Bovine Serenade
by Bessie The Cow
Chapter 11: Madame Wong's or How Quickly They Forget
Most people don’t know that robotic bovines believe “the show must go on” whether the audience is a SRO stadium or the janitor in a tiny club. But we do.
The separation was history. Any daydreams about what could have been at Crystal Sound, the padlocked recording mecca, had been relegated to the back burner. The fact that our social lives had been drastically reduced in a brand new town was forgotten. On the final approach to Madame Wong's, we were focused on one thing and one thing only: replicating the success our live show had enjoyed in the hinterlands.
I wasn't as naturally confident as the humans. I've already confessed my misgivings about uprooting our entire operation. But at that moment, swept up in the excitement, even I would have told you that the idea that we could possibly crash and burn anywhere along the road to complete and total world domination was laughable. Esprit de corps couldn't have been any higher as we pulled into the parking lot of "LA's finest showcase venue."
And then all of a sudden we screeched to a halt. Our path was blocked by a trio of humans brandishing flashlights. One of them spoke to Kinn, who was at the wheel.
"That'll be three dollars to park."
“We’re the band,” Kinn, informed him, expecting the pathway to clear instantaneously.
“It's still three bucks to park.”
“We’re the band. We don’t pay to park.”
“If you want to park in this lot, it’ll be three dollars.” It didn't seem like the first time this practiced crew had defended the sacred blacktop of Madame Wong's.
“Let me speak to your manager.”
“If you wanna speak to the manager, go park on the street.”
I could sense Kinn's positive attitude shifting to a more warlike temper. I knew this mood. This is how he got when he was making an “anyone who mucks with The Milkmen mucks with me” stand—like that time he threw a student booking manager's Daytimer up against the ceiling cause the "weasel" forgot he'd scheduled us to play Denver University.
The only reason things didn't deteriorate further is that the detour out to LA International to pick up my crate had made time a consideration, a reality not lost on Silva and Tim, who were not-so-gently pleading with Kinn to just pay the three bucks already.
Although it killed him to do it, Kinn coughed up the parking ransom and presented it to Madame Wong’s Imperial Guard. One could say this was our "welcome to LA" moment #2.
Before I describe the scene inside Madame Wong’s, allow me to point out a few relevant statistics. The first is that the average crowd size The Milkmen had played to during our last dozen gigs in Colorado was around 1,200. The second is that our cut of the gate generally came out to several thousand dollars. Hold those thoughts.
As the equipment (I count myself in this category, since I was forced to ride with it) was being carted into the bowels of Madame Wong’s—where some sort of auxiliary kitchen used to make noodles or bean curd must have previously been—I couldn’t help but notice that the supposed hotspot seemed pretty deserted. Kinn reconnoitered the rapidly deteriorating building, then reported that he's seen a few disengaged punks, freakazoids and pre-Goths lingering here and there, though there were hardly enough of them to be considered a "crowd."
Even more desolate was Madame Wong’s downstairs, where Kinn was shocked to learn The Milkmen would be performing on the smaller of the club's two stages instead of commanding the somewhat grander (at least size-wise) upstairs room.
“Kinda like showcasing in a sepulcher,” he deadpanned. He also noted that members of the upstairs crowd "could have been mistaken for the extras in The Dawn Of The Dead."
In that not-so gala showcase room, apparently thirty souls weren’t grooving to a band that featured lead singer Doug Feiger, formerly of The Knack, who had hit way big barely six months ago with their infectious single, “My Sharona,” and Steve Jones, whose anarchistic former band, The Sex Pistols, had singlehandedly put punk on the map. The Pistols had received an ungodly amount of press, there was a major movie being made about the Pistols' bass player, Sid Vicious, and here was their former guitarist playing a virtually empty room originally intended to hold Chinese buffets. Feiger was singing some structureless song about the tea in Morocco, a far cry from "My Sharona." On guitar, Jones, a powerhouse on seminal tunes like "God Save The Queen" and "Anarchy In The UK"—tried to augment Feiger's hoona-heenie material with predictably rotten results. It was like going from the Sex Pistols to Lawrence Welk.
Attempting to describe this not-so-supergroup and the not-so-supercrowd's reaction to it, normally eloquent Kinn Konn was reduced to the old chestnut, “how quickly they forget.”
In the even more sparsely populated catacombs where we’d be playing, the band currently onstage featured drummer Ed "Mr. Skin" (one of the few shaved headed guys back then) Cassidy, formerly of Spirit, an excellent band that had regularly sold out the Fillmores East and West and had enjoyed a huge amount of FM play for classics like "Nature's Way" and "I Got A Line On You." The affable Cassidy and his distinctive setup, which included two oversized parade drums employed as dual kick drums, was a bright spot in a dim evening.
But it wasn’t bright enough to attract more than a dozen people. And that included Cassidy, who had certainly appeared in arenas from London to Tokyo in his Spirit days.
“It’s still early in the night,” Victor stated hopefully after Silva pressed him on the attendance issue.
That didn’t exactly ring true. The showcase's odds of turning into a major disaster were increasing by the second.
With a sinking feeling, Kinn wandered back upstairs to check out the featured band. This non-sober ensemble for better or worse featured Brit Michael Des Barres as its lead singer. Des Barres had been in some fairly successful band or other and would go on to become a fairly successful actor. But it could be argued that his wife, Pamela Des Barres, had made the more worthwhile contribution to rock history. "Miss Pamela" was a highly successful groupie: rock gods Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger, and Jim Morrison headlined her list of superstar conquests. She detailed these trysts amusingly enough in a kiss and tell bio, I’m With The Band. Kinn admitted that he'd actually read it. Hard to say what she saw in the pedestrian Des Barres. Dripping with sweat, jumping up and down on an imaginary pogo stick, the guy connected with no one. Possibly he was more gallant in his pre-cocaine days.
I can only imagine what opinions about the LA rock scene a keen observer of cultural anthropology like Kinn Konn formed as he surveyed the highly decadent yet lowly attended venue. But no matter how contemptuous those opinions might be, he and the rest of our ensemble had to vanquish thoughts like those from our minds. Our time to perform had come.
And what we had to adjust to while we were suiting up, like it or not, was the fact that we were now going to be offering our full dairy extravaganza for a sedate crowd of fourteen individuals. This appalling figure included our managers, the waitress, and the bartender. Winning the KBCO songwriting contest with its ensuing waves of publicity had ensured that The Milkmen had never experienced anything remotely like this sort of real-world bringdown in our Rocky Mountain womb. We would experience it now.
When the horror show ended, we too had connected with no one. The band’s take of the till came to a whopping $14. Divided four ways, that came to a Heineken apiece. If you subtract the $3 to park and the $900 for my passage Air Express, we lost $899 on the show which had created no publicity buzz whatsoever.
We'd been troopers. The show had gone on. The songs were performed with precision. I had been milked. But we'd experienced something we'd never had to endure in Colorado—we’d paid to play. But not only had we paid to play, we had paid to play to nobody. As they say, that had to hurt. And hurt it did.
Back in our dressing room, a locker room for illegal workers in its last incarnation, I saw a depressed side of Kinn that had not previously surfaced. I saw that the normally happy-go-lucky egomaniac was doing everything he could to hold back tears. The effort was not entirely successful. A few drops escaped and ran down his cheeks. Then I couldn’t help myself either. The sight of my unhappy human had made me all too aware of my own emotional frailty. I began bawling uncontrollably. Watching me sobbing helped Kinn snap out of it. He came over and consoled me. Even in a shared moment of misery, I recognized how lucky I was to have such a good friend.
On the ride back to The Valley, shaking our heads, we mulled over the exquisite disaster that had been our entrée to the LA rock scene. If we'd just played "a premiere LA venue," what could playing non-premiere venues possibly be like? It would be a lot like playing Filthy McNasty's ... but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Fans of pain and suffering rejoice: several more tragicomic misadventures lay ahead!
Most people don’t know that robotic bovines believe “the show must go on” whether the audience is a SRO stadium or the janitor in a tiny club. But we do.
Chapter 1: Dashing Dairymen
Chapter 2: Rick Plays The Snare Drum With His Head
Chapter 3: Tim Takes The Stage
Chapter 4: Meet Mr. Watts
Chapter 5: We Open For Missing Persons
Chapter 6: Conquering Colorado
Chapter 7: Ric Sees His Successor
Chapter 8: Westward Ho!
Chapter 9: A Cow Writer Co-Writer
Chapter 10: Welcome To LA
Chapter 11: Madame Wong's or How Quickly They Forget