JUST LIKE NEW TIMES

A couple weeks ago, I conducted a little unscientific experiment: Would a company that I’ve outspokenly badmouthed in print overlook my past squawking and offer me a job? I figured the odds were long since the company’s New Times (oops, sorry. Village Voice Media. Be still my heart).

The position in question was editor of Seattle Weekly, a gig that, given different ownership, I would have been seriously chomping at. Yet despite the my public feelings toward the ownership –- my diatribe is recounted here -- I applied, partially as a test and partially because there’s a side of me that thinks the position and the location would make the bullshit that went along with it more palatable. I ran an alternative paper in L.A. for nearly four years (the Los Angeles Reader) and I miss the rush of putting out a weekly on the fly.

The first question was whether I should come clean in my cover letter. Should I remind the New Times Suits (I picture bolo ties, boots made from the skins of exotic dead animals, and Red Man chaw) that I danced on the grave of New Times L.A. in an L.A. Alternative Press story in 2002. Should I tell them that, no, really, I totally understood why company honcho Michael Lacey called me and fellow management at the doomed L.A. Reader cocksuckers right before the guillotine came down hard on our collective necks back in 1996?

I asked a pair of trusted advisers who’d worked with me at the Reader, and they agreed I should stay mum and only play the remorse card well into the process. So I sent a nice package of clips with a confident cover letter and sent it off to New Times (er, Village Voice) headquarters in Denver.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t get the gig. Nor an interview. Just a generic form letter from a New Times underassistant lackey that “nothing was available” for me at the moment. (Just say “until the end of time” and be done with it). It could very well be that I lacked the credentials to run the Seattle Weekly. I can kind of accept that. But it’s more fun to be paranoid and assume that that Mr. Lacey’s got skin the thickness of one-ply tissue (something I saw very first hand a decade ago) and there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that I’d ever be considered for a gig there, credentials be damned. I prefer to imagine Lacey, up there on his little mountaintop, counting his money, laughing diabolically at those he thinks he's squashed. I hold the man personally responsible for yanking the heart of the nation’s alternative press with a rusty pair of pliers. If I've annoyed him just a little bit, I'm happy.

THELMA’S COOCH

Behold the beautifully bent fingers in those photos. Those are a reasonable facsimile of Thelma’s Cooch. Even better, she talks, too – and says the damndest things. Let me explain. Last summer I worked on an unjustly neglected NBC program called “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” Not high art, perhaps, but nevertheless the most fun I’ve ever had working in television. The origin of Thelma’s Cooch came when one of the show’s performers arrived on set with a fairly severe case of, um… how do I say this delicately? Okay, here goes: She came in with monster cameltoe. The cooch took on a life of its own and became something of a mascot among the “Hit Me Baby” producers.

What’s perhaps more remarkable is that even now, a year after the show wrapped, the Cooch survives. We’ve all gone our separate professional ways, but a pack (a “six pack,” if you will; don’t blame me for that, though. I didn’t make it up) of us still hook up on occasion for evenings of drunken revelry, always at Don Cuco’s in Burbank. Six was down to five last night, but in attendance were Daniel “King” Soiseth, Carla “Ivanna” Patterson, KojakColumbo (so named for the excellent Harry Nilsson tune) and Dwight Smith and Michael Agbabian, who, alas, have no nicknames. Sadly, fellow ‘Sixer Jason Lenzi had better things to do and couldn’t join us. But Thelma’s Cooch more than made up for his absence.

TV is such an odd beast from a job perspective. You become intensely close with people for 12 weeks or so, then it’s over with a loud crash. The blood, sweat and bonding often disappears once production stops. It’s a transient life and one I don’t know I’ll ever adjust to. I like working all the time. I don’t like to be six weeks into a project and have to start plotting what my next gig’s going to be.

But I digress. The point of all this is that in this unreal world a bond of real friendships have developed, albeit one that swims in gallons of booze and mediocre Mexican food. Yet perhaps that’s the best kind. Viva la Six Pack!

FLY LOW

I just got back from Cleveland, where I was able to cross two more names off a long list of interviews for a book I’m writing about KROQ from 1972 to 1986 (the book’s called "The Sound Salvation"). It’s part history – how the station inadvertently birthed the alternative rock industry; and part memoir – a look at the connection it had to young listeners such as myself, who couldn’t deal with the cock rock and stoner ramblings of dinosaurs like KMET, KLOS and KWST.

I realize that KMET was once considered L.A. radio’s holy grail, but by the late ‘70s it had become a straitjacket of hesher rock; it was suburban whiteboy music, all spandex, ridiculous facial grimaces, and Paraquat Kellys. KROQ, on the other hand, sounded like it’d been beamed in from another planet. In those pre “Roq of the ‘80s” days, the station was a mess of beautiful noise – deejays that sounded like they wandered in from the street, it had a non-playlist in which jocks played what they wanted -- Queen coexisted with the Ramones -- and very few commercials. For suburban kids like me, who felt hopelessly on the outside looking in, the station was a godsend: I was finally hearing sounds on the radio that spoke my language. KROQ didn’t play favorites; it let everyone inside. Which, of course, meant it wasn’t cool.

My destination Saturday was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now, before I say more, you won’t get any Cleveland jokes from me. I kind of like it. Other than the fact that its downtown shuts down on weekends, it’s a perfectly serviceable mid-sized metropolis with a lot of stuff crammed into a small space. Whoever’s in charge did a nice job of cleaning the place up.

At the Rock Hall, I visited with Dusty Street, who broadcasts two Sirius radio shows from a booth on the fifth floor. Dusty was at KROQ, on and off, for a decade from 1979 to 1989. She wasn’t like the other station jocks. Most of ‘em were kids. She was a real woman, a boozy older broad with a little more authority, a little more professional. And she was a woman with a past – truth was, she was an FM radio pioneer. Street’s career started at KMPX in San Francisco – generally acknowledged as the birthplace of freeform rock – in 1967.

At KROQ, she played a weird combination of Depeche Mode, Naughty Sweeties and Fad Gadget on her daily nighttime broadcast. She was a voice of wisdom in the dark night, and when I was growing up, it was Dusty Street who helped me make it through boring, hot, confused nights in Granada Hills. She was like the mom who’d let me do anything.

When rules came to KROQ, she broke them. And that was okay for a while. But when the suits from Infinity came in, they were less willing to tolerate a badass with a drug problem and Dusty was sent on her way. She bounced around in L.A. in the ‘90s and wound up working in Vegas before landing in Cleveland with Sirius.

I had a great few hours with her. I caught the end of her broadcast, we had lunch, she told stories from a memorable life, details of which she says she can't remember, lost to drugs and booze. Now past 60, she no longer parties, and is slowed by back and knee replacement operations, but she’s a ray of light, and all about the music. She broke the rules because it was always about the music. It’s an odd thing, sitting with someone who’s touched your life. It can sometimes be a letdown, but it’s the rare radio jock whose feet really leave the ground careerwise. Like most entertainment and media gigs, it can humble you real quick. Dusty Street has eaten her fair share of shit and all she wants to do his play the music she loves. Imagine that? Such an old-school sentiment.

Maybe that why she’s in Cleveland and not in L.A. Format’s here are tighter than a drum and DJ’s when you hear them have been neutered to the point of irrelevance. In some ways it saddens me that, after 40 years in the business, there’s no place for her on terrestrial radio. I guess that probably says more about radio than it does about her. Though she’s eligible for the Denny’s discount, the voice is still as seductive as ever; when I sit in the booth as she wraps up her show, I can close my eyes and transport back to the house on Encino Avenue, circa 1980, with the septic tank and the junked-out old Buicks that were parked on the grass of our overgrown lawn. It’s a beautiful voice, a voice of real rock history. Sad, in a way that it’s preserved in a museum and not out in the real world, but also a good thing – it’s a museum of rock history, and visitors who watch her at work get to see rock history in the moment, still alive, still vibrant, still doing what she loves, still flying low, avoiding the radar.

PRESS PLAY

So here we are. I’ve been staring at this site for weeks, trying to figure out exactly what it will be. I guess the beauty of blogging is that it can be anything. So I guess I’ll write about anything and everything, and, in doing so, attempt to dodge the filters I cling to when I write for money. I will also my damndest to be a self-serving asshole only in moderation. That was what I initially hated about blogs in the first place. So many journalist-driven sites are beyond smug. I even made my disdain known here. But I’ve become more enlightened and tolerant in my older age. In fact, I’ve become quite the voyeur. I’ll check up to ten different sites before I start my day in earnest.

Now I’ve joined the fray, here’s a bit of explanation: Valley Boy was originally the title of a column I wrote for two years for Citybeat, a nifty little weekly fighting the good fight here in L.A. I’m guessing whatever I say here will be framed by my having been raised in the San Fernando Valley in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and returning here as an adult with a family three years ago. Besides, the domain was available. What can I say? I’m all about the path of least resistance.

In addition to the blog, the Valley Boy site will serve as a repository for career hype: a resume, links to articles, clips of television shows I’ve written and produced.

So stay tuned, boys and girls. There’s lots more to come.