold, on the West Coast, he got it into his head that, because I’d freelanced for the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone at the dawn of the decade, and attracted much notice with my flamboyant sarcasm, I was exactly the guy to lead him to the pinnacle of the New Wave heap. 

Honestly, a record he and his band had made at a local admirer’s 8-track studio in the hood — “B of A” — had been brilliant, the best Sex Pistols imitation ever. It was all about how suddenly anarchic Mike had become fervently antipathetic toward the Bank of America. “I’m going to blow up every bank I see,” he declared, with Rotten’s scabrousness, but much more tunefully, “I’m going to blow them into hist-to-ree!” I agreed to take Michael and his band under whatever wing he imagined me to have in exchange for his getting me studio time at his young admirer’s ill-equipped studio.

In keeping with the times, I renamed him John Q. Public. Then, overreaching, I decided that it would be amusing for the band to be called His Privates. John Q. Public and His Privates, you see. Privates not only as opposed to public, you see, but also as in cock and balls. Comedy gold, you see!

The deal worked out better for me. I recorded four demos with members of his band. Michael and his pal Colin Something, who’d been the lead singer in the Yes spinoff band Flash, sang backup on my ode to Peter Frampton or maybe, sub-consciously, my No. 1 pal at the time, whose success with women I envied.

Pretty Boy is on the front of People magazine

I find the very thought obscene

I mean I’m keen to douse the little twit in kerosene.

Pretty Boy’s platinum albums line his cashmere walls

“I owe them to my fans,” he drawls. My flesh, it crawls

God, I’d love to kick him the balls.

Anyway, Johnny Q, as Michael had begun calling himself, got booked into the famous Starwood in actual Hollywood, a semi-big deal for a band from the coastal Orange County hinterlands.

’Twas there, on the Starwood’s stage, on which The Knack, Van Halen, and my own band, The Pits, had strutted ‘n’ preened, that Michael did his pre-emptive Elon Musk imitation. After one number, which the not-Privates had played well, and he’d sung well, he pointed out to the audience that if he chose to, he could tell it to get fucked, and that he might do exactly that if didn’t respond more enthusiastically. 

The audience snickered softly and went back to its business.

I heard some time later that Michael had died, but I am Facebook friends with his guitarist, Matt Quilter, whom I once took to a Dodgers game to thank him for playing on my demo.