The First Show I Went To

What's yours????

There was a TV show called Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. As kids in Los Angeles we were privy to things that other kids weren’t. We had a connection to the entertainment industry. Isn’t that odd? Young kids being all savvy with that shit, talking industry talk, getting head shots taken, working on our tans, we were all part of it. Our neighbors were actors and directors and grips and character actors and there were TV faces that would casually sprinkle our everyday world. I saw Dolly Parton driving an old beat up car, Jodie Foster at the florist, Walter Matthau paying a parking meter on Beverly, Ronald McDonald lived down the street. We were surrounded by it. We became oblivious to things as we got older and the rolling of our eyes at the ridiculousness of it all created a buffer between us and the rest of the world. A cheeky sense of sophistication that we relied on. This was old school Los Angeles, I’m talking the kids that grew up there. I hear people bragging about how long they’ve lived there now, it’s not the same. Unless you actually grew up there, sorry, you don’t understand. Our relationship with the city came from old school roots of show folk and craft and dress up and make believe but then also assholes in suits. To us it was kind of a land of make believe. It felt like H.R. Puff n Stuff or Lidsville or the Bugaloos, the sets and the streets and the nooks being overblown colorscapes we all made fun of and felt part of. Fantasy lands specifically for us.

My family lived down the street from Paramount Studios, we could walk there and we did. The Arquettes moved into the back house of our best friends on our block and we all hung out in a group. On Tuesdays the tourists would line up outside of the stages of Paramount an hour or more before and get in to the live tapings of Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. Those were our favorites. There was no age limit, we’d join the tourists and wait in line and get seats and follow the prompts of the audience men, clapping and laughing on cue. We were 10 or 11 and our younger sisters, Patricia, Stephanie, couldn’t have been older than 9. We tired of it quickly, that’s how blasé we’d become. At that age. Over the notion of celebrity and glamor. The advantage of being children in Hollywood.

Punk rock and radical behavior as children stemmed from that. It was a fuck you to the dress up and the phoniness. Some of us embraced it and became eventual parts of it. My best friends do hair and makeup and direct films and write successful things but the ones who grew up in Los Angeles have an inert sense of what the charade was and is. Anyway, I’ve never digressed further but you’ve got to admit it’s fascinating.

Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert was a sort of variety show on TV. I could do an internet search and read about who Don was but I’m gonna pass. In my memory he’s a sideburned pirate of sorts, a womanizer and a troubadour who was probably friends with someone in Fleetwood Mac. Like Gwynneth or Martha Stewart perhaps, he had taste and a sense of how to throw a good time. In the 1970’s, in Los Angeles, that knack had a lot of merit and got traction and he ended up as a host of a TV show. It was a show that bands performed on, there were videos and then a special guest performance

In 1979 there was a flavor and an attitude that was popping up musically, it was straight up rebellion and us not having the pomp and tan that was Los Angeles. I don’t know how I heard about DEVO. The first album was produced by Brian Eno. Me and my crew were somehow aware of that, the credibility factor of that endorsement. The DEVO record in the bin looked odd and it stuck out. Its yellow graphics were a cheeky throwback to some sort of radioactive era that preceded where we were in time. The music was insane and experimental and like an inside joke. There was the cover of Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones that resonated so profoundly, poking fun at the type of person Don Kirshner probably was. And then side two. Side two was way more exploratory than side one and it got scary. Come Back Jonee would start and my sister and I would run. We’d run. Just that feeling of overwhelmption, needing to run. Around the living room, maybe we’d hit each other, Rozy was there too, we couldn’t get enough.

I had started smoking pot by then and my grades were bad. As a result I was in summer school. Summer school was low stakes and I barely partook. Who does homework in the summertime? Ridiculous. In the yard of Daniel Murphy High School that summer some funny looking kid named Adam was talking about Patti Smith. That name was odd. Patti Smith. Like 50’s but weirdly brash. I mouthed her name to myself. Patti Smith. Adam heard on the radio that she’d danced off a high stage at a performance in Florida and for whatever reason the fact that Patti had fallen off a stage was hilarious. It was a punk ethic somehow that an injury in that world was comical. It was different and odd and then it came up about the performance of DEVO at a television studio close by. That day. It was a taping for Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and it was free, we just had to get there hours before and wait in line. The high school was in Hollywood so it was easy. We ditched the rest of the days classes and walked, there were three of us. I’d waited in line before but this was different. The other kids in line were like us, young and adventurous, sarcastic and in the know. There were a couple looks but most of us wore similar clothes, basically OP shorts or Dickies straight long legged work pants and tee shirts, untied tennis shoes, noses burnt by the summer, dirty fingernails, hair as unkempt as we could push it.

We were corralled into the studio and DEVO were already there, up on the stage, waiting for us. They were wearing the yellow jump suits with DEVO on the shoulder. The paper glasses that were like big versions of the 3D glasses that a movie theatre would give out. They looked like mannequins. We were shy and unsure about how to engage. They didn’t break character and stood at their instruments unmoving. There was a prompt from a stagehand over the sound system and the show started way quicker and more suddenly than we’d expected. Their performance was orchestrated and choreographed, they were lit largely from below and it gave a sense of, I don’t know, horror? Scary? Mystery I guess. Weird and inviting. We got Uncontrollable Urge and then Mongoloid, just two songs. They were faster than on the record, it felt like much faster, I couldn’t fathom how they were keeping up. It felt unruly and urgent and precise. The songs ended and then in true Hollywood fashion, they played them again. They needed the footage for the edit and we were instructed to act in the audience as we had for the first go round. As if we’d behave differently.

It wasn’t really a show but I’m calling it a show and it was my first. From there the world opened up and we started adventuring into punk clubs and places in Hollywood. DEVO was the beginning of it all for me, though, the weirdness opened up there and it helped me turn on Hollywood and the norm and that was part of why I left when I could and moved to San Francisco.

What was your first show?