Digging the Vein (18 page)

The first rehearsal I showed up, as would become my ritual over the next few weeks, riding shotgun in Simon’s rickety Volkswagen Bug. We snaked up the winding narrow path that led to Atom’s house on top of Lookout Mountain. The road had no barriers to prevent the car from tumbling onto the busy stretch of road below and if you met a car coming the other way, someone had to reverse all the way to their start point, or you would be at an impasse. Given that most people driving to and from the house were usually loaded on heroin or speed, these little stand-offs could often be quite terrifying. Simon had filled me in on a few of the wilder stories about Atom: the gun fixation, the death threats to the Oscar Wildes (a band who started off as good friends of Atom’s but became an object of seething resentment as their success - and his drug intake - ballooned), the obsession with the Masons, the messiah complex that became blossomed into full-on Jesus mania when he was high enough … trundling up to this large, secluded house I began to thank God that at least we had a drug habit in common. There’s no icebreaker in the world like shooting up with someone.

Atom answered the door dressed in his uniform flowing white robes, looking more distracted than usual.

“
Rehearsal’s off,” he told us, ushering us in. “Unless you can loan me 40 bucks and give me a ride.”

It turned out that both of his guitars were in the pawnshop. He was 40 dollars short on the tickets to retrieve them. He gave me a brief tour of the house, which included him proudly showing off his sitars… plucking long sustained notes on them and nodding to himself contentedly in a dreamlike manner… and we ended up in the bedroom where Atom held out his Masonic sword to me. It was an awesome thing, heavy and beautifully carved with intricate designs. The room suddenly became very quiet – it was obvious that Atom revered this item above all others.

“
A lot of people would like to get their hands on this,” he told me in an excited whisper. “You don’t fuck with the Masons. I shouldn’t even know
this
exists
.”

We got ourselves straight with a couple of speedballs. Then we piled in Simon’s bug and rode to the pawnshop on Sunset.

The place was typical as far as LA pawnshops go. Believe me, when you have a habit you spend a lot of time in pawnshops. It had a wooden statue of an Indian Chief outside the door and the inside was cool, musty and dark. The old Armenian behind the counter knew Atom and sarcastically addressed him as “the rock star” to which Atom scowled back, “Fuck you, old man”. The owner came out from behind the chicken wire protecting his counter and shuffled onto the shop floor. He was horribly hunched over - some kind of spinal disease I assumed - but he moved quickly for someone so twisted and bent. I flicked through the CD’s and stumbled across a copy of The Catsuits debut album for sale for the princely sum of 70 cents. It was right next to a soundtrack CD for
LA Law
which was a dollar fifty.

“
I got some good stuff for you rock star … new guns.”

“
Oh yeah, yeah, let me see …”

Simon, who knew Atom a lot better than I did, suddenly had a look on his face that I would come to recognize pretty well over the coming weeks. This mask of exasperation was the signal that Atom was about to do something stupid and it was utterly futile to try and stop him.

We left an hour later with only one of the guitars. The rest of the money had been put toward some bullets and a replica civil war era pistol. Even though it fired real bullets, this thing was so old it was considered an antique and as such didn’t require a waiting period. Driving up Sunset again, Atom kept sticking the gun out of the window and pointing it at open-mouthed passers-by, screaming, “I WILL KILL ALL OF YOU FUCKERS!” Simon looked about ready to have a heart attack every time this happened, but he seemed scared to do more than mutter under his breath about it. We stopped by some sleazy groupies pad in Echo Park, where Atom borrowed a hundred bucks, then hit downtown to score. That was our first rehearsal.

I later discovered that the original line-up of the band had all quit after Atom began using heroin after a few years clean. Soon he was worse than ever, shooting coke on top of his usual diet of smack and speed. This led to a number of high profile onstage fistfights that delighted the music press but ended up breaking up the band’s classic line-up. When the band walked out Atom also got kicked out the documentary filmmaker who had been following the band around for years in the hopes of making a film about their antics. I met her once or twice and she seemed like most of the other people floating in and out of the Kool-Aid’s inner circle – flaky and drug damaged. I figured there was no way in hell this movie would even get finished. I was astounded years later when it was not only released, but became quite a hit, effectively re-launching Electric Kool-Aid’s career.

The line-up I played in was cobbled together from musicians who either didn’t know how crazy Atom was or didn’t care. Despite this freewheeling attitude the band lost members by a rate of approximately one person every couple of days. We had 3 weeks to prepare for a headlining “comeback” show at the Troubadour that was getting a lot of press hype. The original line-up consisted of: Atom, Simon, a strung out guitarist named Aaron, Mike from my band Southpaw on bass, a Hollywood freak named Buddy on second guitar, and myself.

Aaron was the first to go, gone after getting too high to play and fucking up his cues a couple of times. Despite the fact Atom was a junky too, he couldn’t tolerate
sloppy
drug users. Atom berated him for over an hour one time in particular, calling him a useless nancy boy junky who couldn’t even play the guitar, a pathetic, clichéd Johnny Thunders wannabe … he even told him that he was rotten at being a junky, never mind a musician. That was the last we saw of Aaron. He was practically in tears when he left. Aaron’s real problem was that he was in awe of Atom, and if you were in awe of him or you feared him, Atom would use that weakness to completely destroy you.

Mike went next. He and Buddy were the two non-junkies in the band and even his impeccable patience and normally unflappable personality couldn’t take
these
rehearsals. We would generally start an hour or more late while everybody shot up, wheedled drugs out of each other, or nodded out during long circular conversations about where this sitar line should go or on the relative merits of the The Kinks’
Village Green Preservation Society
album. Then the music would start, either as a funeral-paced dirge (if Simon had done heroin before counting us in) or at a breakneck jittery pace (if he had done crystal meth). Then each song would be interrupted several times while Atom berated Simon, myself, Mike or Buddy for playing a note behind or in front of the beat, not grooving enough, or simply to interject another piece of information relating to a conversation we had all had three hours ago which he’d just remembered. I think the whole scene just got too weird for Mike and one day we were a four piece: vocals, two guitars, keyboards and drums. It would be almost 4 years before I saw Mike again, in London. He was touring as the lighting guy for the latest group of ex-Kool-Aid musicians to be in a flavor-of-the-month band.

Buddy got the worst of it once Aaron and Mike had split. He was not a junky, just a pot smoker with a stupid stoned grin permanently stuck to his face. He absolutely idolized Atom. The most banal bit of information offered by Atom would receive a slow, rapturous nod, as if Buddy was a devout Catholic receiving a personal proclamation from the Pope himself. It was sad: because he worshipped Atom, Buddy tolerated every piece of verbal or physical abuse Atom would throw at him. Our singer seemed to take this is a personal challenge and a grotesque exercise in sado-masochism began to play out every time we showed up for rehearsal.

As the days wore on, Buddy the whipping boy of the group. Sometimes he would bring it on himself. I think he like to see himself as some kind of voice of reason among the chaos. He mistakenly assumed that Atom would somehow respect that. Once he pulled me aside and told Simon and I to stop sharing our drugs with Atom.

“
You see how crazy he gets when he shoots dope, man,” Buddy told me. “You got to let him
fly
, baby. He’s a genius, and the dope is holding him back…”

I told Buddy that if he really wanted to see crazy he should watch what would happen if I
didn’t
share my shit with Atom.

His biggest mistake (and the moment which, in retrospect, spelled the end for Buddy) was when one day we took a break to fix. I told Buddy to hang and read a magazine as this was often a messy, protracted process. Nobody’s veins were in great shape anymore.

“
Hey Atom,” Buddy yelled, “don’t you think you’ve had
enough
? Let those two losers go get high … Lemmie show you this song I wrote. I think you’ll like it…”

Atom didn’t dignify Buddy’s moronic suggestion that he didn’t get high with a reply, but the look on his face said it all. The next day, Buddy was gone.

Now we had a real problem. The show was in 3 days and we had to rearrange the entire set to be played on guitar, drums and keyboards. We did more and more drugs. I had started shooting coke and I was finding it hard to sit still long enough to finish a song without sneaking off and fixing while no one was looking. Atom wanted to find a Hammond organ and have me play the songs “like the fucking
Doors
, man.” At this point we had only learned 4 songs and they sounded ropy at best. I began to realize the show was going to be a disaster and broached the subject of pulling out. Atom stated that there was no way—we needed the money.

It all ended in a suitably farcical manner. We were rehearsing when Atom suddenly decided he wanted some fresh orange juice and that he wanted Simon and I to go get it. I figured he had some drugs that we weren’t meant to know about and he wanted to do them. We got into the rickety Volks and started down Lookout Mountain. At the bottom of the mountain we hit a right and headed to the Ralphs supermarket on the corner of Sunset. As soon as we were on the road though, the car started spluttering and shaking.

“
Aw fuck,” Simon said as the engine died and he rolled the car over to the curb. “I’m outta gas.”

It was too far and too steep to walk back to Atom's place. After rustling up five dollars in change between us and an empty Gatorade bottle, we walked twenty minutes to the nearest gas station, filled up the bottle with two dollars of gas and brought it back to the bug. We then drove down to the gas station, put the other three dollars in the tank, and finally returned to Atom’s place. We had been gone over an hour. When we walked in we were hot, thirsty and thoroughly pissed off. My first thought was finishing the last of my smack and getting a glass of cold water. Atom was sitting in his chair and I immediately knew that shit was about to go down. For a start he had that ceremonial sword lying across his lap.

“
What kept you?” he asked. His voice was deceptively calm.

Simon started the whole convoluted story about how the Bug died and how we had to get gas. Atom nodded affably. When Simon was done I sense Simon’s growing agitation. His patience with Atom’s craziness was wearing dangerously thin. I could see that Simon was just waiting for Atom to say something to set him off. The two of them stared at each other, both about to erupt.

“
Well?” asked Atom, a thing smile curling his lips. “Now that story time’s over… you want to tell me where my fucking
orange juice
is?”

And that was it.

“
Did you listen to a word I just said, man??? We had to walk to the gas station and fill a fucking Gatorade bottle full of gas and walk back to the car!!! Asshole
! I did not get your fucking juice
!”

In the ensuing ruckus Simon was almost decapitated by a Masonic sword. As I tried to escape Atom’s flailing blade I accidentally knocked a guitar against an amp so hard that we could still hear the feedback wailing out of the open front door – along with Atom cursing us, our mothers and our unborn children – until we were at least halfway down the mountain.

Still, Simon and I showed up to the comeback gig two nights later. Simon used to score from a girl who worked the door and so we slipped in without paying. The filmmaker was back, ready to capture the carnage for posterity. As the lights went down and a few expectant whoops and hollers went up from the crowd, Simon leaned into me and said, “I can’t wait to see how the motherfucker tries to pull this shit off …”

Atom walked up to the mike and began to play the opening song with just an acoustic guitar. From the very first chord it was obvious he was badly out of tune. It was obvious that Atom was out of his mind on smack and coke – his eyes were practically rolling back in their sockets. In-between songs he berated the sound guy and the lighting guy, saying they were crucifying him. He forgot the words to the songs. I could sense the crowd getting uglier and more restless around us. “Where’s the rest of the band?” someone yelled, and Atom muttered, “I am the fucking band, asswipe.”