Thelonious Monster HOLLYWOOD BABBLIN'

Thelonious Monster HOLLYWOOD BABBLIN'

by

Steve Appletord

“I lost it way, way back. ” —Dix Denney

Zelda was nervous as hell. Riding in the back of the rumbling Condo-On-Wheels with a small crowd of eating, drinking, smoking and sleeping human-types, the lean walnut-colored canine paced nervously, dodging knitting needles and falling burrito wrappers. Zelda held her pointed head low to the trembling floor, doing what she could to ignore the insane electric guitar screeches emanating from the speakers high above her and the crazed young man in the driver’s seat blurting out lyrics from a long-forgotten song called “Rock And Rollers.”

Bob Forrest, the blond, dreadlocked leader of this van-load of musicians, friends and roadies traveling under the banner Thelonious Monster, stopped his singing for a moment to absorb the recorded guitar poundings of Angel, a band left for dead eons ago. "They were way ahead of their time,” he enthused, a gaping grin spreading below his glasses. "But they were just lame enough to be popular now.”

Leaning toward a tall windshield spider-webbed by cracks made when he angrily tried to smash a radio through it on an earlier trip, Forrest turned his attention back to the road, keeping rhythm on the steering wheel with his fingers. Next to him in the cockpit, and staring serenely down the rainsoaked highway, sat Keith Morris, the near-spastic vocalist of Los Angeles punk-rock survivors the Circle Jerks, taking a rare break from his own band’s touring schedule.

The Angel cassette finally over, bassist Zander Schloss pulled an acoustic guitar over his crossed legs before tearing into an accelerating slide guitar jam. Wearing a black western shirt decorated with red and white curlicues,

Zander stared blankly through his clear-rimmed glasses building this wandering tune into a frantic and whining frenzy. Most in the back looked on with little interest, if not total boredom, but drummer Pete Weiss leaned closer, snapping his fingers and twisting his face with every change in tempo. When one of Zander’s guitar strings suddenly snapped in mid-slide, Pete gasped in relief.

While Zander was busy untangling the thing, Forrest yelled back to Weiss, who’d squeezed himself between the plywood wall of the van and Forrest’s girlfriend, Sabrina. “Hey Pete, did you know that Memphis Slim died today?”

“What? He died today?”

“Well, it was printed in the paper today.”

Though usually quick with a comment, Weiss said nothing, staring quietly at Zander’s silent guitar as the Condo bumped along up the coast.

Born on the fringes of the L.A. alternative rock scene, Thelonious Monster began as nothing more than a way to pass the time. But this thing started by Weiss and guitarist Chris Handsome (later joined by Forrest and guitarist Dix Denney) accidentally turned into a weirdly high-powered and passionate rock juggernaut.

In their dive-crawling days, Forrest would frantically scream out his introspective tantrums in a gravelly whine that fell somewhere between the grind of Janis Joplin and the raw squeal of the Seeds’ Sky Saxon. But while Saxon complained bitterly to authority that they were “Pushin’ Too Hard,” Forrest yammered just as passionately in his tribute to poor Zelda, “Don’t Be Shittin’ In The House.” And as the often delirious singer held his alcohol-drenched body up with the mike stand, the rest of the band wandered aimlessly around the stage, bumping into one another, but still slinging out a frenzied, powerful guifer-rock mess.

The Monster’s two LPs. Baby. . . You’re Bummin’ My Life Out In A Supreme Fashion and Saturday Afternoon aggressively make up in creative passion what the combo lacks in grace. The late great jazzman Thelonious Monk would surely have been horrified by his near-Sacriligeous Monster namesake. But the solemn keyboard master may have dug the combo’s improvisational rehearsal style—with Forrest blurting out lyrics in near-scat style as they pop into his head, and the band jamming in the cave-like practice room of Thelonious Monster’s Compound in residential Hollywood.

“Before, when we made the first album, we just sort of picked a style of music,” Forrest explains. “We’d say ‘Play punk rock,’ and they’d play punk rock and I’d sing iyrics. . . ”

Yet, this wild creative energy has done its share tb keep Thelonious Monster in a near-constant state of turmoil, with personnel changes almost outnumbering gigs. Schloss, on leave from the Circle Jerks, was filling the vacated shoes of founding bassist Jon Huck. Before Schloss, Rob Graves lasted out a grueling three-month road trip but bailed out when things started to get too weird.

“It was a nightmare being around us for three months,” Forrest shrugged. “It was really bad. Then we came home to write hew material for the new album, and he’d never seen anything like it before, so he quit. We fight over the parts and stuff.”

Forrest toured with another version of this crew—driving the lumbering white Condo across the country without a license and nothing more than his plastic Budweiser Club membership card to show if pulled over—ultimately leading them to Buffalo, New York, where the Condo’s engine died, leaving the band stranded ahd broke at an all-night truck stop. The Monster immediately called their record company for help. But the band’s deputation for public drunkenness and dangerous behavior preceded them. “The record company thought We were drug addicts and wanted the money to get high and were lying,” Pete said excitedly, sitting on the Condo’b carpeted floor.

“The record company thought we were drug addicts...”

—Pete Weiss

The press, however; has strangely taken to these guys, somehow compelled by their self-destructive spasms. At shows in Washington D.C., the local papers have excused this behavidr as some Strange brew of violent and brilliant musical vision, perhaps even surpassing that of the Replacements. After one disastrous gig in D.C., the Washington Post praised the show, marveling at the band’s circuslike stage persona and describing it as a “deck of cards in the wind.”

Later, behind the Compound, the weathered Hollywood apartment-garage-complex that serves as the Monster’s home base, Forrest would laugh. “We were awful,” he said, pointing to Pete. “He didn’t even show up for the beginning part of the show. It was a catastrophe. So we got some guy in the audience to play drums. We had all this anarchy going on, and they wrote in the paper we were purposely trying to be bad to offset our critical acclaim.”

When the Monster bus reached its destination—a club near Santa Barbara balled Borsodi’s—Forrest wandered into the wooden room, looking at the hard tables spread across the floor and trailing Zelda behind him. As the rest of the band and the three roadies began lugging in the first load of equipment, Zelda was shooed through the kitchen by a raving waitress. Forrest’s excitement seemed to wane. The ghost of the hippy dream hung heavily over Borsodi’s. The promoter-manager of the club-restaurant shuffled about in a faded yellow shirt decorated with orange flowers while a deadlocked rastaman worked the kitchen. Sprouts were everywhere, on every plate, on the flbof, between teeth, like some dried-out, green-dyed spermatozoa. And mounted on the ceiling of the main room was a dark and oppressive painting of the burnt-out carcass of the Bank of America building that once stood across the street, before the Shortlived hippy revolution snuffed it out in a rare show of force.

“I had a dream last night where Neil Young was hanging around my house,” Forrest recalled. “He was saying ‘I’m gonna get Crazy Horse back together to back ya up. I’m gonna take care of the whole thing.’ And I couldn’t believe it because he was huge. He was this huge fat man.”

Meanwhile, Pete bantered barbs with a CREEM writer. “Zander is adamant that you know that he’s in the band full-time,” he said, looking twice oyer each shoulder. “It’s kind of weird because of Keith.” Unbeknownst to raspythrqated Keith Morris, Zander wanted out of the Circle Jerks, being, quite simply, unsatisfied. He saw himself more as the sensitive young guitar player type stuck thumping bass Strings at the Circle Jerks’ Constant high-throttle. His discontent was undoubtedly heightened by the unexpected interest Joe Strummer showed In his guitar playing after the Jerks’ work on the soundtrack for Sid & Nancy. Strummer subsequently enlisted Zander to play guitar on such projects as the Walker and Permanent Record soundtracks, calling up whenever he made it into L.A.

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“Zander,” Strummer would whisper hoarsely into the phone, “why don’t you come down to the studio and bring some rolling papers.” A few minutes later, he called back. “And bring your Spanish guitar too.”

Waiting for the gig to begin, Zander and Forrest spent an hour jamming for a Dylan tribute-fundraiser to be held in Hollywood the next night. But now Forrest was anxious to get away. In moments he was a few feet from where opening band the Loud Family was standing on stage, pounding on the bathroom door. “Sabrina, come on! We’re gonna see a movie!”

In the crowd, someone yelled, “Yeah, a movie!”

Forrest, quickly realizing what he had just done, ran back out through the kitchen, laughing. “I can’t believe I said that. I feel terrible.”

He shrugged and marched away. “I’m sorry about that. But I’m just tired of seeing bands,” he said, waving his arms in front of him. “I like folk music.”

Stopping at a building vaguely resembling a movie theatre, he bought a ticket and hurried inside.

Eventually, Thelonious Monster, augmented by a broken acoustic guitar lugging Keith Morris, shambled onto Borsodi’s stage. Now wearing a clean, longsleeved white shirt, Forrest apologized to the Loud Family for his rude outburst in the middle of their set. He then grabbed the microphone stand and pressed it close to his face, leading the band into his countrified ballad, “Looking To The West.”

“I look into the West I see a buncha bands that I can’t stand; and I look into the East and I see no, no, no bands at all. Well music used to mean so much to me, it don’t mean that much to me no more. When I was a kid nothing mattered more, when Kiss and Led Zeppelin singin ’ rock ’n’ roll, singin’ rock ’n’ roll. Back then music used to mean so much to me it don’t mean that much to me no more...”

Dix and Handsome then bounded into the later-era punked-up guitar rhythms of ‘‘Hang Tough” as Forrest whined: “Well, nothing ever changes, and probably never will. The harder I keep trying the more they change the rules. Every time I get it right, it ends up being wrong. And all the things I’ve figured out don’t mean that much at all... You got to hang tough, ya gotta hang tu-u-u-uf. ’’

Meanwhile, Morris bounced like a jackrabbit with his custom air guitar, covering most of the stage. Dix, lips puckered and back bent, then danced his pick across the strings in an excited solo.

After it was all over, the crowd was left yelling for more, but Forrest would have none of it. As the band stood around in the kitchen, listening hungrily to the whistling and applause outside, a waitress in the kitchen said, ‘‘How about The Way We Were?’ That’s always a crowdpleaser.” Forrest ignored her. After 100 gigs where everything possible that could go wrong did, from fights on stage to absent musicians to falling down and cracking his head open, Forrest has finally decided not to risk a perfectly good set by continuing until things fall apart. ‘‘I’m not going to do it,” Forrest declared, shaking his blond dreads.

Heading back to L.A., the condo was mostly dark, lit only by the passing lights shining through the windshield and the hot tips of a half-dozen cigarettes bouncing in the blackness. Early tomorrow morning Forrest would be back at the golf course, shoveling manure and gathering balls. And the others would be back home doing the jobs that keep them fed. Pete is the exception, without a job or a place to live. He prefers to bounce around, sleeping on friends’ couches, beds or with his drum set in the dark garage under Forrest’s apartment.

Still pumped with the energy of the show, and fighting the sound of Benny Goodman’s clarinet blaring from the stereo, Pete was talking fast and loud. ‘‘I think people like us because it’s honesty,” he yelled. ‘‘Even when we were fucked up, we were honestly haying a fucked up good time. No pretense. I keep on thinking we’re going to try to formulate something. No way, we couldn’t get that together. ‘Let’s figure out a major plan.’ No way, dude.”

Later, the band was relaxing on the porch behind their rehearsal space, facing an old black & white while announcer Chick Hearn babbled on and on about the Lakers. Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers was strumming the guitar Forrest had been writing songs on lately.

The singer had only been playing for the past few months, writing new songs as he picked up new chords. The reaction from the rest of the group was mixed. ‘‘He’s come up with a couple of lame ones,” Pete volunteered. ‘‘But it’s better if it helps him write the lyrics.”

“ ‘In My Own Back Yard’ is a good one,” said Zander. ‘‘I think that’s a nice one.”

Fotrest interrupted. “We’re not going to do that one. That’s on a Bob Forrest solo album that’s coming soon. Be looking for that in your stores even before the Monster album probably.”

Flea kept strumming, and started singing: “/ don’t want to go to Paris, I got Paris in my own back yard. And I don’t need to go to Texas, I got Texas in my own back yard. So leave me alone, leave me alone in my back yard and I’ll be alright. ”

Meanwhile, Pete confided, “The fact that Bob can play the guitar now is really good. It. gives him something to do so he doesn’t yell at us all the time.

Forrest continued the song with Flea: “I don’t wanna watch TV, these are things that I don’t want to own. I don’t need to hear Neil Young, I’m Neil Young in my own backyard. So leave me alone, leave me alone. ”

Flea stopped. “Dude, I haven’t slept in days. Can’t sleep.” Chili Peppers singer Anthony stormed in, and Flea said, “You know we’re the centerfold of CREEM?”

“Who is?”

“You are,” Forrest shouted.

But Anthony was unconcerned about such things at the moment. “My car ran out of gas, man,” he said in a feverish rasp. “No gas gauge. Middle of La Cienega and Beverly. I had a fuckin’ geek stop and give me a ride.”

Ignoring the rest, Zander ponfessed his decision to join the Monster (although he hadn’t yet told Keith Morris or the guys in the Circle Jerks yet). “With Thelonious Monster, I have so much fun, it doesn’t matter if I’m playing bass or not. There’s a little bit more room for improvisation with these guys, too. While the Jerks, it’s all ack-ack-ack\”

This decision was unlikely to please Zander’s mother. “Well, you should stay in the Circle Jerks because it’s a steady paycheck,’’ she fretted. “These boys in Thelonious Monster sound like they’re very unstable.”

A couple of months later at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, Thelonious Monster was set to play the L.A. Weekly Music Awards show, Industry types, scene regulars, many in make-up and bleached or dyed hair, talking in raspy or giggly voices, fired cool stares at each other from across the room. Very soon the Monster would open the festivities, but Pete was still working the lobby. He crossed the room quickly, his chin high in the air, shaking hands.

He stopped for a mpment. “Zander’s out of the band,” he said casually. “Rob’s back in."

And then he was off again,, shaking more hands and working his way back to the stage while scanning the room one last time through his dark lenses.

The show ended way ahead of schedule, with most of the ticketholders still socializing in the lobby, never straying too far from the bar. As the crowd squeezed out onto the sidewalk, Pete and the others were hanging their heads out a window high above the parking lot. A round-faced girl in black was smiling up to him. “Pete, do you still not have a place to live?”

“It doesn’t matter,” came the purring cool jazzman retort. “We’re going out on tour next week.” H