Girl in a Band Read online

  Boys helped kill the time. They had always liked me, though I was never sure if I liked any of them back. In their approach they all used the California clichés of the moment. “You’re so negative, Kim,” one would say, followed by an invitation to go out with him. “You have to be more open,” another said, while another was into positive thinking, and still another wanted me to chant with him. One boy wrote me a dream-drenched poem about how I’d be happiest dancing around freely, alone, in a jungle. I was seventeen years old, a little wild and rebellious, though not a fraction as bad as Keller, and it was the late sixties in Southern California. Hypervigilance was my mode.

  In junior high school I dated a Mexican boy a couple of years my senior. Be careful, my mother used to say. Where are you guys going? She was afraid the two of us would get harassed on account of the fact we were a “mixed couple.” At the time my mother worked for the ACLU, which always made me roll my eyes. There were other boyfriends in between, none of them serious. Then I met Danny Elfman.

  Today Danny is a musician and film composer known for a lot of things—being the lead singer and songwriter for Oingo Boingo, scoring most of Tim Burton’s movies, even writing the theme song for The Simpsons—but in those days he was more into film and surrealism than anything else. Danny seemed to materialize one day at our high school. He was a grade ahead of me, charismatic and politically attuned, a boy who at least gave the impression he had a road map going forward. It was the fall of 1969 and a volatile time in the culture, to say the least. Our school was a microcosm of the world. There were demonstrations and teachers’ strikes. Lorna Luft, one of Judy Garland’s two daughters, was a student there, at one point bringing in Sid Caesar to direct a play. Later some people came to believe an actual cult had infiltrated the school, even though by then it was hard to tell the difference.

  I was undergoing my own mini-mutiny, cutting school, wanting to be anywhere but in a classroom. Danny took it upon himself to launch a demonstration, leading the students in a march around the school to show our solidarity with the teachers. Around that time he and I started officially going out. It was the first time I felt like I’d met a peer, and Danny was the first boy I felt I could really talk to, who shared my viewpoints as well as the itch to go against the grain.

  Danny and I went camping a lot. We spent time in Sequoia and Yosemite, sleeping in sleeping bags without a tent over us, and Danny shot a short film filled with aching teenage significance: My hand was framed against a patch of snow, with blood in it, which Danny added afterward by painting the film cells red—but that’s love, maybe, when you’re in high school.

  For the next few years Danny and I were on again, off again—but we couldn’t seem to stay out of each other’s lives. We broke up when Danny graduated and went to Africa with a friend. Or so I thought. While Danny was overseas, he and I didn’t communicate—there seemed to be an unspoken competition over which one of us, him or me, cared less about our relationship—so I went on with my life.

  My bedroom at home had a door that opened up into the backyard. One night, another boy was over when Danny—whom I hadn’t seen since he took off for Africa—knocked at the door. I had to come out and tell him I had a guest. Danny was very upset. Later he told me with great seriousness that this incident had humiliated him, and was responsible for turning him into, in his words, a complete “asshole.” Of course things between us weren’t over, and when we briefly got back together later on, it was Danny’s turn to leave me. Still, Danny opened up to me in a way he hadn’t to anyone before—one of the benefits, maybe, to meeting people before they’re fully formed—and he always encouraged me in my art.

  10

  MICHAEL BYRON, an aspiring musician I had dated before Danny, lived close to school, and during senior year my friends and I would sneak out and climb over the tall wire fencing to get to his house, where we would get stoned, listen to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, and make out. I had another good friend, Willie Winant, whose older brother later created the TV show My So-Called Life, which was coincidentally filmed at my high school. Willie was a drummer, and none of the other girls in our class wanted much to do with him—he was bighearted but not especially attuned to his body. I used to choreograph dance pieces in our free-form modern dance class, with Willie always at the center of the piece. To me it was a challenge to show the other girls, and my teacher, who knew nothing about dance, that body type didn’t matter.

  Outside of school I took classes at a Martha Graham studio from an eccentric French woman, but my mother didn’t want me to pursue dance—it was too showbiz for her. The dance teacher at my high school also taught gym, and to me those classes were the only truly creative classes I had. What was the most outrageous thing you could do and still call it a “dance” while not getting kicked out of school? I remember choreographing one performance to Frank Zappa’s song “Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague” from the album Uncle Meat. Willie mimed going to the bathroom, while my fellow dancers and I were the toilet mechanisms, tossing toilet paper out into the audience. A year later, Matthew Bright, who went on to direct the infamous Reese Witherspoon film Freeway, bragged that during his own dance performance he’d tossed chicken livers out into the audience.

  My best friend at the time was a girl named Marge. Marge and I would sneak out at night and meet each other halfway between our two houses. One night, a few of us stole some big ice blocks out of the school ice machine and snuck onto the Bel Air golf course at two A.M. We laid towels over the ice and slid down the dark slopes. Another time we drove to Beverly Hills and swiped flowers from people’s front lawns. It was a harmless thrill, we reasoned, because after all, Beverly Hills was too perfect in the first place.

  Marge also liked to drag me to peace demonstrations and love-ins. As the oldest of three kids, and a take-charge person, she was far tougher and more grown-up than I was. On the surreal, shocking night Bobby Kennedy was shot, Marge had gone to the Ambassador Hotel to see him speak. One moment she was talking about going over there, and two hours later RFK was dead—in L.A., too, that safe and beautiful place of movie-lot landscaping, shiny new cars, and tanned good-looking people, a city where thanks to the curfew laws no one was allowed to so much as loiter.

  I graduated high school as a midterm grad. I was glad it was over, and as a “young” high school grad who had just turned seventeen, I decided to take a year off before starting Santa Monica College. My parents wouldn’t pay for me to go to CalArts, but I was bullheaded and had no interest in going anyplace else. Eventually I got bored waitressing and doing other menial jobs, and I moved in with a friend, Kathy Walters, a Santa Monica College student. If memory serves, the tuition at Santa Monica College was $30 a semester. Of course this was before Ronald Reagan wrecked the entire California school system, from the community colleges up to the state university level, with his brilliant ideas about freezing property taxes, thereby leaving no money for education. Next he would go after the whole country.

  The fall after high school, I was going out with a quiet, introverted, gentle guy named Rick, who was in his early twenties. Rick lived in Westwood Village, which during the early seventies was the only place that had any kind of a scene, a hive for creativity. Rick introduced me to another resident of Westwood Village, his friend Larry Gagosian.

  Larry was hanging out in Westwood, dealing art books in the street. Entrepreneurs always exhibit signs early on of who they’ll become, I guess. Larry had rented an outdoor space, which he subleased to other vendors, in order to create a sort of mini-plaza. There he sold schlocky, mass-produced prints of works by contemporary artists—the kind that appeal to teenage girls or women in their twenties who think of themselves as dreamy romantics—in cheap, ugly metal frames. Marge and I were looking to make money—I was trying to be as financially independent as possible, having watched Keller rely on my parents for years, and being unemployed, and stressing them out, which I didn’t want to add to—so we started working for him.

 
Frame after frame—I must have assembled thousands of those things, and the dimensions twenty-four by thirty-six inches are still carved in my brain. It would have been straight-ahead, decent grunt work if Larry had been a good boss, but he wasn’t. He was mean, yelling at us all the time for messing up, being too slow, just plain being. He was erratic, and the last person on the planet I would have ever thought would later become the world’s most powerful art dealer. Larry had a bull terrier named Muffin that he was always trying to get rid of, and he once told me that whenever a woman slept over at his place, Muffin would get jealous, and go under the bed and tear up the woman’s clothes with her fangs.

  Eventually I quit working for Larry—I just couldn’t take it any longer—but our paths would keep mixing up again and again.

  11

  SOMETIMES I THINK we know on some level the person we’re going to be in our life, that if we pay attention, we can piece out that information. I find it strange when people don’t know what they want to do in life. Because even when I was a young kid pushing around clay objects at the UCLA Lab School, I knew I wanted to be an artist. Nothing else mattered. I cringe when I recall Andrea Fraser, the performance artist and one of the most fearless artists I know, using that line in one of her performances to critique art institutions and artist myths: “The exact words are, ‘I wanted to be an artist since I was five.’” Because that was my line.

  My mother always thought I’d become a graphic artist someday, even though I never showed any interest in graphic design (I was a painter/sculptor—all sloppy work, no graphics in sight). Then again she sometimes also told her friends that I’d end up as an interpreter for the United Nations—“She’s so good with people,” she would tell them, though it still confuses me why she’d say something like that about someone so obviously shy and uncommunicative. Eventually both my parents, especially my dad, supported the idea of my pursuing a creative life. Keller’s breakdown might have eroded their expectations, setting the bar that much lower: Kim can do anything she wants as long as she doesn’t go crazy.

  I remember a friend’s older brother interrogating me when I was a teenager: An artist? How are you going to be an artist? What are you going to do if you don’t make it as an artist? What if you fail? Do you have a backup plan? It never occurred to me I would fail. “Your art is very personal,” Danny said to me once. “So it’ll be popular.” Personal is something I still equate with Sunday painters. I still carry around with me a battle between working conceptually—art based on some overriding idea—and my pure carnal sensory love of materials.

  In 1972, I started attending Santa Monica College. By this point, Rick, my then boyfriend, had started suffering from seizures. At eighteen I felt too young to be living with the constant fear of someone having a seizure and me sitting there helplessly, not knowing what to do. That, and my leaving for college, contributed to our breakup.

  I became involved, again, with Danny and I moved to Venice with a couple of friends. Postmodern architecture was the thing then, and parts of Venice were all funky wood construction, with oddball angles and unexpected windows of wood and corrugated sheet metal intertwined alongside the little indigenous cottages intended for weekend use by Hollywood actors and drifters. In the midseventies Venice was also a rough, scary place. One street would be fine but a block away was a potential drug war zone. I lived on one of the rotten streets. On the day we were unpacking stuff from my ’68 VW Bug, a deranged-looking guy approached us holding a long butcher knife. His movements were so slow and balletic he could only have been high, and we circled around him before tearing into the house and locking the door. Another night when I wasn’t home, someone drove down the street firing gunshots into all the houses on our side of the street.

  Guillermo, my landlord, was an Argentinian who was also a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He lived next door, which meant there was always a party atmosphere. At the time I was friends with a guy named Richie O’Connell and Richie’s good friend Bruce Berry, who was somehow related to Jan Berry of the sixties rock duo Jan and Dean. Whenever Guillermo and Bruce came home from touring, a bunch of us would go carousing until dawn. One night, we went to Jan’s house high in the hills, a cheesy contemporary glass box on a tacky hilltop in a would-be neighborhood, surrounded by nothing. Cocaine was prevalent, heroin more under-the-table, but I wasn’t into that stuff. I do remember being there one morning at around eight A.M. watching a topless girl float through the living room playing a violin.

  Later Bruce started working just for David Crosby. When he told everybody he knew that someone had jacked David’s car and stolen his Stratocaster, we all knew it was Bruce and that he had sold David’s guitar to get heroin. In the early nineties, when Sonic Youth went on tour with Neil Young, I realized that Neil’s song “Tonight’s the Night,” about a roadie who had overdosed, was written for that same Bruce Berry. He had died in 1973.

  That would all come later. When I lived in Venice, Richard, Bruce, and I would stay up all night driving around the Hollywood Hills, dropping in at the houses of unlikely people, like Hal Blaine, the famous studio drummer who’d worked with Elvis, the Beach Boys, and Steely Dan. Another night a bunch of friends and I went up to Arthur Janov’s house. Janov was the creator of the primal scream, a therapy technique that was supposed to return you to your birth trauma experience and release you by encouraging screaming and other vocal disinhibitions. The Janovs lived in one of those houses way up high on Mulholland Drive. The place wasn’t as creepy as the famous Body Double house but it was close—a coldly beautiful, empty, modern house with a huge wraparound-window view of downtown L.A. I didn’t know their daughter, Ellen, well; she was a friend of a friend. She was deeply troubled, and also a junkie, though I wasn’t aware of that at the time. Rumor had it she hung out with the Rolling Stones, who were friends of her parents. As the night went on, all my friends vanished into one or another of the cold rooms, and I remember waiting there by myself until the next morning, until they were all ready to leave. A few months later, Ellen died in a house fire.

  It is said that Joni Mitchell’s guitar playing on Song to a Seagull made Jimmy Page cry. I wonder if like so many of those English musicians who grew up in the fog and the bleakness, Jimmy Page was in love with California and the idea of the canyons, if not the canyons themselves. Even if I had to leave L.A. to become myself, I loved the mystique of the canyons, too, and all they represented. By the mid-1970s the California aesthetic was definitely being exported, and I would have to take it with me.

  12

  Photo by Felipe Orrego

  AFTER TWO YEARS at Santa Monica College, I transferred to York University in Toronto. Willie Winant, my friend from high school and dance class, was planning to study percussion there and told me about the place. York had an interdisciplinary program, and I fantasized I could study dance there as well as visual art. Money was a big factor, too. I learned that Canadian colleges cost next to nothing, so that made York much more appealing, as I was still trying to rely as little as possible on my parents, even though they footed the bill.

  We drove together in tandem, me following Willie cross-country in my VW Bug. When we got to Saint Louis, suddenly the world turned brown. The landscape became ugly, hard to face, the buildings miniature and lopped off, like pieces in some sad board game. I wasn’t used to brown, or shadows even—Southern California light transformed even the scraggly parts and ruined colors of the city into toothy, opal grays—and I began to feel that I’d made a giant mistake leaving California.

  Toronto was starkly different from Los Angeles too—a shiny, gleaming downtown area, mixed with row-house architecture that felt ordinary and cheerless. I moved into a big good-looking Victorian house with the sister of a high school friend and two of her friends, all of them younger, all of them dancers. You’d think it would have been a match, but they were all freshmen, and hard to relate to, and I didn’t like being in a roommate situation where I was obliged to contribute money to the co
llective food budget or take my turn going to the supermarket, especially if I wasn’t planning on being there most of the time. Neither was the York arts program as interdisciplinary as I thought it would be, which meant I was pretty much on my own, doing art in a small room. Willie and I soon became friends with the other American grad students at York, as well as with two Chilean boys who were cousins. It wasn’t until recently when I reconnected with one of them that I realized the boys were at some point members of a seventies Chilean cult prog-rock band called the Blops, who’d emigrated to the U.S. to escape Chile’s dictatorship.

  My media class at York was taught by the Fluxus filmmaker George Manupelli. George was by far the most interesting teacher in the college, a heavy drinker with a much younger girlfriend who was a former student. Fluxus explored art as a process, using the viewer, or the audience, to complete the work. It asked, What can art be?

  For a project, a group of my friends and I decided to start a band. We called it Below the Belt, and the lineup was me, a Canadian girl named Rae, Willie on regular drums (though he was a percussionist, Willie wasn’t used to a conventional drum set and would just end a song when he got tired), and the two Chilean boys, Felipe on guitar and Juan Pablo on bass. Rae, a raven-haired beauty, and I sang and played tambourine. In their tight, satin green trousers, the two Chilean boys were much more Rolling Stones–like in their appearance and approach than the rest of us, who were far more casual about the whole thing.

  Our second gig was at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Before the show, we all got drunk. That night Willie wore a dress and a hat, and before the show started, he blew fire across the stage, a style and a trick he’d developed during his short stint with the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo with Danny Elfman. Willie liked shocking people, and he summoned us onstage by asking “the spics and cunts to come on out and play.” We were, I remember, an explosive mess, pure mayhem and caterwauling. We danced, tossed our tambourines onto the ground, and let everything fall apart into a garage noise jam. It didn’t take management long to pull the plug. We played only two or three times, mostly for fun, but I knew this band wasn’t going anywhere. Years later, my lifelong friend, the artist Mike Kelley—who always derived immense pleasure from the unacceptable—told me he was in the audience that night, and that our performance had inspired him to go home and start a “noise garage band.” In retrospect, I realize that the band Mike started became Destroy All Monsters and grew to include ex-members of the Stooges. Until Mike told me this, I had no idea what genre Below the Belt even was, if any. But I did know one thing: I liked performing.