Dark Screams: Volume Two (14 page)

S
EPTEMBER 11,1974

What are Rikki Tutt and Greg Magurk of Whatever thinking? The darkness of their second and newest album,
Just Forget It,
released last week, is a harrowing ride that borders on diatribe.

While the band’s first album, the intoxicating
Know Means Know
was a Lewis Carroll surrealism, filled with post-psychedelia braininess, addictive pulses and lyrical whimsy, this second outing is harder to place. There is none of the delighted feeling of the band caught under a bit of Magritte drizzle, from earlier efforts; no more nose-snubbing invention for its own pleasure.

The band is changing. Philip Zapata, now fully Moog synthesized, and G. G. Wall, his ax haunted by Jimi and experience, cannot rescue their faithless leaders. Listening to Whatever’s new music is almost like watching an eloquent friend fall into a suffocating depression.

Could it be that Watergate antics and the body counts of Vietnam have left Tutt, Magurk, and company in a cheerless funk that won’t let go? While
Just Forget It
is a brilliant set of songs, lyrically stunning, there is no mistaking the lightless bondage of its mood. The assassination of pop culture fills its every note and word, graff and bullies of sour headlines their prime targets. Our government tops the list.

“Addicts” is a toxic pin-the-tail-on-the-heartless mockery about the Watergate break-in that swarms with bitter imprecations. None gets out alive, including G. Gordon Liddy, John Dean, John Ehrlichman, and former President Richard M. Nixon.

The fountain of youth is red, not clear.

The secret of love is playing on fear.

You shouldn’t resist, there’s no point.

It’s life’s dirty trick, the rules of the joint.

Their gifts and tricks never abate, but the songwriters seem to have forgotten the joy of it all. This is an album of myriad gifts, however massively troubled. Whatever needs to lift its head from the bleakness of U.S. war policy and the bleating rancor of protesters before Tutt and Magurk have nothing good left to say about anything.

N
OVEMBER 4, 1974

“He can’t hear me.”

The room is stuffy. View of cornfields. Smokestacks. A train filled with frightened livestock rattles by.

A small town; farming, some industry. They don’t see guys like Stomp McGoo coming through too often from atop their tractors and fundamentalism. All that hair and velvet. Bracelets jangling; a scrawny faggot. Makes their necks redden just thinking about it.

He’s holding his brother Steven’s hand. Steven landed his chopper on a mine in Vietnam, and when he came to there was less of him. Two arms gone. A leg. Most of his face. He’s blind now. Being fed through a tube.

“You shoulda seen how he threw, man. Fuckin’ Steven was the whole varsity team. Could pass into a thimble from half a mile.”

Steven moans. Stomp strokes his hair.

The nurse says visiting time is almost up. Stomp nods, leans down to whisper to Steven, hold him. I can’t hear what he says. Stomp holds him more tightly. Turns to look at me for a moment. He’s crying.

On the drive away from the hospital, Stomp never said a word. As the jet took off, he looked out the window at the town left behind. Closed eyes. Said something about how Steven could never cry again. There was nothing left of his face that would allow it. Tear ducts had been destroyed.

The next night, Stomp did the longest and most amazing drum solo anyone could remember.

J
ANUARY 3, 1975

2:37 A.M.

Bad streets, bad people. Bars that hose death off their sidewalks every morning. A loft building rises, crapped-out—cheap. Inside, a guy who had an emotional blowout at a million miles an hour and kept going is waking.

His name is Oz Peterson, and he used to be a Chi Town blue. Until he and his partner got grabbed by Peruvian smack monkeys, and Oz watched the guy he rode with get unlaced slow style, tortured for DEA leads.

His partner, Nicky, never told. But it took three days to finally kill him. And Oz still has nightmare flashes of Nick, hung like beef, inch-long knife cuts venting his body, bled to death.

Oz rubs puffy features awake, fixes coffee, as a smoggy sun comes up in his loft space. It’s filled with towering canvases painted with self-exorcising images. Oz disappeared after the death and flaked, drank, got lost, hoped he’d never get found.

Ended up in L.A. painting, doing dipshit PI work when he needed the gig. Divorce surveillance, riding a telephoto, getting fat. He’d go home at night, talk to a few shots of Herradura and paint until the images scared him. Faces. Screaming children. Blades slitting skin. Red trickles that dripped onto his loft floor and made him sit cross-legged and think about just yanking his fucking cord.

But a knock at the door stopped him.

She stood there, and he’d seen her before. But he looked down, not wanting to make the connection, not wanting to chance even liking anybody. And so they rode in the loft building elevator a thousand times and he buried his face under a dead mask and she never asked. He always read her as a hooker. Pale, flashy. Edgar Winter hair, a teased abstraction. Pretty face, smart eyes. Eyes that probably knew he was cocooned and wasn’t going to ask.

But then she said she needed to score. Was he holding? It was for a friend. A hungry arm that needed some yummy.

He said nothing. And she knew.

She talked him into bed and did some magic tricks on him that fried the hangover. And they held each other and he watched her, guilt pooling. What was someone like her doing down here?

“People here just get left on the curb to be collected.” He likes her. Being next to her.

He battles a decision. Finally pulls cuffs from the bedside table, anchors her thin wrist to bedpost.

She writhes, yells bad words.

He calls the cops.

And as Inga gets taken away, he sketches her face. She’s shrieking at him, in the back of the squad car. He stands on the filthy sidewalk, finishes the charcoal. Goes back to his room. Hangs up the sketch and gets drunk.

This year’s Oval Office Mouseketeer, “Jerry,” was starting to clamp down on drugs, big-time. Nickel-and-dimers were gulping years without parole. Maybe Magurk wouldn’t be able to buy Inga out of this one.

Even though he’d sent her.

A
PRIL 10, 1978

It’s been a long wait. And the result is a troubling masterpiece.

The first cut from the new Whatever double album,
Skin and Bones,
is “Mainline,” and, like the rest of the album, it’s a full-frontal indictment.

Disease and glitter,

Just take my hand.

I’ll never hurt you.

I’m your biggest fan.

And so it goes throughout this lethal stroll through the neon Styx of media imagery and false dreams. In the eyes of Tutt, Magurk, Wall, and McGoo, L.A. is one big ghastly appetite, rendered in inhuman, industrial grays and gunshot reds. They cut a deep incision and pull back flesh to dismiss show business as chic destitution, a party that dips its young in lies before eating them.

In Whatever’s bloodied testimony, the city of glitz-gloom swallows lives, and the streets are littered with sick flesh, tar-pit stares. Hookers strut, peddling death, and everywhere the poison landscape ingests hope and spreads while no one is looking; city cancer. From “Hurting Inside” comes this merry shudder:

My schedule is murder.

I’m hurting inside.

Another new friend

Washes up in the tide.

I feast on misfortune.

I make a questionable friend.

I’m good on the full moon.

I’m a hip seventies trend.

I eat men for breakfast,

Drink women for lunch.

I soak in their essence.

It’s my favorite punch.

It can’t be stopped.

Can’t be found.

To me, you’re all barking dogs,

Put to sleep in my pound.

(chorus)

I’m hurting inside.

No one understands.

I’m a priceless addition,

Just lending a hand.

There’s too many people,

Not enough love.

The world is a cliff.

I’m just a shove.

(end chorus)

I make a killing,

Transporting lost souls.

Some question the method,

But life’s about goals.

My schedule is murder.

It’s just my way.

Another lost dream.

Another fine day.

Not content to shoot at neon falsity, they plunge into deeper trauma with their pro-environmentalist “Black Sky,” set to a fierce piano and raging vocal by Tutt.

The birds are hiding,

Bleeding in dead trees.

Clouds infected.

Bringing sick men to their knees.

Bad things are coming.

I can hear them on the stairs.

Coming down the hallway.

Death is in the air.

(chorus)

Black sky.

The clock has stopped for good.

Black sky.

Flames have reached the wood.

Black sky.

Bad man’s coming with a smile.

He’s hungry and he’s empty

Be staying for a while.

But all is not nihilism. In the dulcet “Shade of a Blue Affair,” the band changes emotional octaves, and Magurk sings a pleading ballad, backed only by Wall’s melancholic guitar. On side three, the band’s opening track is the sultry “Spanish Lies,” a lulling Castillian sway.

The twenty songs, despite frequently scathing lyrics, never oppress melodic invention nor become brittle allegations. In past albums, Tutt and Magurk have deadened their own heartbeats with polemics and bile. In
Skin and Bones,
they don’t pull any punches, but nor are they self-pitying and lost. What felt like thinly camouflaged star malaise in past work is nowhere to be found on this album. Only perception and sleek production. And the usual tunesmithing that soars.

Maybe Bob D. was right, and the times truly are changing. This is not an album that could have been appreciated or forgiven a few years ago. But the way things are going, this is an album which fills an ominous vacancy.

FIVE STARS.

F
EBRUARY 4, 1978

ROCKER’S GAL PAL FOUND DEAD.

Inga Johanneson, former wife of Whatever cofounder Rikki Tutt, was found hanged in her São Paolo, Brazil, prison cell. Prison officials say Johanneson committed suicide, using a belt. Tutt was unavailable for comment, but it is known he had tried to secure her release for several months. Whatever manager Leonard Lupo said the entire band was in shock and that Tutt is in seclusion, under doctor’s supervision. Those close to Tutt have declined comment on the troubling coincidence that Johanneson’s death occurred on his birthday.

N
OVEMBER 1979

Rikki Tutt is bare-chested, staring at himself in the mirror. His band, Whatever, is in Minneapolis, opening for Latin rock group Malo, about to perform for a half-filled stadium. The days of SRO and number-one albums have faded; this juxtaposed billing of differing musical styles places things in telling relief.

In recent years Whatever has suffered poor record sales and concert attendance. The group seems a casualty, at least partially, of disco music. In recent months, they were booed offstage when opening in Sarasota for KC and the Sunshine Band. Equally, they have had more than their share of genuine tragedy.

Their brilliant guitarist, G. G. Wall, died of a heroin overdose at a party in the Hollywood Hills, hosted by megagroup Seahorse. In further misfortune, drummer Stomp McGoo was jailed for sexual assault with a minor, though the girl later admitted she’d lied. Stomp rejoined the group for its ill-fated, disastrously unpopular double album
Skin and Bones.

Wall was replaced for one tour by Snap Brown, who had played with Billy Preston, Blood, Sweat and Tears, the Eric Burdon Band, Howlin’ Wolf, and was a session player in London and New York.

Brown left the group after eight months to form SHAKE, an enormous international concert draw which features upbeat dance music and colorful calypso costumes. The first album from SHAKE,
Boogie Bay,
is number one in America and Britain, and all compositions are Brown’s.

Although Magurk and Tutt are openly critical of Brown’s music, and aghast at Brown’s status as a superstar, Brown never responds in the press. His solo album,
French Eyes,
has been ridiculed by Tutt and Magurk, who termed it
French Fries
and compared its musical instincts to fast food.

Meanwhile, Whatever remains on the road to pay spiraling legal expenses arising from their ongoing lawsuit with former manager Lenny Lupo, who they claim misappropriated royalties from their four albums. Lupo counterclaims it’s fiction and that he was fired while still having a stake in all the band’s past albums and future projects—if any.

“Invented sewage,” says Tutt.

The group has also been sued by the parents of the fifteen-year-old girl who was beaten to death at their Athens concert in 1978. Greek police say private security hired by Whatever did nothing to help when the girl was attacked by an unruly crowd, unhappy that Whatever had to shorten their concert to only one hour when G. G. Wall collapsed onstage. It’s hard to say whether the group has recovered from his overdose and death.

“I miss him,” admits Tutt. “I don’t know…maybe he was smart to get out. The world is falling asleep. No one cares. It’s global torpor. I mean, a fucking actor is running for president.”

“Pedestrian one at that,” adds Magurk.

“Oh, is he walking now?” Tutt chews celery.

Magurk almost smiles.

“Something went wrong somewhere,” he says. “I mean, Donna fucking Summer is number one. I went to visit my mother in Sarasota, and she has a pet rock.”

Tutt sips a tequila shooter. “Maybe it’s just your father. He’s awfully quiet.” He points. “Tell ya, people used to think we had something to say.”

“Did we?” Magurk asks.

Tutt says nothing. Finishes the shooter.

“Ask the Bee Gees.”