Jack Skelley
Gig
I’m in different bands. We play shows.
Let’s start here: Upon graduating from California State University at Humboldt, I return from behind the Redwood & Marijuana Curtain and move back to L.A. The Gods of Art decree: “Thou shalt take a job at Beyond Baroque, Venice arts Boho poetry/lit HQ. There, BB Founder George Drury Smith shall both employ you at BB and rent you a low-ceilinged garret above a liquor-store pay-phone on West Washington Boulevard. (Today, Abbott Kinney.) And thou shalt meet amazing people (including girlfriends), write and publish poetry/fiction/journalism, and launch a bunch of bands.”
(Not long after starting there, I brand BB with the subtitle “Literary/Arts Center.” It sticks.)
I co-launch Planet of Toys. This is me, poet/performer Bob Flanagan and Rick Lawndale (musician/artist & high school friend). This “folk punk bongo trio” is two acoustic guitars plus Rick on bongos. We all three sing. Rick is the Segovia of the bongo. He’s a savant, oblivious to lower-order reality such as social cues and ever in throes of creativity. Besides songs, he conjures punk-dada collages on TV lunch trays, or art installations in his home, such as “Gilligan’s Bedroom,” decked with palms, bamboo and tikis. This piece joins the tiki obsessions of those such as artist Jeffrey Vallance, who ultimately designs the logo for my next band, Lawndale, named after Rick Lawndale and the lower-class suburb of Lawndale (in L.A.’s South Bay). For the Lawndale logo, I sit down with Jeffrey and he inserts images into a mock emblem of the USSR. Lawndale still uses this logo today.
Anyway, back to Rick Lawndale for a sec: Along with me and Bob, Rick adds to our collab songs. Later Planet of Toys evolves into a six-piece rock unit. We snag a twin female rhythm section—Molly & Linda Ruttan on drums and bass. Who else has that?! We meet Molly & Linda through poet Tim Dlugos, who is NY emissary to “The Gang” of writers and artists Dennis Cooper has gathered in L.A.
Hanging with Molly, I plummet ridiculously, cosmically, hyperventilatingly in love.
Molly and her sister return to NYC. I’m crushed. We pledge our romance (founded on blowjobs, rim jobs, orgasms, longing gazes & music) to continue, but she has at least one boyfriend in NYC. I’m a bundle of angst, elation, time-zone-panicked phone calls, actual letters made of mush, and a cycle of poems, “Disco Paradiso,” based on our mutual obsession with twelve-inch dance singles and on my reading of Dante’s Divina Commedia. Molly bequeaths to me theeeee very first record evah by Madonna! “Everybody.” This is Lower East Side Madonna. It doesn’t even have her picture. (The cover a crazy graffiti-and-boom-box collage.) Molly gone, Planet of Toys adds drummer Keith Mitchell, who also rocks The Romans, Green on Red, Opal and—whoa!—Mazzy Star. Keith falls from the same tree as the generally Pasadena-realmed, art-damaged collectives and outside noise-oids in Los Angeles Free Music Society, insanity pop such as Monitor, and artists Fredrik Nilsen, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy (e.g. of art/noise/jamsters super group Extended Organ, which distends to today.)
When Planet of Toys ends, Rick and I rehearse a dozen instrumental ditties he writes under the spell Gardena Japanese hostess piano bars. These become the first songs of new band Lawndale. We add Dave Childs and Steve Housden to turn Lawndale into psychedelic surf and we sign to SST Records, along with some of the world’s utmost punk and whatever bands.
Anyway… where am I going with this? Oh, yeah: Back to Bob Flanagan. It’s important where I introduce Bob Flanagan and Rick Lawndale: Because it’s at the super auspicious Halloween party where I also introduce Bob to… Sheree Rose! It’s love at first fright and a hundred other scary or bloody Bob puns, memorialized in his verse and performances henceforth. (In costume he is a zombie and she is Jayne Mansfield.)
Other people meet each other that Halloween. Pretty sure this is 1979. The party is hosted by me, Dennis Cooper and Amy Gerstler at the Santa Monica Canyon home of Beyond Baroque supporter Alexandra Garrett.
Planet of Toys takes its name from one of my poems (from my collection Monsters; my first book; It’s on Dennis Cooper’s Little Caesar press.) “Planet of Toys” now becomes a song of the same name. It riffs off my Kartoon-Kolored poem about a cutie hitting hot puberty on a frozen planet (boy or girl? I’ve heard both interpretations). Bob writes most of the lyrics to this song. He and I harmonize:
Mister Machine will keep the streets clean
Teddy bears will comb your hair
Barbie Dolls will cry for you when nobody else wants to…
Another number, “Fun to be Dead,” becomes the “signature song” for Planet of Toys:
Problems, problems, everybody’s got ‘em
Not me, not me
I look around from a hole in the ground…
When I wake up on the morning I’m still asleep
Dreaming that the birds in the trees go cheep
Waiting for somebody to knock on my door
But no one’s gonna knock on my door any more
Cause it’s fun to be dead, fun to be dead
Lah la la la la laaaah… UGH!
That refrain—“Lah la la la la laaaah… UGH!”—the last line of the chorus—is the essence of Bob. As I later say in the Introduction to Fun to Be Dead: The Poems of Bob Flanagan (edited by Sabrina Tarasoff, Kristina Kite Gallery/Pep Talk), this song is a gut-punch of glee and Bob’s pangs of dread on a beautiful day. Bob O’Clock is a time to taste sweet desserts on Death Row. Because—the thing is—Bob is cursed with cystic fibrosis and he is doomed to die young.
For “A Date with Barbie” I come up with chords & chorus and Bob writes B&D verses:
Barbie wraps me up in cellophane
Barbie ties me down with macramé.
(This references an aborted bondage encounter he has with writer Kate Braverman… prior to meeting Sheree Rose.)
Bob elevates his masochism to extreme depths. (He is electrified by the SM theme of “A Date With Barbie”). To enact the song, Bob constructs a percussion instrument: The Slapper: Two narrow boards with handles and a hinge. It sounds like a whip crack. Twisting his skinny arms and legs, Bob smacks it between lines and goes nuts at the end.
Planet of Toys is not my only band with Bob. There is also Idiot Bliss. This is Bob, myself and artist Mike Kelley. Plus poet Alec Duncan on bass. There are other iterations of Idiot Bliss. There are occasions where poet Ed Smith sings something. Music journalist Richard Gehr sits in on sax once or twice. But the core of Idiot Bliss is me, Bob Flanagan and Mike Kelley. Our concept is singular: Everything is made-up on the spot. But this is no “jam band” because we maintain this strict rule: Each of our “pop” songs must adhere to verse/chorus/bridge structure. Three minutes tops; built to this formula: I start the number with a random repeat riff. Bob freestyles lyrics, complete with rhymes. Every hooky song winds through different sections then stops, never to appear again.
Bob’s brain fluid is primed for ferocious levels of improv. He spews lyrics and melody like a geyser. And he’s a maniac on stage, flailing, grimacing & dumb-joking. Rolling on the floor.
Mike plays drums. But you can’t keep him behind his kit. He’s as much of an exhibitionist as Bob. At one Anti-Club performance, he jumps to the front of the stage, yelling at someone in the crowd, “Take off your pants!”
My first exposure to Mike is one of his performances at Beyond Baroque. Mike does these mock-lectures, delivering a text dense with both classical and pulp-cultural allusions, plus dirty jokes. This act develops into long-form projects such as Monkey Island, and Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (eventually performed with Sonic Youth and released on CD by The Peristaltic Airwaves.) Mike is a mad doctor. He reminds me of wild-haired Professor Irwin Corey, who is an obviously schizo comic whom I recall from wacky appearances on the Steve Allen show. Irwin Corey wears an oversized tux and expounds fractured theoretical double-talk. “However!” he yells, to no antecedent or follow-up, finger in the air.
Is Mike Kelley wearing a baggy tux at Beyond Baroque? It’s more of a lab coat. He Ta-DAs his manifesto with oversized scrawls. Its globby wordplay, ideaplay and high/low insinuations fuck writing just like I like it.
Allow me to dwell there for an endless sec. for, allusions fuck writing. Right up to now I am compelled to microcosm mind-waves of jagged and obsessive references – from the grimy to the elevated. It’s like what American Theatre magazine editor Rob Kendt says about my novel Fear of Kathy Acker (FOKA). “An anxious romp through pop-culture-warped consciousness, rife with jarring juxtapositions and tonal shifts, crudity and profundity.”
Mike Kelly has me play guitar in his performances. Underground KPFK FM is the truly independent station in L.A. with Carl Stone’s “Imaginary Landscapes” new music show, and Jimm Cushing’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (where Planet of Toys does an acoustic set and spins records), and “Something’s Happening” where Roy of Hollywood has been blowing my mind since I’m a stoner teen with Terence McKenna and Alan Watts talks. KPFK also programs punk rock and undefinables via Richard Meltzer’s “Hep Cats From Hell,” plus all its political and community stuff. My job here for the Mike Kelley appearance is to improvise guitar attacks to Mike’s deadpan rap. By this time my SST band Lawndale is going strong, and our drummer Dave Childs has joined this radio gig. Mike likes it noisy. At rehearsal, he gives direction in his flat Detroit accent: “Jack. You’re playing too GOOD! Play UGGGly!”
For me, those Idiot Bliss shows with Bob and Mike are 1000% gig-tacular! You can’t be more “in the moment” yet free from the confines of time (“extemporaneous,” from the Latin, ex tempore, “out of the time”) than while concocting songs on the spot. During this period when it is booked by Russell Jessum and Jack Marquette, The Anti-Club, at the dirty eastern end of Melrose Avenue, is an awesome anything-goes venue. Anti-Club joins Al’s Bar in the Loft District and Beyond Baroque in Venice as the three stages I appear most often, for music or “spoken word” gigs. To name-drop the biggies, Lawndale shares bills with Chile Peppers and Sonic Youth. Also Jane’s Addiction, not to mention all the SST Records bands: Black Flag, Minutemen, Descendants, fIREHOSE, The Last, etc. I’m the first person to book the Meat Puppets in L.A. They thrash at Beyond Baroque, and singer/guitarist Kirk Kirkwood must frantically smush his glasses back onto his sweaty nose between chords. This initial noise/chaos iteration of Meat Puppets quickly gives way to their warpy tumbleweed-psych.
I have a mosh-pit view of L.A. punk. But it’s not about the mosh. At Beyond Baroque, I produce the music and performance series in its funky community space with folding metal chairs. This L.A. scene is far more fluid than what hardens into hardcore. From the start it is outsider demographics. At BB, arty and (what we now term) non-binary-fronted entities such as Nervous Gender or Human Hands share bills with early versions of Wall of Voodoo. Music cross-infects with art and lit factions.
Now I’ve really got the band bug. Playing to a live audience is almost as good as sex. (I said “almost”!) Rick Lawndale and I form Lawndale, with Dave Childs and Steve Housden.
Here’s the Lawndale concept: All instrumental. No vocals (aside from screams, bigfoot moans (for “Sasquatch Rock”) and the phrase ‘Atta Boy, Luther! (For Rick Lawndale’s song patterned after the Don Knotts character and the Vic Mizzy soundtrack of The Ghost and Mr. Chicken… Will someone please do a retrospective of Vic Mizzy? He not only scored those Don Knotts movies, but also The Addams Family and Green Acres, the latter being the closest a sit-com has ever approached the paralytic absurdism of Samuel Beckett!) I’m a poet/writer. So why do I somehow find constrained liberation in zero lyrics? The challenge is to entertain the brain by contrasting compressed concepts into mood mashes, drenched in reverbed mockery of surf, psych, jazz, lounge, metal, country, soundtracks, TV themes, etc. “A pulp novel in every tune,” blurbs L.A. Weekly. After Joe Baiza, guitarist for Saccharine Trust etc., joins us for a-two year stint, ending just this year, he tells me, “Learning your material I feel like a graduated from Lawndale University: Each song is five songs!” (Same with covers. In our “Interstellar Caravan,” Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” fucks Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.”) The high/low, mass/niche concretion instrumentalizes the process by which I also read and write. Emblemizing the comic component is Rick Lawndale himself, who finds thrift-store McDonald’s uniforms for his stage wear and band photos. (By now, Rick moves from bongos to guitar, and later in Game Show, yet-another spin-off band, keyboards.)
There’s something disarming about Lawndale’s distortion. We wedge into divergent scenes: palm-tree haircut punks from Hollywood as well as their long-hair beach brethren & sistren; lit freaks hanging around Venice; art-damaged denizens of Downtown lofts. Chameleonically, we open for Black Flag in a warehouse. We set-up in the center of an after-hours Russian restaurant Gorky’s. Backyard bashes are our bread and butter. We even get along with people’s parents. Abby Travis has Lawndale rock her sixteenth birthday at her home in Pacific Palisades. (Abby goes on to play bass with everyone from The Bangles to Elastica, in addition to fronting her own smoky lounge act, and her majestic duo Sumo Princess.)
There’s a further advantage to Lawndale: Because we have no vocals, we don’t need a P.A… you know, a microphone and speakers. We can set jam any place with just an AC plug or generator. This creates all kinds of pop-ups. With the Descendants we perform right on the sand of County Line (L.A. and Ventura County Beaches). We rock the parking lot behind O Sole Mio pizzeria in Hollywood. We play the porch of Lawndale Jewelry and Loan pawn shop in the city of Lawndale! (Ostensibly a benefit to get our gear “out of hock,” this is actually a photo-op engineered by scene-queen publicist and acid-dealer Carmel Moran to get us in the L.A. Weekly.) (Carmel’s alter-ego is Tabitha, named for the little girl in Bewitched and for tabs of acid.) We jam atop a canyon in the Santa Monica mountains. Lots of these shows are the brainchild of Abby’s brother Dave Travis, who packs a hardy generator. If it’s a group gig, someone contributes a P.A. We jokingly name these Dave Travis gigs “Travisties,” because they’re supremely ad-hoc, punk-rock, and havoc-prone.
In fact, Lawndale is born in torrents of chaos. Our first gig is the Barney party. This event celebrates the final edition of my magazine Barney. The “venue” is the sprawling, wall-free, third floor of the Nate Starkman and Sons warehouse (in the desolate Loft District). This is where my friend Michael Sheppard lives. Lawndale plays, along with Animal Dance (funky pop band fronted by my girlfriend Robin Carr and her sister Nancy), and sloppy punkers Nip Drivers whose singer Mike Webber discretely pukes his heroin behind the speakers. The gig is billed as presenting writers from my magazine. And indeed, Dennis Cooper, Benjamin Weissman, Amy Gerstler, Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala are all there. But things quickly go awry. Word gets out about a rager in the Starkman building. People stream up the two flights of stairs. They gobble all the sushi purchased for the entertainers. The place is packed beyond the nightmares of Los Angeles County Fire Marshal. Of course, I have no permits, no insurance, no security, and there’s one bathroom. One of the guests breaks their ankle when it plops through the un-reinforced floorboard. For weeks afterwards I fret that I’ll get sued. (I never do: Praise the gods of punk.) But fuck it: That Barney party is a major blast.
Lawndale’s second gig is similarly big. It is Joy at Sea. The brainchild of Desolation Center (Stuart Sweezy and Bruce Licher) who also produced the far-out, hallucinogen-prone shows in remote Mojave Desert settings, with bands from Sonic Youth to German industrial weirdos Einstürzende Neubauten (trans. “Collapsing New Buildings”… I can still see the sparks from their circular-saw “instrument” rocketing star-ward.) Joy at Sea is closer to home: San Pedro Harbor. A pleasure cruiser is chartered. A stage is constructed. And P.A. and lighting are lashed to the masts for sets by Minutemen and Meat Puppets. (There is big and bounding Minutemen guitarist D. Boon testing that makeshift stage, rocking the boat.) Among the Joy at Sea passengers is Los Angeles Reader rock writer Chris Morris. Here’s what he says about us:
After a brief interval that allowed the two hundred–odd passengers to get their sea legs, the South Bay quartet Lawndale started cranking up below decks. They attracted a small group, since most of the assembled crew was jammed together up top, waiting for the Meat Puppets to begin their set. A pity, for Lawndale (in yachting caps and deck shoes) proved to be a completely entertaining neo-surf combo, who tore into their all-instrumental set with a vigor evidently born of the ocean-going setting.
But back to the miraculously disaster-free Barney party. This is not the sole gig to spiral out of control. Around this period I’m still working at Beyond Baroque, which is forever in a funding crisis, especially since Reagan has gutted NEA budgets. It is decided that we enlist X to do a benefit concert for Beyond Baroque. It’s a natural: Beyond Baroque’s poetry workshop is where X founders John Doe and Exene first meet. They are always grateful for that. And this isn’t the first benefit they do for the organization. But it is the biggest. At a meeting in their headquarters above Fredricks of Hollywood on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame, the band agrees to play. Their only payment: packets of speed. (Their cool dykey manager tells me where to get it… An alley near MacArthur Park.) I rent the Stardust Ballroom on Hollywood Boulevard. I print up twenty thousand tickets. I sell them at record stores and bookstores.
Getting Beyond Baroque solvent is major pressure, and who knows if we can make our money back after booking the venue, P.A. etc. A week before the show I happen to be on this bill at the Anti-Club: Sonic Youth, Lawndale, Jack Skelley, Bob Flanagan and Monica Rex. (It’s one of Sonic Youth’s first L.A. shows, their very first being the Desolation Center Mojave Desert gig… I think.) I’m doing both the Lawndale set and a solo “spoken word” thing. Now, around this time, at all these various clubs, I have been performing parts of my still-unpublished novel Fear of Kathy Acker, with its tales of “existential degradation in the dark underbelly of decadent neo-romantic lowlife, waste, greed, corruption, power, money, sex and drugs…” (which is how I mock the content of my novel in my novel, which doesn’t see complete publication until 2023, on Semiotext(e).) Fear of Kathy Acker is a portal for whatever is happening to me (and my friends, or my imagination) at the time. So, at the Anti-Club I integrate my BB benefit ticket-sales pitch into my performance. With false alarm (but real anxiety… that never leaves) I plead into the mic: “I’ve got to sell ten thousand X tickets in ten days! I’ve got to sell ten thousand X tickets in ten days! I’ve got to sell ten thousand X tickets in ten days!”
After the show I talk to Kim Gordon. Since I’ve been hanging with SY, she has adopted the surfing term “gnarly” which Lawndale uses as a superlative. She says, “You guys sounded so gnarly!” She also likes my word performance: “So funny! You have great timing. Like a comedian.”
Fuck. It’s Kim Gordon. Deceptively willowy. Intense. Jaggedly sexy. Hard to forget that. I force myself not to get hung up on Kim. Thurston Moore her partner is so fun and cool. And Lee Ranaldo a total sweetheart. Along with Lawndale friends etc., I hang out quite a bit with Kim and Thurston. We go see Akira Kurosawa’s Ran at one of those classic theaters in Westwood. (Kim’s family lives in West L.A.) Also David Cronenberg’s The Fly. They come over for a chili dinner at my Venice bungalow on Nowita Place. (I have moved out of the liquor-store/pay-phone garret.)
Anyway, despite Kim’s praise (or because of it?) I’m stressed about the X benefit. It arrives as a glorious disaster. Yes, we sell all the tickets, and then some: Have I oversold the venue? People are literally hanging from the rafters of the Stardust Ballroom to view the bands. Again, there is no security. I ask a bunch of friends to take tickets and guard the backstage area with all its beer and band food. What a joke. In no time, the dressing rooms are overtaken, the beer consumed. Whatever. The bands don’t care. They’ve already seen everything.
They all do great sets. X gets their speed. Beyond Baroque pays its bills. And, miraculously, I don’t get sued.
Lawndale’s debut at the Barney party is at the Starkman Building in the Loft District. And we return to the scene of that crime for a big-ass blow-out with legendary SST Records bands: Minutemen, DC-3, Saccharine Trust, and Sonic Youth. This is the warehouse space where dear pal Mike Sheppard lives (rest his soul and dirty bare feet). And Mike lives to create insane shows. This time the bands play outdoors on the building’s loading dock. Perched above the corner of Santa Fe Avenue and Palmetto Street, it makes for a perfect stage. In these days, Downtown is a weekend ghost town. Six-packs and pizzas take over the intersection. You can’t do a show like that today. You’d get shut down before setting-up. We hang late into the night with Sonic Youth who are about to embark on tour. As I write in the appendix to FOKA, Sonic Youth waves to me as their van takes off. Lee Ranaldo yells, “Come with us!” And I wish I could.