More Fun in the New World by John Doe & Tom Desavia

Author:John Doe & Tom Desavia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

It is sunny, and I am walking down the street. Shops, restaurants, and taverns are heaving with people. I’ve been here long enough that an occasional voice cries out a greeting, even though this big city is supposed to be so impersonal.

Yet this is not Los Angeles. It is London. I pause by a bookstore that has discounted overstocked paperbacks on sagging wooden shelves outside their front door. Twice I have seen one of my books humiliatingly displayed on these public discount shelves, where passersby can glance over and notice how neither your name, your research, nor your literary point of view was enough to sell the fifty thousand heartfelt words you poured onto that particular book’s untouched pages.

A garish black, white, and pink book cover catches my eye. It is a history of the Masque, the punk rock club I literally stumbled into when I slipped on something slimy in its doorway forty years earlier. I had moved to L.A. from my Kentucky home, arriving October 11, 1977, and I was green as suburban grass. It was only two months since the late great Brendan Mullen, a wise Scotsman I was proud to call my friend, opened the joint when I entered its filthy portals.

Picking this book up, I found it had more black-and-white photographs than it did text, and to my astonishment many of the photos were not of the bands who performed at the Masque’s original location—the Mau Mau’s, F-Word, The Alley Cats, The Dils, The Zeros, The Eyes… I saw ’em all there—but of the fans, posers, and punters who made the place swing as much as the music did. I hurriedly flipped through its pages, looking for old friends, hoping to see a young Phast Phreddie or Rik L. Rik, perhaps spotting the late Don Waller wonderfully alive again or maybe Belinda Carlisle not long after she was sacked as drummer of The Germs or—dare I think it—a photo of a barely twenty-two-year easy mark whose Stiv Bators razor-cut hair could not hide the fact he was a dumb kid, a rube, a hoe-dad, a wanna-be, and a tinhorn immediately out of his depth the moment he drove west across the Kentucky state line.

Flipping the pages excitedly, I recognize faces, but none are close friends. Out of nowhere and after four decades I begin to grow skittish and full of anxiety. These faces are the SoCal kids who never quite accepted me and who were angry I wasn’t angry at life and at Los Angeles as a whole. And I wasn’t. I thought Los Angeles terrific after the stifling Southern Baptist existence I had known in suburban Kentucky.

The more I turned the pages searching for old friends appearing so magically young, the more I remembered that this person in this photo laughed when I said I liked The Everly Brothers, the more I remembered that the guy in the next photo wanted to fight me over God knows what social error I committed, and this

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