Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
For the entire nine months of my mother's pregnancy, she told everyone I was going to be a girl. She and my father already had my brother the previous year, so in preparation for the upcoming me she'd channeled all her psychic reproductive energy into having a girl. I’m not sure to what extent, if any, her mother nature manipulation powers willed into effect - but I do seem to be fine tuned in with my feminine side.
During her final weeks of pregnancy she took me along inside her to my first ever live concert which was Ike & Tina Turner at the height of their 1970 soul-funk heyday. Just a few weeks later when I was born, I broke my collarbone during the process, which I’m pretty sure was from trying to do a Tina Turner style strut-shimmy into the world.
For the first ten years of my life our family lived in the Cambrian Park area of San Jose, California, which was a more modest version of a “Brady Bunch” style neighborhood. Back then this was a middle-class new suburbia no more than ten years old and in the midst of its fresh first wave of expanding growth. Its free-flowing roads curved through the house-lined blocks like streams rather than straight and cornered angular grids. Though not identical, each side-by-side house had its own driveway and a patch of lawn in the front with trees sprinkled all along the sidewalks. Beyond the world of our immediate neighborhood, the surrounding city consisted mostly of shopping centers, malls and restaurants in an architectural landscape oddly realizing where Scandinavia would meet Mexico.
My father is in the driveway putting the final touches on the kustom go-kart he’s been building for my older brother Paul and me. He’s an auto mechanic by trade and despite his lack of machismo and his soft-spoken manner, he’d been building hot rods and all manner of one-of-a-kind motorized creations since his early teens back on the vast plains of North Dakota.
The go-kart is a complete kustom weld job, painted in high gloss silver metal flake. It’s skeletal-like frame is adorned with chrome parts which sit on pristine rubber mini racing style tires as he checks the tightness on the brand new Ferrari-type leather racing steering wheel. Despite it’s lawn mower engine, this metal, rubber and leather machine iss several classes above the kiddie go-kart scene.
Observing from across the street are three of my brother’s new neighborhood pre-pube acquaintances, two of which sit on BMX bikes and the third a Schwinn. All three with long feathered hair in varying degrees of failure attempting to emulate the teen pin-up stars of the day. They also all share the California summer uniform of shorts and tank tops, each colored shirt advertising a different logo - “KOME 98.5 FM”, “DISCO SUCKS” and “OAKLEY” with a sunrise motif you might see on the side of a new van. Elastic terry-cloth sweat bands wrapped around either wrists, head or all three. White athletic socks cling just below the knee with dedicated regular adjusting.
So far all the work my dad has put into building the go-kart has taken place inside of our garage, making this its first big debut out onto the showcase driveway. By the looks from the huddled rubber necking across the street, it’s already garnished my brother a major promotion in the neighborhood hierarchy. With blonde hair and wearing a rugby shirt, his blue eyes peer excitedly from behind my dad’s Mike Nesmith hairdo, at the ready to grab whatever tool may be needed to tighten and fine-tune. It’s close.
Just then my Uncle Joey purr-RUMBLES up in his brand new off-the-lot 1979 Firebird Trans Am. It’s brown in color with a gold phoenix emblazoned on the hood. As he parks up next to the driveway, Tom Petty’s “Refugee” cuts off with the turn of the car key. He gets out, unzips his fur collared matching brown leather jacket and tosses it onto the driver's seat. As he slams the door, he slides on large octagon frame shaped sunglasses. “Niice” he says smiling approvingly as he walks up stopping just short of his flared blue jeans touching a front tire. He was known between my brother and I as our “cool uncle”.
While I looked almost exactly like my mother, she often told me that I behaved just like my uncle back when he was my age. This usually happened right after she absent-mindedly called me “Joey” by mistake, which was always when I got caught in the act of doing something I’m not supposed to be doing. I’d have to wait nine more years before finding out if I manage to hold on to this uncle spirit and become “cool” like him at his age now. The entire side of my mother’s family are all San Francisco natives and all of them, my grandparents and all five brothers and sisters had relocated to San Jose in a mass family pilgrimage to suburbia.
He had something he wanted to talk to the whole family about so we all went inside the house and into our family’s living room. Its decorative interior is awash in interchanging color combinations of orange, brown, green and gold. My mother has been caught off guard with giant hair curlers the size of lowball cocktail glasses lining her head. Uncle Joey leaned against a wall framing himself between giant-sized wooden fork and spoon decorative hangings as he tells my mom and dad that he’d like to take me and my suddenly ecstatic brother to see KISS at The Cow Palace concert arena in San Francisco that weekend.
At this point in time KISS are the main cover feature of every music and teen magazine every single month, either by themselves or put into some imaginary contests against either a completely different genre style of popular group such as The Village People or closer to home hard rock rivals like Alice Cooper. Then, always sequestered safely within their own corner photo box away from these harsh reality music wars were the teen hunks like Sean Cassidy and Leif Garrett, doing and looking how they do and look. It wasn’t always easy to figure out for absolute sure who was the best thing on the planet, but from the collective magazines you got the feeling that KISS were the kings of the day's ROCK climate of mass-consumed controlled danger.
On the night of the show we made the forty-five minute drive in style surrounded by the leather interior of the Firebird. Arriving at the huge Cow Palace San Francisco parking lot, we parked and then walked through and over the city boarder onto the Daly City half of the sprawling lot where the actual old livestock pavilion stood. The Cow Palace was originally built pre-depression era to house livestock expos, which ticks the irony meter reading up pretty high. Everywhere there are teens dressed in KISS costumes holding their tickets and getting into lines. Lines are the only reality here and they rule everything and everywhere. If you are not already in a line, you’re walking to get into a line. Lines to the ticket windows, lines to enter through the arena doors, lines to go to the bathroom, lines to check in coats and all the cameras people got busted trying to sneak inside. Lines to buy popcorn, hot dogs and wax lined paper cups of soda pop, lines to use the pay phones, lines to all the different seating sections, lines to buy band merchandise and this being the 70s, surely somewhere there are even lines to do lines. We hit one of the merchandise table lines and Uncle Joey buys my brother and I both tour programs and tour t-shirts. Then after some more waiting in lines we make it to our high altitude seats way up in the stands at in a term I’d learn many years from now “stage left”. From up there the stage looked like a tiny little raft that I imagined all sixteen thousand people in attendance trying to fit on a little later when KISS showed up. “Hey boys, check these out, ” my uncle says as he pulled a small pair of binoculars out of his leather jacket. Both of our mouths dropped when through the focal lenses the stage looked like it was right in front of us.
Just then the “warm up” act came on. They were called “The Rockets” who were the most extreme level possible of generic un-with it denim doobie blues boogie. The crowd had no interest whatsoever in giving these jokers a chance even after an excruciating number of mimed “I can’t hear you!” hand to ear gesture attempts made by the singer. The fact that total non-response won’t make him stop just added to a new feeling that I would experience from here on throughout my entire life, that of feeling embarrassment for a band that just can’t get any of the interest they obviously want so badly from an indifferent crowd. To look back in fairness, it must be a dream gone nightmare to get a gig that big and then find yourself in front of that many people who only see you as an obstacle before the real show can start. Nevertheless, my life course as a music snob was set at this key moment, already starting with the first live band I’d ever seen.
When KISS finally came on it was through the floor of the stage standing on individual risers, all four of them with extended fists in what I guess was a ROCK salute to all their thousands of KISS ARMY teen soldiers. Everyone crammed into the Cow palace is going bonkers now and will pay any price to serve the “army” in any dollar amounts asked of them in order to preserve the spirit of ROCK.
Now, with my fresh music snob metamorphosis complete, I began to engage in my first inner dismantling of a band. As a cartoon watching kid, I’d never seen costume characters sweat so much. Despite the other-other-worldly spandex and rubber ROCK outfits, half of the KISS guys wore no shirts and the ample chest hair got sweaty and soon they all had sweaty everything. As the music went on song for song all they sang about was sex and being gross. Then the bass player did a fire breathing trick before flying up and hovering above the front of the crowd while attached to some strings that were on the same invisibility level as a 1950s martian invasion movie. A few songs later another item “flies” away as apparently one of the guitar players can trigger his instrument to rocket into space once fueled sufficiently with his sheer high-level magnitude of ROCK. His now smoke-spewing guitar solo fires off his now floating guitar upward at lost party balloon speed. In the distraction he suddenly has acquired a new guitar. He aims its neck at the high floating guitar and then “shoots” it from the stage with a “laser”, totally like, blowing it up.
It’s not long after that when the bass player has another trick up his sweat and starts spitting fake blood all over the place. Finally, as the show ends with sixteen thousand people all singing in unison, I WANNA ROCK N ROLL ALL NIGHT AND PARTY EVERY DAY! hundreds of foam KISS sponges drop down onto the crowd from giant ceiling nets like its Mr. Clean’s election night. These foam novelty items were far out of reach from our side-perch placement but we still have programs and t-shirts.
My mom washed my new “KISS DYNASTY WORLD TOUR” t-shirt in time for school on Monday morning and as I did with any shirt, I paired it with some corduroy “Tough Skins” jeans for kids. When I arrived at Reed Elementary School, I jumped my usual fence and began to walk by the dodgeball court. The closer I got, the more kids stopped what they were doing to look at my shirt until just about the whole playground full of kids were staring at my chest. This was an elementary school and what pre-teen kid would ever be allowed to go to a such a high-level rebel rock and roll concert like KISS? They gazed in glassy-eyed reverence as if I was maybe one of the Jesus characters in a church stained glass window, perhaps herding a single baby sheep while one foot is placed atop a snake. My arm would be bent slightly at the elbow with thumb and middle fingertips touching, pinky and index out and head slightly tilted just so.
I slo-mo promenaded in my new modeling pose across the court with all eyes now on me for the first time. I felt a high off of this t-shirt reaction, like it was I who was now walking onto the big stage greeted with mass adulation. Even the three older boys from the 6th grade who only two days before had wanted to beat me up after I’d defied all of their dodgeball throw attempts until the recess-ending bell rang were now with a slight bow. No matter who or what I was before, I was now wearing an official KISS Tour T-shirt from the show no one else could go to.
Despite my instant ascent to being an overnight sensation for the first half of one day, it was still going to be all about The Beatles for me. I left my brother to all his KISS albums and continued to spend my own fantasy time listening to the 1967-1970 blue and red double vinyl Beatles collections my mother had bought me at the Gemco department store.
The following year my whole family took a trip to San Francisco. We spent the day doing all the usual touristy things - Pier 39, Alcatraz Island, Chinatown and then the cable car to Union Square. It was as we rolled up and down the steep slopes of Nob Hill when I completed the picture in my mind that this place was as magical as any place could be. It was dreamlike and timeless and so full of new sensations both wonderful and repulsive, often at the same time.
In the cable car sitting on the wooden bench directly opposite from us, leaning into the corner was the dirtiest man I had ever seen. He was asleep and seemed to be the only person on board not affected by the constant jerking, vibrating, and rattle of the antiquated wood and iron transport. Maybe more vivid than anything else I experienced that day, I remember the look and smell of that man on our deep descent down Powell Street. His tan suit and large bushy silver beard were covered in multiple shades of different grime coatings. He was caked over in multi-layers of browns and grays like city ally-way camouflage.
So pungent was the smell that it seemed to have actual physical properties in its thick intake. It was hard to breathe in, yet its sheer authority over the senses made it curiously fascinating. I’d never physically felt an odor before. They didn’t have those back where I was growing up, but here it seemed anything could happen. If a cow were to be suddenly seen floating in circles around the top of Coit Tower, I would have accepted it as is.
In reality, what that smell was, I would find out years later after moving out on my own, was actually not this man’s own private brimstone, but the antiquated wooden breaking pads of the cable car smoldering as they gripped the moving underground cables. This was only the first of many tricks San Francisco had waiting to play on me.
A few years after I moved out of the house and into San Francisco, I was quickly rounding the corner of Masonic and Fulton streets where I had to stop in total confusion. Then, I slowly re-read the Brave New World’s small shabby venue marquee:
“TONIGHT! THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE KISSmas: A Tribute To The Music of KISS!”
KISS? What's going on here? My first time ever playing a live gig and it's going to be with some of the lamest bands in San Francisco all covering KISS songs?? I didn’t like KISS. Anton hated KISS. Why would he ask me to be a part of this? As I'm already arriving late, I better find out what's going on fast.
Until this moment I had been excited. It was only this afternoon on Haight Street that Anton had unexpectedly shouted to me from across the other side of the street “Hey Joel! You wanna play a show with me tonight?! It’s easy, all you have to do is play E and A guitar chords over and over!”
My single-word answer of “Yes!” to this question was seemingly all I needed to pass the audition. More likely it was probably just me being the first of his friends he ran into on the street that day. All the original Brian Jonestown Massacre lineup had recently quit, so I just assumed that he was recruiting people for a psych rock jam to make good on a previously booked engagement.
I point out my name on the list to the large doorman and go in looking for Anton. Scanning around the venue, I see him past the bar area, through the showroom and back on the stage. At the exact moment I see him he sees me all the way up at the front doors. His gaze locks onto mine from across the club and suddenly I'm trapped in some sort of invisible tractor beam. Optically full of intent, he moves directly towards me in a straight path in which he weirdly seems to slightly hover off the ground while in his forward movement. His head remains perfectly level with eyes wide and fixated on mine as he continues moving through the club uninterrupted by all the zigging and zagging heavy metal fans who seem to just naturally move out of his path like a slo-mo ballet. Part of me wants to leave right then but I'm caught in the trance.
"Are we really playing this?" I ask as he lands. The answer now revealed why he'd told me earlier that the gig details were “a secret". He takes out a cigarette and smiles, "We are going to totally fuck these people's heads up. They're probably gonna try to kill us.” He chuckles with cigarette bouncing as he lights it from the corner of his grin. He then proceeds to air guitar for me his desired strumming pattern while simultaneously mimicking the notes with a hum. Almost as soon as it started his demonstration is finished. He then abruptly nods his head at me once, turns around and walks back towards the stage.
I need a quick drink or three so I go up to the bar and wait. And wait. I'm out of place at this packed bar of hair metal rockers and it doesn’t take long for me to realize I'm not of the serving priority type here as I continually find myself newly behind any arriving leather and denim clad KISS metal warrior that saddles up for a beer. Knowing I'm sure to be in this wimp-holding pattern for a while, I nervously scan the now full crowd in the large showroom. The whole club is filling up fast. I look over the vast hair metal hair-cloud that's like a feather blow-dried bleached and brown cotton candy fog reaching all the way to the stage.
That’s where I see Anton talking to the sound man. It's time. "Shit!" I say out loud and head over drink-less.
I climb up the side of the stage recognizing but not really knowing the rest of the "band". A blonde foppey-haired guy dressed in a white t-shirt, white Levis and white Chuck Taylor’s is adjusting the height of one of his two stand-up drums. I smile and nod, but he doesn’t respond. A young curvy girl that's dressed like the hangover the sixties had on New Year’s Day 1970 is holding a flute and doing scales.
“Here” Anton says holding out an acoustic guitar towards me. I strap it on and join in on the quick change-over chaos. The sound man comes over to me and begins installing an electric pickup on the guitar. “How many bands tonight?” I ask while unconsciously holding my hands in the air as if getting ready for a police pat-down.
“Ten bands with only ten minutes each to pay tribute to the kings of 1970s hard rock KISS” he replies like he’s been giving the same directions to the interstate highway all day.
This is nowhere near the first-time ever live performance scenario I'd been dreaming about since I was a five-year-old listening to The Beatles and jumping on my bed with a tennis racket guitar. With my head down and from under whatever minor cover my brow could provide I sneak a quick scan of the crowd. I see various huddles of unshaven sniggers, pointing and chuckling from smiling shaking heads in amused and disapproving judgement. Is that wimpy acoustic really going to be his sorry excuse for an "axe" I can hear them thinking loudly.
A hypnotic inner chaos takes over, shooting off tingly fireworks inside my chest that land in my back teeth. My mind can only dip in for random flashes of in-the-moment consciousness as dread invades my body like invisible radiation. Why did I have to run into him today?
With my head still down and neck craning like a motorway streetlight, I watch Anton and wait until finally this purgatory state breaks with him addressing the packed crowd of hair and stoner metal rockers:
"Ok, the only thing funnier than the fact that you all think that I'm a “art fag”, is that I'm here getting paid to make fun of all of you!"
He quickly turns around to me and mouths "go”. I start us off into the two chord jam of what seemed to be "I Wanna Rock N Roll All Night" as in that’s what Anton starts repeating over and over again in a deep crooner style. Other than that, accompanied by cave man surf drums and folk flute soloing, it has zero resemblance to the original song. This was the ultimate 70s party rock anthem and we are turning it into a gothic freak folk “fuck you” to all in attendance.
On came the chorus of boos followed immediately by the packed showroom emptying in a rumbling herd of denim hair grumbles that flooded back into the bar area.
With the room completely emptied and mission accomplished, we haphazardly end the jam with each of us out of sync with the others. I feel like I just cheated death and taking off Anton’s guitar I'm already changing my stance on the evening to it having been a great success. All elated, our backing band of three are exchanging big smiles with each other while Anton is already getting an earful from the show’s promoter:
“Do you know who was here in attendance tonight?!” he screams “PETER CRISS! THE ORIGINAL DRUMMER OF KISS!”
“Oh…ok, you don't think he liked it?” Anton asks half smiling.
“NO! In fact, he’s just left the building!”
After surviving that night I still wasn’t asked to join the band permanently, but a few months later I would be and not as a guitarist but as the tambourine player. Ten years later, The Brian Jonestown Massacre would enter the world consciousness after being profiled in the 2004 Sundance Film Festival’s “Grand Jury Prize” award winning documentary Dig!
Joel Gion has been playing percussion in the San Francisco psych-rock band The Brian Jonestown Massacre for the last twenty-five years. In 2004 the band was profiled in the Sundance Film Festival's "Grand Jury Prize" award winning documentary Dig! His twitter handle is - https://twitter.com/realjoelgion He has a patreon page at - https://www.patreon.com/joelgion