First published 5/9/07

If only I’d known then how cool my life was, I’d have taken better notes.

I kept a diary every night from the time I was 12 years old until I was 28. I’ve been rereading my diaries from the 1970s, when I was a teenager in New York City. While many of the entries are hilarious in the way of adolescent profundities and trauma, they also are a microcosm of a time and place.

Some samples:

April 6, 1972
I’m going to see the Allman Brothers, Edgar Winter and Dave Mason.

April 16, 1972
Jesus! What a concert! Berrie Oakley is absolutely fantastic! They’re so good!

November 12, 1972
Berry Oakley is dead. And thus endeth the Allman Brothers. That’s awful.

(I’m going to skip a few particularly self absorbed years here)

April 20, 1976
Tonight was Max’s (Kansas City). It was OK. (One of many, many references to Max’s—although I rarely bothered mentioning the bands I saw. Mostly I wrote about boys I had crushes on.)

April 30, 1976
I went to see Monte Python tonight. The show was great.

May 1, 1976
We went back to the City Center. Got all the rest of the (Monte Python) autographs. Terry Jones picked me out of the crowd and spoke to me. He was really nice.

July 4, 1976
I had a shitty bicentennial July 4th.

July 21, 1976
A pleasing evening. I came home & watched Nadia Comaneci win the gold medal. I idolize that girl.

August 25, 1976
We went to see the Laughing Dogs at CBGB tonight. (Again, one of many references to what I usually called “GBs”)

Sept. 20, 1976
The most amazing thing happened today! Robbie Gordon came to my counter. (I was selling designer handbags at a long-gone departments store called Franklin Simon.) He was looking for a friend of his, but when I recognized him he stayed and talked to me for a couple of minutes. He’s leaving, left, actually, the Tuff Darts. I can’t believe it. No more Darts. They were just on the verge of being incredibly famous, too.

Sept. 22, 1976
It is actually Thursday morning. We stated at C.B.G.B. all night. The Eels didn’t record until 5:00 a.m. (The Eels was my brother’s band.)

Nov. 26, 1976
I saw Ella Fitzgerald tonight. She was great. I am really glad I stuck around. In the beginning, when Oscar Peterson and Joe Pass were playing, I was so depressed I felt like just walking out. But Ella was worth it.

Dec. 23, 1976
Nick’s at a hot shit party tonight running the sound. Barbra Streisand’s new movie’s opening night party. I’m so jealous.

Jan. 7, 1977
I saw “A Chorus Line” tonight.

Feb. 3, 1977
I saw the Ramones tonight. They totally knocked me out. I may go see them tomorrow night, too. They were just great.

March 11, 1977
I saw the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” with Monte tonight. It was the best fucking movie. I have to take Sue to see it. I loved it.

March 18, 1977
I saw “Rocky Horror” again. I love that movie. I lust after Tim Curry. I want to see it again tomorrow night.

March 25, 1977
I had a shitty day at work but saw “Rocky Horror” tonight.

April 1, 1977
Saw “Rocky Horror” at the Waverly.

April 2, 1977
Sue and I took Oliver to see “Rocky Horror” at the New Yorker.

April 7, 1977
Tomorrow night should be great. First Laughing Dogs, then “Rocky Horror.”

April 22, 1977
Sue & Lynn & I made a really good dinner at Lynn’s house & then walked over to the Waverly and saw “Rocky Horror.”

April 27, 1977
I saw “Annie Hall” tonight.

July 13, 1977
I am in Denver, midway through my first cross-country trip—three girls in a baby blue Plymouth Duster.
There’s a blackout in New York tonight. I feel so far away. A NY disaster & I’m not there. An American chopper was shot down over North Korea. War peeks up. Scary.

July 25, 1977
Tonight we went to the Whiskey a Go Go to see the Dictators. I really like that club. The people are completely trendy, but entertaining. The Dictators were great.

July 28, 1977
We hung around the Tropicana today and watched the punks. The Dictators, the Nuns and the Ramones were all staying there.

Aug. 26, 1977
I saw an absolutely spectacular Talking Heads/Laughing Dogs gig tonight. Amazomatic.

Oct. 17, 1977
I saw the Talking Heads tonight with Dave & Chris. C.

Dec. 27, 1977
Nada much to say. I bought “Young Americans” and a John Lennon album.

Feb. 11, 1978
I went to the Ice Palace with Monte & Bert tonight.

Feb. 19, 1978
Annie Golden is on the cover of the “News” magazine. It’s so strange to start seeing my contemporaries make it.

Feb. 25, 1978
It’s 5 a.m. and I feel exhilarated. I had a wonderful night. First I went to Jerry’s party, which was dull, & I left before his band played. Then I went to CBGB where I just watched everybody go by & cruised and got cruised & fended off pick-ups and listened to “The Shirts.”

April 11, 1978
I saw Crystal Gayle tonight with Alice & Bruce.

April 20, 1978
I went to CBGB to see Jerry’s first gig as a Void Oild

May 20, 1978
I went to The Bottom Line tonight to see Lou Reed. It was a less than satisfying experience. I waited in line to pay seven dollars to be mashed in with the rest of standing room to see a mediocre show that started 3 hours late.

Well, that’s enough for now. I sure had fun.

Labels: 1970s, Allman Brothers, C.B.G.B., diary, laughing dogs, Max's Kansas City, memoir, new york city, Ramones, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Talking Heads, Tuff Darts

Some loose thoughts that have been rattling around in my head. Maybe if I get them out I’ll have room for fully developed thoughts.

Last night, DJ MrRid came over with eight DVDs of The Midnight Special. You oldies remember those—the live rock shows on TV every week. Oddly, I didn't watch them back then but we had a blast last night. Earth Wind and Fire. Small Faces. Aerosmith. Kiss. KC and the Sunshine Band. Minnie Ripperton. Peter Frampton. Delicious and we still have hours to go.

I was struck, once again, how nice it was to see people on TV with lumpy hair, crooked teeth, pores. People who look like the people we see every day, only dressed up. Or not dressed up. Those were not dressing up days. Some guys looked pretty smelly. But still, it was nice to see people I could imagine hanging out with instead of people so perfectly toned, exquisitely groomed, and impeccably dressed, I would be struck dumb in their presence.

What are we doing to ourselves? We're beating ourselves up with relentless images of unattainable beauty. We're wasting countless hours and dollars on things that have nothing to do with our true potential value to society. We hate ourselves.

**

Has anyone every pined for you? I don’t think anyone has ever pined for me, and that kinda bums me out.

**

Our front yard swarms with busy, busy squirrels and I’m not the only one who has noticed. A red-tail hawk has been hunting here. The other morning, I saw him lift off with a squirrel. I’m haunted by the image of the squirrel’s little legs hanging down helplessly.

**

Tom and I went to the Fair on Friday. Funny how sometimes the Fair clicks for us and sometimes it’s just off. Last year was great, this year was off. We should know better than to try the exciting new fried foods of the year. They’re expensive and we’re almost always disappointed. The chicken fried bacon ($6, I think) was mostly salty, the chocolate dipped strawberry waffle balls ($5) were gummy. Nasty. I didn’t finish mine. Fortunately, my funnel cake was as good as I expected.

But I had the wrong shoes and my feet hurt and Tom had been working like a dog all week and he was tired. We saw a daredevil act, but heights make me so tense that I couldn’t enjoy it. We saw the dancing dogs, sat in a new car, saw a kid throw up, looked at the creative arts. But this visit, we weren’t feeling it. Mostly we felt sticky. The waffle balls were our last-ditch effort at fun and when they didn’t work out, we went home and fell asleep on the couch.



(State Fair 2007)

Although, lest I romanticize State Fair '07, I will report that the fabulous expensive pillows we bought last year suck. They are rock hard and I woke up with a stiff neck the two or three times I tried to sleep on one.

**

Last week, a friend and I went to a dance recital at SMU. Student dancers dancing student choreography. The kids were all very talented and it was a lot of fun.

I’m not big on regrets. I decided long ago not to nurse regrets and have been mostly successful. I acknowledge my regrets but don’t wallow in them. But one of my regrets is the way I ignored my body through my youth. I envy dancers for their control of, respect for, and joy in their bodies. I wish I could dance. I mean really dance—turn my body into a leaf or a stream, into anger or ecstasy. I think that would be swell.

Labels: 1970s, flotsam, memoir, pop culture, texas

I was a huge fan of Masterpiece Theater in the 1970s and a particularly huge fan of the show’s adaptation of Thomas Hughes’ novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

Of course, I was a teenaged girl and the six-part series about Rugby, an English boys’ school, was all cute boys with English accents wearing foppish clothes. And the hair! My god, you’ve never seen such marvelous haircuts, straight out of an Urban Outfitter catalog, except the faces underneath them were happy and chipper instead of haunted and morose. I wish I could show you photos, but I can find none online except this on the website of the guy in the photo—cute little Anthony Murphy who played Tom himself. Now he’s a painter in France and good one, I think.

But anyway trust me. Cute boys, good hair, cool clothes and a morality play. What’s not to like?

I loved, loved, loved the miniseries when it ran and saw it a few times. I even wrote a fan letter to Anthony Murphy. Somewhere I have the photo of him I received in return (I can’t recall if it was autographed). Back then, before VCRs, I actually taped it on a cassette audio tape as my only way of preserving the joy.

I rented the series from Netflix recently, with some trepidation. Would it be good as I remembered?

Oh joy. It was every bit as wonderful as I remembered, maybe even more so. Twinkle-eyed Tom Brown is fair, honest and mischievous. His mate Ned East is as upright and loyal a buddy as you could hope for. Poor Diggs’ plain face fair glows with goodness, even though he hasn’t two farthings to rub together. Cutherbertson—oooh, that Cuthberston—is a squirrely little weasel with a lisp and a Little Lord Fauntleroy collar. And Flashman is an all-time great dastardly sexy villain. He is so bad, especially when he roasts young Tom over the fireplace. But when he laughs his wicked laugh, he has dimples to die for.

Tom Brown’s Schooldays is the testosterone version of the Victorian book that inspired the values by which I live, A Little Princess. That story took place in a girls’ school and the torture was poverty and mocking rather than the more brutal and physical torments the boys of Rugby inflict on each other. But the themes are the same: indomitable spirit, stoicism and dignity in the face of injustice (well, Tom did become a vomiting drunk for a while after Flashman framed him, but he got better) and the triumph of good over evil. Hokey as they are, Tom Brown and especially Sara Crewe are the heroes after whom I have always tried to model myself.

And all that aside, Tom Brown’s Schooldays is a ripping yarn. With great hair.

Labels: 1970s, books, television

This is one of my brother’s early bands, The Eels, circa 1975. That’s brother Nick, doing a Harpo Marx kinda thing, second from left. He played the drums back then. (He can play about any instrument you put in his hands now.) Next to him on the couch is Chris the bass player, who was so laid back he was inside out. Last I heard, he was in some kind of metal band. And then another Chris, the temperamental genius guitarist and my ersatz brother. He and Nick were friends since elementary school and Chris spent a lot of time at our house. Sometimes I would get up late in the morning and there would be nobody in the house but Chris, sitting at our kitchen table, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

And on the far left, holding the inert warhead in what is known among those who know it as the “Warhead Picture” is Jerry Garcia. The other Jerry Garcia.

Jerry died last week and it’s given a lot of people a lot to think about. A lot of ambivalence surrounds his death, from hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver. As you might imagine, with those particular causes, his death is not entirely surprising but that doesn’t make it any less sad.

Jerry was charismatic, charming, talented and a drug addict. Gosh, that’s a cliché, isn’t it? After the Eels, he played with a couple of important bands in the NY punk scene—Richard Hell and the Voidoids and James White and the Blacks.

My friend Dave, who was close friends with Jerry from childhood, told me that when Jerry learned that he’d made it into the Voidoids, he went straight to Dave’s house and they jumped up and down and squealed like little girls.

But Jerry was a vortex of dissolution and over the years, he sabotaged himself—stealing from friends, band mates and professional associates, for example—and many (most? all?) of his friends dropped him.

One friend one time left a room leaving his wallet and Jerry alone. In the wallet was money and a note that said, “Take the money and never come back.”

At his best, Jerry was social, garrulous and a raconteur but that may be why he tried so hard to bring his friends into his drug-driven life. He liked people and didn’t want to do stuff alone. We all like friends around who share our interests. My family holds Jerry partly responsible for my brother Oliver’s descent into addiction and his ultimate death. I don’t think I ever saw Jerry again, after Oliver died in 1987, though I heard news of him now and then, none very good.

Jerry lived with his parents when he died. There was no funeral, just a viewing of the body. Dave went and a few other people. Just a handful. A small handful. After seeing what was left of Jerry, they all went out together and reminisced about Jerry’s good days, about the Jerry who charmed everyone around before he allowed himself to freefall.

Jerry was not an intimate of mine, although he was certainly part of a gang with which I ran. I still laugh to think of him telling me, when we were both older teenagers, that he likes Jewish girls “because they put out” –which is tawdry but funny anyway. (Jerry was Cuban.) I never put out for him though he once expressed a fleeting interest.

Drug addiction is so sad, so sad, so sad. It steals people away from us, sucks them into a cesspool from which many never emerge. Oliver was sucked down quickly. Jerry spun around and around into middle age before his body gave out.

Maybe Jerry was a bad person. I don’t know. He did a lot of bad things. But I think he was just broken, like Oliver. Now that he’s gone, his friends are mourning the person he once was and could have been. It’s a complicated sadness.

Labels: 1970s, death, drugs, memoir

Did anyone catch Saturday Night Live this week—the rebroadcast of the first episode, starring George Carlin?

He was great, of course. He didn’t participate in skits but instead his stand-up was interspersed among the skits and musical performances by Billy Preston and his band of nattily dressed ‘70s hipsters, and poor, unhappy Janis Ian. Such a sad sack.

The ‘70s ... so long ago.

Carlin’s schtick about the irony of going through airport security and then being handed eating utensils was prescient. His joke about threatening a stewardess by cutting her throat with a piece of paper was disturbing.

And did you catch the TV commercial satire about a razor with three blades? Three blades! Can you imagine? Outlandish!

I think we’re up to five blades now. How high can we go?

My, how things have changed.

I’ve also been watching Maude on DVD again. Most disturbing: Maude is supposed to be 47 years old in the show. The disk I have includes an episode of Walter celebrating his 50th birthday.

I'm still waiting to feel older than Archie Andrews and now I learn I'm older than Maude.

Aside from that, this disk includes the episodes in which Maude gets pregnant. (Oy, she’s so upset, she needs a double something. Looks like Scotch.) She decides, after two episodes of discussion, to get an abortion. It was weird, just weird, to hear a discussion that frank and unburdened by politics or hysteria. Her daughter Carol (Adrienne Barbeau) was all over ditching that fetus. It’s hard to imagine any television show today touching this topic.

My how things have changed.

In another episode, Maude and her “housewife” friends decide to protest a young supermarket checker getting busted for pot by buying pot and all getting arrested.

The whole episode is like entering a parallel universe.

For example: Carol comes downstairs in the morning feeling groggy. Maude and Walter had kept her up fighting about the planned protest and so Adrienne finally had to give in and take a Valium, she explains. Oh, Maude can help--here's a Ritalin to wake her up. (“That’s what mommies are for.”)

Then, their doctor buddy Arthur stops by (with a hangover) and Walter hits him up for refills on their drugs--Secenol, Miltown, Librium.

Holy crap, Maude. You’re all hopped up on dolls! Who knew?

Yes, that’s the point—the hypocrisy of marijuana laws when people are taking all kinds of other drugs, but still… Can you imagine Ray Romano downing a Miltown after a bad day?

Maude was responsible for getting weed to get herself and her friends busted but Walter confiscates her $20 bag and she ends up going to the police station with a bag of oregano. The sergeant at the desk figures that out and won’t arrest anyone for that. He also complains of exhaustion and so Maude rummages in her purse and helpfully hands him a Dexamil.

I was sure the punch line would be that she would get arrested for distributing another kind of controlled substance. Nope. Blablabla, Maude and the women end up going home, free, and after she’s gone, the cop shrugs and pops the Dexamil.

Cue the music.

MY how things have changed!

Finally, last night Tom and I wallowed in VH1 Classic’s History of Rock episodes about 1970s rock and then punk. No particular insights about that here, except to note how deep the roots of the rock of our formative years run. It just sounds, looks and feels so right to me, so personal, in a way no music from before or after does. I still belong to the Blank Generation. That doesn’t seem to change.

Labels: 1970s, music, pop culture, television

My friends Chuck and Susan in fine disco form


According to the public radio show Marketplace (spinning off a Forbes Magazine article), while gay businesses in general are booming, gay bars are facing extinction. (Story here.)

This is a good thing because it means we find it less necessary to segregate ourselves according to sexual orientation. One person interviewed suggested—and he may be quite right—that the trend applies more to the coasts than to the rest of the nation, where the risks of hitting on the wrong same sex person may be a lot riskier. Hit on the wrong person in New York City and you’ll probably get a “no thanks,” or maybe a night of experimentation by someone who will claim to have been too drunk to remember the next day. Hit on the wrong person someplace like Wyoming and you may be beaten, tied to a fence and left to die. (You know what I mean.)

But I digress … my intent is to reminisce about gay bars in the 1970s, when I was a card-carrying, Halston perfume-wearing fag hag in four-inch heels and Qiana.

The disco movement may have been popularized by the breeders of Saturday Night Fever (a movie I adore), but it was launched by gay men. The first time I danced until dawn was at a disco called Galaxy 21, on 23rd St., near the Chelsea Hotel, which (like the rest of New York City) was a whole lot seedier then. Nancy Spungen had not yet died there; it was still the kind of place where that kind of thing happened.

I was in 11th grade. Galaxy 21 had three stories and that was the first time I’d ever heard Donna Summer faking an orgasm in “Love to Love You Baby.” After a night of dancing and drinking vodka tonics, I went with friends to breakfast at the Cosmos Coffee Shop, on 58th St. Then I dragged my friend Susan home with me to face my parents. We we were met by the stone-angry face of my father waiting for us at the kitchen table. Yikes. Yeah, I was in all kinds of trouble.

But a fag hag was born.

Our casual weeknight hangout was The Barefoot Boy, a dark, woody (no pun intended), cozy neighborhood bar in the East 30s where I learned to do the Hustle. This place was popular with older men looking for younger—chicken hawks, we called them. It’s also where I tried poppers (amyl nitrate) the first time. Yuck. Never liked it but people dancing by sometimes just stuck under the noses of other dancers for a snort.

Sometimes friends and I went to Ice Palace on 57th Street for their Sunday afternoon tea dances. I saw Ethel Merman sitting at the bar there once, surrounded by fluttery young men. That was when she had a disco album. Ice Palace had a “no open-toed shoes” policy which was designed to discourage women. We went anyway, in closed-toe shoes.

When Xenon opened, that became the hangout for my me and my friends. That wasn’t so much a gay bar as full-out glitzy disco—kind of the poor man’s Studio 54, where I went just once. I saw Robin Williams there. He gave my red pumps and vintage robin’s egg blue silk capri pants a good once over, then looked disappointed when he saw the rest of me.

Xenon was great over-the-top fun, with lots of smoke and flashing lights, a giant neon pinball machine, a spaceship that lowered from the ceiling…

Disco Sally, world’s oldest fag hag, a tiny little lady who I believe was an attorney, was often there, surrounded by an adoring gay entourage. I saw Eartha Kitt there once, dancing with a boa constrictor that was a regular (yes, the snake was regular); and Sylvester Stallone, who was surprisingly short; and Truman Capote, hat and all. And there was a guy, I forget what we called him, who spent every night doing interpretive dance alone.

When I moved to Dallas in the 1980s, my gay bar hangout was the Crews Inn on Fitzhugh, where my friend Stan (RIP) and I would get absolutely blotto on wicked strong happy hour drinks Friday nights. Yikes, I can still remember how quickly those hit, and I remember reeling out of there.

I went to the Village Station only once, as I recall. Same with the Roundup. I was new to Texas at that time and seeing people two-step was interesting in itself. Seeing guys two-step together was like entering a parallel universe. I recall feeling that women were not welcome at the Roundup.

I went to JRs once or twice, too, but by that time I was losing interest in bars in general and gay bars in particular because it was beginning to sink in for me that gay boys weren’t just looking for the right woman.

One of the attractions of gay bars for me at the time was that I could go and have fun and never get hit on, which I actually liked. Plus, I always had someone to dance with. (Old joke: Why did God make gay men? So fat chicks would have someone to dance with.) And gay men told me often how FABULOUS I was, especially when I wore Qiana and Halston perfume, which actually was a gift from a gay boy I knew in high school. I slept with this gay boy at one point--I suspect I was a last ditch effort for him. It wasn’t much fun for either of us…

If gay bars go the way of record stores, it will definitely be the end of an era. Not a bad thing. But they were great fun for me, back in the day.

Labels: 1970s, dallas, disco, memoir, new york city, nightlife

I watched the movie Hair on AMC the other night. Some of you know that Hair holds a very special place in my heart. I was a stage door groupie for the Broadway show and even auditioned for it when I was, like, 12 years old. Yeah, really. No, I didn’t get a part.

Anyway, the movie wasn’t great and I haven’t seen it since it came out in 1979, but I was thrilled to see it listed the other night, when I was planning a solo late-night couch party. It was great fun.

Hair depicts the seismic societal changes of the late ‘60s but what the movie brought most strongly to my mind is the very distinct experience of growing up in the 1970s, when I went to see the show over and over, longing for the jubilance of the life of those who came just before me.

My cohort comprises the tail end of the baby boom (I was born in ’58, the boom is generally accepted as ’46-’64). Mine is one of those in-between generations, stuck in a muddy trench between the revolutionary idealism of the ‘60s and the brittle excess of the ‘80s. The 1970s were a dark time, when the drugs really kicked in and the pristine visions of the flower children started looking like snow in New York City, day two—gray with yellow spots and pocked with garbage. Maybe free sex and prodigious drugs weren't such a great idea after all. This was the decade when we figured that out.

A teenager through Watergate, I was acutely aware of it without entirely comprehending what was happening. I just breathed the sour air of corruption, mistrust and anger surrounding it. I didn’t know anyone who went to Vietnam (oddly, now that I think about it) but it flickers on the TV screens of my memories of those days. The nation was hit by inflation and the oil crisis and New York City was deep in the economic crapper.

Drugs and sex were seeping ever more deeply into popular culture but the sex was a lot less jubilant than it seems today. Nobody was used to sexual freedom yet and it all seemed a little bit tawdry--sex clubs and poppers and leather bars. I was too young to be a part of all that but I knew what was going on. (The famous sex club Plato’s Retreat was not very far from my home. Once, a man standing outside asked me if I would go in with him, no strings attached, because single men were not allowed in. I declined.)

Wedged between the nuclear family ‘50s and the loud reinvention of parenting that began in the ‘80s, many of my generation were untethered from their parents. I roamed New York freely, riding graffiti-covered subway cars; getting high with friends in the park, in friends' apartments while their parents were at work, in the staircases of apartment buildings if no place better could be found. I pretended to go to school in the morning but instead met a friend on a patch of grass near the West Side Highway, where we waited until our parents went to work so we could go back home.

That was the '70s NYC-style but I recognize the same style of sad and surly independence in the suburban teen lives depicted in the movie and book The Ice Storm. Tom, who was born in 1960, sees his Texas adolescence in Dazed and Confused—funnier by miles than the Ice Storm (which is devoid of humor) but not exactly depicting a generation on the fast track.

In some ways, the 1970s gave me a dark world view and chopped, diced and spliced my values into a strange amalgam of idealism and cynicism.

I don’t mistrust the government as deeply as some (perhaps the fact that Watergate was uncovered and punished inoculated me against total cynicism) but I believe it bears close watching and that voting is among our most significant responsibilities. I also believe that if newspapers go under, the great loss to society will be unbiased investigative reporting.

I think the era affected how I view sex and drugs. I’ve seen lots of casualties of drugs and so have less of a moral objection to them than a pragmatic one because they do some bad shit. I avoided the harder drugs many of my peers did. I never tripped, but I did do cocaine for a while. I don’t anymore because it killed my brother and I hold a grudge.

Coming of age while culture was in flux perhaps made me more broad minded, more flexible in my rules of morality (for better or worse), than those who came before or after. In general, I am forgiving of our darkest nature, tolerant of transgressions and raw in my assessment of human nature. I don’t think humans are bad. I just think we’re all a little fucked up. And that’s OK.

And, by the way, I miss the ‘70s desperately. Those are my good old days.

Labels: 1970s, baby boom, drugs, memoir, new york city, personal growth, sex

My brother Nick just sent me this video of one of our NYC favorite bands back in the day, The Laughing Dogs.

The Laughing Dogs played all the usual places—CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, Hurrah, Bottom Line. I hadn't heard them in a long time and was relieved that they sound every bit as good to me as I remember. They were power pop tunesters with chops. I went to every gig I could get to, and that was most of them. I saw them open for Patti Smith in New Jersey and back up the Monkees in a club on the ground floor of the Empire State Building, if I remember correctly.

I may have been in the crowd somewhere wearing a Joehead mask (you'll know what I mean when you see it). I can’t recall, but these guys were friends with Nick and I was a peripheral friend so it's possible/likely. (If you were a girl back then you had to be dating someone in order to be anything more than peripheral to the scene.) I'm still in touch with Carter Cathcart--the piano player--now and then. I had a big crush on the bass player, Ronny Carle (nee Altaville), the one doing most of the singing. He looks like Trouble, right? Yeah. I had great taste in men. My first big romance was a hard-drinkin’ gun lover. Yikes.

But enough about me. Ladies and gentlemen, The Laughing Dogs:

P.S. serious earworm potential here

Labels: 1970s, laughing dogs, music, new york city