Intro by Kim Cooper, editrix:

When I was a kid in Hollywood in the '80s, the folks who worked at record stores were much cooler than they are today. The city was still cheap enough that a clerk's wages could finance a civilized life, so hep cats with insatiable appetites for new vinyl could spend years behind the counter at Rhino, Aron's, or my uncle David's Record Connection, dispensing snarky opinions on your purchases or just leaning on the counters digging the latest sounds.

I'm not sure when I became aware that Rhino perennial Phast Phreddie Patterson had once been a principle in a mag called Back Door Man--possibly from Danielle Faye, the exquisitely laid back Record Connection staffer whose sister D.D. was also a BDM alum. I didn't see a copy until the mid-'90s, and when I finally did I was intrigued by the writers' passion and their efforts to locate and interpret worthy cultural excrescences in an era where bloated excess was too infrequently punctured by real, raw art. During the magazine's short life, punk rock exploded, making it much easier for weirdoes to find good stuff. Magazines like BDM had a small but undeniable influence on the emerging underground, and it's fun to go back and watch them grasping at the straws that would eventually form a movement.

I've seen BDM's Don Waller around for years, but first got talking with him while promoting the Scramarama festival. I called to see if he might want to write about the show for the L.A. Times, and ended up spending a couple hours enjoying his tales of SoCal childhood and thirty years as a rock and roll writer. When Dave Laing (whose Dog Meat Records in Australia released a posthumous LP by Don's Imperial Dogs) suggested we interview Don for Scram, I thought immediately of putting him together with Ron Garmon of Worldly Remains mag, since Don and Ron are two of the most verbally adept, opinionated and well-dressed writers on the LA scene. Sure enough, they hit it off famously…

(note: the conversation is punctuated with much coughing and gargling; Waller’s nasal rasp is funny and confiding, as is his feline moan over terminal vowels like “y’kno-ow”)

Scram: Great, the commentators now interview each other…

Don: Oh, I’ve interviewed writers before. I understand why Studs Terkel didn’t include writers in his book, Working. We think too much about stuff. (cigarettes are lit)

Scram: As background, what L.A. radio stations were you listening to back in the early '70s?

Don: In the very, very early ‘70s, way before we started Back Door Man, KDAY was still pretty cool, because Bob Wilson was programming it. He ran it like a Top 40 version of an FM station, where you had three songs in a row, then spots and promos, then three songs in a row, and he’d play a lot of weird stuff. You’d get things like “Rattlesnake Shake” or “Oh Well” by Fleetwood Mac, and odd things. It was kind of the free-form era. When that went off the air, KROQ was around for a while and went away for a while. Look, the standard AM/FM stations were just, by ’74, they were just hopeless. I mean, you heard what you heard.

Scram: To quote the biographical statement you gave Brendan Mullen for the We Got the Neutron Bomb LA punk book: “FM radio sucked. Everything was either paid-by-the-note prog shite, downer-fueled heavy metal or kozmik kowboys Eagles krap. This was 1975.”

Don: That’s pretty much the way it was.

Scram: At about what time did free-form FM radio begin to die in this town?

Don: (long pause, Waller’s face contorts into baroque angles suggestive of thought) About 1972, for sure it was dead. You started with B. Mitchell Reid and Tom Donahue doing KPPC out of that church in Pasadena. That was where it started and that was just it. They did six hours, three hours of each, before it became a full-time station. I was still in high school, so this hadda be about ’68, ‘69. There was a great poster I wish I had, which said, “What kind of person listens to KPPC?” and had a picture of Jimi Hendrix. I think they did a couple like that, but that one was the best. Then there was KLOS and KMET as yer big FM powerhouses, but they gradually got corporatized, and there were strikes and stuff like that. Occasionally you could listen to weird shit on the radio. I remember the Credibility Gap on KRLA, and I can also remember Radio Free Oz, with the Firesign Theatre guys on KPPC. Johnny Otis’s show used to be on Sunday night on one of the FM stations. He used to have Shuggie [Otis] on, and they’d play with people. KUSC, before it went Classical, used to have student bloc programming, and there was this guy named "Memory" Lane Quigley who played nothing but '50s-type oldies, which was kinda cool. This was before American Graffiti came out. I remember listening to that in college. Rock 'n’ roll wasn’t that old, so, like in the mid-'60s when the Beatles came out, on Memorial Day weekend they’d have these Million Dollar Weekends where they’d play the library of gold hits. You’d hear the Five Satins doing “In the Still of the Night,” or the Flamingos' “I Only Have Eyes For You” and go, “What the fuck was that? That was a great record.” There was also the Wolfman. I just discovered him one night. Really early on, he was playing Lightnin’ Hopkins and Big Mama Thornton. Later, he got into more contemporary R&B, but it was still great. And his act was just fuckin’ great. By ’74, this shit has all but vanished.

Scram: Tell us about the founding of Back Door Man. Who were the people involved?

Don: Okay, Phreddie called me up one day and said, "I wanna start a magazine and I wanna call it Back Door Man.” I was living in Carson at the time, and I said, “Yeah. Good. Let’s get D.D. Faye to write for it.” She was my girlfriend, and she could write. “Let’s get Bob Meyers”—‘cause he lived around the corner from me when I was a kid, and I still knew him and I knew he could write. We both wanted our pal Tom Gardner and the Underwoods, too. That was the original hard-core staff. We’d met the Underwoods when Phreddie and I taught an extension class at UCLA. Liz had a bunch of vintage photos and fancied herself a photographer. Don was just a funny, cool guy. In retrospect, I miss Don Underwood’s voice in the later issues. He was a big champion of Roxy Music and Eno and weird stuff like that. There was a whole horrible falling-out early on with all that.

Scram: Was it over the direction of the magazine?

Don: No, it was more of a personality conflict. There were issues of responsibility and who’s doing what, etc, etc. Certain people weren’t happy with Liz, and they were a package. Stones were thrown and stones were thrown back. But that was the original crew and that’s how it came together. Phreddie typed it over at El Camino College and that’s why those first issues were just rife with fuckin’ errors! Spelling errors, grammar, all that stuff. It was very much a learn-by-doing kind of experience for us. I mean, none of us were journalism majors; none of us had worked for newspapers. Or anything.

Scram: What kind of local rock press did L.A. have in those days?

Don: I think the L.A. Free Press had just about folded. There really wasn’t any. The Times didn’t do much with the local scene. There wasn’t much happening. Let’s review: At the time, the Whisky was closed for a coupla years. The Roxy was running this “El Grande de Coca Cola” musical thing in there. The only way you could get into the Starwood doing originals was if you had a record deal. Most of the time, it was Quiet Riot doing their Slade act or something like that. There was no club to play per se. If you were doing original material, there weren’t a lot of places to play. Local radio wasn’t giving anything out.

Scram: There wasn’t any local scene for the magazine to support.

Don: There wasn’t much of anything. You could rent a union hall, say Mr. and Mrs. Joe Blow are gonna get married and you bring in a band. (pauses to consider)… Yeah. Yeah. It was a wasteland.

Scram: What was to be the point of the magazine, then?

Don: Well, we just thought the other magazines all sucked. We got really tired of ‘em all. Our goal was to write about music we cared about in a way we wanted to write about it. Nobody was saying anything about anything we cared about, so we thought we should do this ourselves. It was just frustration, I think.

Scram: I’ve had problems with printers over content. Did BDM?

Don: Yeah! We switched printers a coupla times, partly over rates, partly over who would do it. Most people didn’t want to bother with something that small. I remember that, after the last issue, the printer didn’t want to do it, and I think it was ‘cause of that shot in the back where all the one-liners are, where the girl's clutching that latex dress. We took that out of a magazine called The Lure of Latex or something like that. We did that as a center spread. It’s nothing revealing really, just suggestive. They said, “We don’t want this. We don’t like this. We don’t want the language.” I remember going down there in a suit to talk to people, saying, “C’mon, man, this is a money deal. We’re willing to pay. You can increase the price from what the previous printer was charging.” The manager of this place said, “No, we don’t wanna do it.” What can you say? The last two issues had foldouts in ‘em, for God’s sake. What good is that? The Johnny Rotten foldout is really good, and the flip of that, where D.D. does the reportage from the Winterland show with the Sex Pistols was the best thing we ever did. It’s a really good piece. I also liked the way that, when we got it in from D.D., we said, “Why typeset it? Let’s just shoot these pages with the editorial notes in the margins and all across." I thought that was the best piece of art direction I did. I’m very happy with that.

Scram: What was the record company gravy train like in those days?

Don: Probably richer than it’s been in the last three months. There were things like, say, when Ram Jam played the Starwood on the strength of “Black Betty.” Nobody wanted to go see ‘em, so Pat Siciliano, the publicist, ordered buckets and buckets and buckets of Pioneer Chicken. There were unlimited tabs, if you can believe that. We were never as abusive as some people were. Maybe there were some nights when Phreddie or somebody might’ve abused a tab. We would ask for multiple tickets, like all six of us needed to get in. Or eight, or whatever the fuck. Nobody gave a shit. There was certainly a lot of largesse back then, but we were so naïve! If I knew then what I know now! We didn’t loot ‘em. The people and companies who took out ads really liked, or pretended to like, what we were doing for their acts. It was all good publicity and all good. We actually did refuse certain advertising for acts we didn’t like, which was really dumb as shit. When Casablanca was running that ad for Angel [Punky Meadows’ cutie-pie '70s metal act whose White Hot (1975) was a stoner favorite and critic’s despair], we told them we hate that fuckin’ band. What the fuck were we thinking?

Scram: Probably of all the “sell-out” letters you’d get.

Don: At the end, we didn’t get a lot of letters because we started making fun of everybody in the letters so viciously that they’d never write in. Which was stupid! We’d take the hate mail and trash it. And if you didn’t hate us, we’d make fun of you, too.

Scram: What was performer access like in those days?

Don: Pretty good. When Patti Smith played the Whisky that was the first time we went backstage there. She played for a bunch of people who didn’t give a fuck. She was the opening act for some fucking band I can’t remember. There weren’t a lot of people there, but we went every night. It was amazing. We went back and hung out with her and Lenny Kaye. She emboldened us and encouraged us a great deal. We were The Press. We were always on the list at the Starwood, for example, and they made their money because we drank like fools. Part of that was because Eddie Nash owned it. Y’know who I’m talking about?

Scram: Tell me.

Don: Eddie Nash was the guy who was implicated in those Wonderland Murders [A particularly sordid affair involving racketeering, drug dealing and the 1981 beating deaths of four people in a “highly secured” house in Laurel Canyon; the bloody handprint of porn star John Holmes was found at the scene, but he was acquitted and the case remains unsolved.] He owned the Starwood, the Odyssey, the Seven Seas and a few other clubs in town. It was fucking organized crime, mostly a front for drug dealing. We’re talking Tony Soprano now.

Remember, things were a lot cheaper then. Tickets were a lot cheaper. There was no restricted parking. You could park for free in West Hollywood and walk up to the Whisky. Even if you got hosed for the ticket and hosed for drinks, you still could do it. We were big Iggy Pop fans and would hang out on the fuckin’ street for two hours waiting for the Whisky’s doors to open. We ate copious amounts of marijuana brownies and lots of white crosses too. Lids were ten bucks.

Scram: How was distribution?

Don: Of the publication? Well, originally we just sold it in local record stores, then we did a lot of mail order to stores across America. The last several issues, I think we were distributed by Jem, the import retailer that also handled Bomp! and that kind of stuff. Everything with a $1 cover price was distributed by Jem. A lot of people wrote in for subs. Remember, there was no MTV, no Internet, no way to get this stuff around, so it was all word of mouth. We tried to get into all the big record stores like Tower, or certain record stores in Cleveland, Boston or wherever.

Scram: Did you initially design it as a local magazine?

Don: No. We wanted to cover the local scene, because somebody should. The local scene shifted from the kind of bands playing hall parties in the South Bay to the Runaways, the glitter scene, stuff up here in the city. I covered Kim Fowley’s “New Wave Night” or whatever the fuck it was called at the Whisky, which was just (puckers) horrible. Kim just let whoever showed up first get up on stage. Don’t tell me that the Germs were a great band. They were horrible.

Scram: There’s still a rather silly personality cult around Darby Crash.

Don: Yeah… I’ll just say that that was a load of shite. The music was shite; Darby was a load of shite. I’ve talked about this before. I can remember where I was when Darby died. I was sitting in our apartment over in West L.A. and we’d eaten all these mushrooms and we were waiting for Charlotte Caffey to get there. It was a rainy Sunday night and Charlotte comes in and says, “Darby’s dead” and we just all started laughing.

Scram: At what point did you start putting out records?

Don: We did two singles by the Pop, one single by the Zippers and the one Imperial Dogs single that came out after the band had already broken up. Back Door Man Records was a joint venture of me, Tom Gardner and Gregg Turner. We did those four singles and then dissolved it. Twelve fuckin’ years later or something like that, Dave Laing in Australia calls Ken Barnes, who’s like this real avid record collector, and says he really likes the Imperial Dogs single, and Ken tells him the guy who made it is sitting in the next office! Dave talked to me and I said I had a bunch of other shit on tape. I picked the stuff I liked and sent it down there and we put that record out.

Scram: From a pure vibe standpoint, compare the L.A. scene then to that of today.

Don: Well, it’s different. Certainly there’s a lot more media out there. There’s the Internet. Fanzines, lots of ‘em. The clubs are kind of weird, because L.A.’s in kind of a downward spiral right now. Look at all the fuckin’ tribute bands and shit. There’s not one band that’s broken out of L.A. recently. Back in the '80s, you had Van Halen, X, the Go-Gos, the Bangles, the Blasters, the Minutemen. All different kinds of music and the clubs were hoppin’. How can Silver Lake be so happening when there’s only two fuckin’ places to play? And you can’t put twenty-one decent bands on in a week? To me, the scene is very fragmented here in L.A. They don’t like this, won’t go see that. And the dance music scene has been bad, ‘cause it’s really cheap to hire a DJ. That was a problem back in the '70s too, y’know, when the whole disco thing came in. It’s gotta be healthier overall, because of the support systems. But I go out a lot and there’s nobody for whom I’d say “You just gotta see these people or set yourself on fire.” Maybe I’m just too far from the street, but I don’t see it.

Scram: I get around quite a lot and can say that there’s no there out there. Nobody’s talking about anything going on.

Don: Certainly it’s easier to make a record nowadays. We never had rehearsal spaces. If things would’ve happened a little later, because I walked away from music at a certain point, I didn’t play anymore. If I knew that a punk revolution was gonna come in two years and change the world, I would have stayed at it. By then, people were paying me more money to write about music than to play it.

Scram: That’s still the same.

Don: And I wouldn’t have to split it up four ways at the end of the night. I had a career at that point. Phreddie is a club DJ and does liner notes and obits, and he worked at Warner-Chappell music publishing in New York and ran record stores and stuff like that. D.D. is teaching ESL classes at Santa Monica College and Glendale. She’s got a Master’s in Linguistics. Tom sells food to restaurants and plays guitar with Paul Therrio from the Imperial Dogs in a band called the Wig Titans. They’re good. Gregg formed the Angry Samoans and wrote for Creem, but he teaches math these days. Oh yeah, he makes records with the Bloodrained Cows. But I’m the one person who really became a pro writer out of the whole thing.

Scram: How much did Lester Bangs wind up influencing the style and editorial direction of BDM?

Don: Oh, well, Lester was a great influence. I’d stand up on the bar and shout that. Also people like John Mendelsohn, y’know, whose work was really good. Personally, the biggest single influence on my writing was Nik Cohn. His Rock from the Beginning, I read in 1969. I got it out of the library; I was a poor kid. I never read anything I agreed with so much. I loved the way he told the stories. He’s the person that I stole the most from. Everyone else is secondary, tertiary or worse. Lester and the whole Creem thing was a big influence on us. Other people were more influenced by R. Meltzer than I was. Maybe Gregg Turner. We were also influenced by Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor.

Scram: What was the origin of the inside back cover ad in issue # 3 that has Kim Fowley soliciting a girlfriend?

Don: He paid for it.

Scram: Was he serious?

Don: I can only guess at his motivation. I think it’s obvious. (laughter). I’ve always thought of Kim as an eccentric uncle. He’s very funny when he’s not talking about his own projects. When he’s talking about his own stuff, its just bullshit on bullshit. I would watch him work the phones and come up with weird slang and say things like “Gram Parsons is just a guy who knew a lot of George Jones B-sides.” He’s a pig. I really must say that. A lot of women find him disgusting.

Scram: So I keep hearing. Quite. There was some controversy about racial jokes in BDM.

Don: That’s more later as people looked back on it. I think that was Chris Stigliano, who has that fanzine out of Pittsburgh, Black To Comm. He did a piece on BDM a few years ago and didn’t talk to anyone involved. He just did what Chris does, which is spin his own interpretation of events, which I suppose is what any writer does. Somehow this came to my attention and I wrote him back a long letter, trying to clear up errors and misconceptions. The remark “David Bowie, I hope you O.D. on Afro Sheen” is a reaction to Young Americans. It was a joke. I mean, Bowie’s face was pasted onto Sly Stone’s body on that picture. There were a lot of bad things happening in black music then. I’ll say this. Me and Bob Meyers went to see P-Funk play the Forum on the Mothership Connection tour. Bootsy Collins was the opening act. There were 18,000 people at the Forum, and sixteen other people besides me and Bob were white. I know. I counted us. If you’re lookin’ at James Brown or P-Funk, you think, “What the fuck is Donna Summer?” A lot of that stuff was pretty bad. Why listen to the Bee Gees when you can listen to Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding or P-Funk? The jokes we made were sex jokes or homosexual jokes or racist jokes. It wasn’t like we weren’t going to make fun of David Cassidy just because his dad got burnt to a crisp. We made fun of Johnny Winter (“Albino more of his records after hearing this.”) and the Eagles (“Pissing and moaning about the good life is uncalled for.”)—all classic stuff. Just take it in context. Nowadays, in my own stuff, I don’t do that kind of stuff unless it’s put in the mouth of a very stupid character. I love The Boondocks comic strip. Aaron McGruder’s very good, but he’s in the community. He’s a black person writing about black people for black people, so he can get away with saying all kinds of stuff. If I were to go on Comedy Central with that stuff, I don’t know if I’d get away with it. I’d have to prove my bona fides first. I just don’t feel like having to explain the jokes. (sighs, very tired) I think it was somewhat of a different time.

Scram: How did you get contributors?

Don: People came to us. Lisa Fancher. Bangs and Meltzer might’ve been solicited. The only person we paid was Meltzer, who asked for thirty-five bucks. It says so in the piece. Lester did it for free, ‘cause he was prolific and he liked us. We never really reached out to anyone.

Scram: At what point did BDM begin to get noticed nationally?

Don: Pretty quickly. Around about the time we did the Runaways stuff, we started getting new orders. We were written up in Bomp! and some of the other fanzines. I’ve got some of those.

Scram: What ended the magazine?

Don: The aforementioned printer problems, also we were only getting 50% from distributors. We didn’t make as much money when we went national as we got when we self-distributed. Also, people had kind of gotten into their own thing. D.D. was busy managing the Zippers. Phreddie was busy being Phreddie. I was working at Radio & Records back then, a day job that was pretty time-consuming. A sense of frustration set in. Slash came along and was very popular. It was all new and had no history. Slash was like the biggest little small-town newspaper. It was this small community that all had their pictures and records in there and all wrote about each other and was one big clusterfuck. We were kind of scrupulous about avoiding that kind of conflict of interest. We thought we were a national magazine and not a fanzine (laughs). We thought, “We’re dreaming if we think this is gonna change the world.” Of course it did, twenty years later, but that’s another story. But it was pretty hard to compete with what was going on. Today, the standard rap goes: “First there was the Ramones, then the Sex Pistols, then Nirvana!” There was like fourteen fuckin’ years or somethin’ between the Sex Pistols and Nirvana! The Pixies, the Minutemen, Camper Van Beethoven didn’t happen? No indie rock, no punk rock, no Sonic Youth, no Black Flag? Nothin’ happened?

Scram: One can almost understand ignorance of textbook history, given the shitty state of education, but ignorance of history you’ve lived through?

Don: Not all of them have lived through it, but basically that’s the thing. There’s Punk Rock Mach I, which is what you find on the Nuggets box, which is kids in garages wanting to be the Yardbirds and the Stones. Punk Rock Mach II is pretty much what the Ramones produced. A different style of punk rock, which is still around in a weird form nowadays. Half of it is the come-join-our-gang shit, which is all just done to sell skateboard wear. Then there’s a segment of it that’s a little more committed. Punk rock is like suburban blues, it’s a little like Muddy Waters, the same themes rehashed with little differences. Suburban frustration. I don’t have a problem with it, and I can’t tell some thirteen-year-old kid who’s getting drunk for the first time or losing their virginity that this is not a valid aesthetic experience. Sit there and say music hasn’t been any good since Buddy Holly died? Fuck you! Music is better than ever now because there’s more new shit to listen to and there’s always the old shit to listen to and any old shit you haven’t heard is new to you.

Paul Vanase: Inside The World Of Baby Bones
Interview by Robert Dayton from Scram Magazine #22

I was on tour with my act Canned Hamm in Philadelphia. On one rare off night we were over at Tom of the record label Siltbreeze’s home listening to his primo collection of vanity pressings and other ephemera. At least I think it was Tom’s pad in Philly, there was a lot of beer haze. I do remember that sometime somewhere one record stood out amongst all the other curios for its’ hard to miss “IT” factor.  This record had a black and white cover adorned simply with the hand drawn bubble letters “Paul Vanase in The World Of Baby Bones.” On the back cover were photos of this moustachioed man dynamically performing in lame, glitter stars on his nipples, makeup adorning his cue ball head. Who was this guy???? The copy loudly proclaimed “Baby Bones Is Here! Cosmic Spunk Is..Disco-Caba-Rock!” When the record played we knew that its’ self-described pastiche catch phrase couldn’t begin to describe the larger than life nature, a nature that naturally should be stature to match its’ grandure. Oh Lord. The song “Sticking Needles In Paper Doll Eyes” was delightfully and giddily disturbing, it made me want to dance around the room like Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?” This tarnished glam with its’ strongly minced theatrical vocal fabulousness and aggressive ivory tinkling was difficult to forget. Fast forward a few years later, Canned Hamm was on tour playing LA. On an off night we were over at Gregg of the record label Amarillo’s home listening to his primo collection of vanity pressings and other ephemera… and so it goes…

I was lucky enough to have been given a copy of “Baby Bones” from Scram editrix Kim Cooper due to much pleading on my part. Turns out she had found an inexplicable bounty of 25 copies in a thrift shop!

There was no denying the alluring mystery of this record and the pull that it had on me. Such records can be like that, records that seem to encompass their own identity, that come out of nowhere, well, somewhere but it’s a time and place that seems distant, records that shine out from the mire waiting to be plucked, some made more mysterious through their low budget black and white covers and their most decidedly non-major label status.

Whilst strolling through a Klaus Nomi Yahoo group one day I asked if anyone had any info on this Paul Vanase as he and the Nomi seemed to share certain commonalities. I honestly thought that I was grasping at straws as I had found very little info on the world wide web about him. My asking for info was a dim, near random hope.  Yet through my posting weeks later, shock of shocks, Paul’s own boyfriend contacted me.  Not too long after that I heard from Paul himself! This was exciting news! I truly didn’t expect that I would be able to locate such a man. All is fine and tickled pink! Paul Vanase currently resides in Las Vegas after residing in LA and, prior to that, New York City for many years.  The following interview with him was conducted through various e mail conversations during December 2005 and January 2006. Gentle readers, I must advise you to brace yourself for this interview’s tone, rendered in three sessions,  as we will be floating in The World Of Baby Bones, brace yourself then relax and cast yourself adrift into this unique sphere.

PART ONE:

RD: Your album has turned up in far flung geographical locales.
Vanase: After sparkling in the gutter glitter theatre and rock scenes how appropriate to end up in thrift stores coast to coast. My audience loves trash lol.

RD: Would you know why dozens of your albums have turned up in individual caches in thrift stores in LA several years apart?
Vanase: It seems to be timed to my moving about LA.

RD: What else have the musicians on the album done?
Vanase: Who knows.

RD: My copy says “Special Collectors Edition”- were there other editions?
Vanase: The first album prints for Baby Bones were the collector ones, the rest ran without the special words on it.

RD: The record says 1975 and 1978, why is that?
Vanase: Some of the songs were written in 1975 and some in 1978, and some from my Broadway show "Wonderful Woman."

RD: How many copies were there?
Vanase: There were 5000 pressed if i recall.

RD:Tell me more about the Baby Bones stage show.
Vanase: Every now and then i make comebacks and give a new twist and sample of Baby Bones to the new generation that looks in wonder. My stage show was summed up by one critic, “A trendy new trend encompassing all the pop, camp, neo-dada and hypersexuality of the  broadway and glitter rock scenes rolled into one.” I was an audiovisual fling with decadence. We gave sleeze a bad name lol. It was like a troupe of high school brats weaned on too many hustler magazines and rocky horror picture shows presenting an extravaganza under the direction of the marquis de sade.

RD: What exactly was the character of Baby Bones?
Vanase: Baby bones was a cosmic cartoon kinda character changing costumes and moods every minute to create various results.

RD: How was the Baby Bones character different than you?
Vanase: He isn't.

RD: When you toured the show where did you take it?
Vanase: Yes, i toured the Baby Bones show in Boston at the Rat, Philadelphia, Provincetown, Fire Island, Virginia, Rhode Island, the Catskills and a homecoming in my hometown in Connecticut which they were not ready for.  When NewYorkCity had nothing happening i would sneak out and take the show on the road.

RD:What types of venues would you play?
Vanase: We took the show to just about every top night club in nyc including at that time the Copa Cabana, Max's Kansas Vity, Hurrahs, Studio 54, we were a house band at CBGBs playing there lots.

RD: It seems like you could have one foot in and one foot out of a multitude of scenes, am I correct in that assumption?
Vanase: The purpose was to bone all kinds of audiences from punk rockers to disco bunnies to sophisticated broadway and cabaret audiences. We just glitterized the populace wherever we performed. All the music was original so where we played didn't matter. We just couldn't play copy tune venues and lounges. In the punk clubs id start the show as a heavy rocker long hair and rip the long hair off and expose my skinhead and put slashes of blue on my eyes it was time to indulge in a cosmic orgy of boner music.

RD: Does anyone approach you today about Baby Bones?
Vanase: Only New Yorkers and LA people who want to be in a new show, or if i'm out and about in lame.

RD: Tell me about your love of lame.
Paul: I loved the lame, esp silver...it’s so bright and shiny.  i wore it in all my shows.  My favorite full body jumpsuit was made out of this wild latex material that was coated with gold lame and cut down to the crotch.  Others showed tits, I bared my navel.  It was the closest to being fully naked on stage. It was like wearing a playtex living glove.

RD: How much lame did/do you own?  
Vanase: Enough to fill a broadway stage.

RD: Do you still wear silver lame?
Vanase: Only to the Miss America 2006 pageant.  It’s the first glamorous affair Las Vegas has hosted.

RD: Vegas must be a goldmine for lame! I hear that the thrifting there is amazing!  
Vanase: Not really, LA is still the thrifting mecca unless you are into old casino uniforms.

RD: What exactly is the song “Sticking Needles through Paper Doll Eyes” about?
Vanase: It's about my childhood.

RD: I notice that there’s a song called “Broken Chances 2” on your album. Was there a song entitled “Broken Chances 1”?
Vanase: Yes, it was much slower with a haunting melody.

RD: Did you release any other records?
Vanase: We did a 45 rpm called “electroshock me baby”- very headbanging scream.

RD: You had also told me that you were picking up master tapes of some recordings! What recordings are these?
Vanase: I have master tapes for a whole new opera, I’m working on getting cds made and doing a babybone show in vegas at the Onyxxx theatre. It will have a lot of video and art I’ve created also intertwined in the production. I’ve been asked to DJ at the liberace museum- now that could be an interesting event lol. More later I’m off to Planet Hollywood where I now work. Also I work at Luxor, I’m in the Attractions and Entertainment dept. We have Carrot Top and Dame Edna right now with Hairspray opening in Feb. It will be fun to see Harvey Fierstein since we both go back to the Glines Theatre. I remember I was doing “Glamour Glory and Gold.” I took over Robert De Niro’s role cuz he was going to Hollywood to do Taxi Driver talk about years ago lol.  I opened the Glines Theatre with my show “A Drop In The Pudding”, a gay morality play.  When I left nyc for hollywood Harvey worked with John Glines on his show. OK I’m off for now.

PART TWO:
(Before the next interview session happened I was contacted by one Richard Holm. He found me through the exact same posting that I had made on the Nomi group where Paul’s boyfriend had found me! Richard’s e mail was most informative. He wrote, “Paul was one of the leading gay-glam actors/singers in NY of the late 1970's and was part of the scene that included the Cockettes, Brenda Bergman, Candy Darling, Divine and Jackie Curtis....

He was Robert DeNiro's understudy in an early off-off-Broadway play and then produced several musicals - culminating in Wonder Woman...

I was fortunate enough to camp-out on his sofa when I first went to NYC (we both went to the same high school in CT).  Baby Bones was more than a 'vanity album' - since there were no commercial opportunities for obviously gay acts at that time - everyone self-produced.  I produced his Electroshock single, but his standout work was 'Sticking Needles through Paper Doll Eyes'. He had lots of gigs in the punk/glam scene at the time and he got some airplay - so it was definitely more than just a vanity pressing...

My personal favorite memory of Paul was the night that he took over the role in "Women Behind Bars" that Fanny Fox originated at the Truck and Warehouse on E. 4th Street.... The show featured Divine who always took her final stage bows dressed in the gown she made famous in 'Pink Flamingos'.  Well, Paul had found a fabulous second-hand baby blue gown that was even better than Divine's and, since he took his stage bow first, stole the show in his 'more-than-divine' gown...  so when Divine finally came out for her bows - there was nothing more than polite applause....

Paul was fired before he even left the stage... but he had made his point...

Paul moved to LA in the 80's and I haven't heard anything since but its great that people have re-discovered him...”

With the arrival of that delightful e mail our next interview started ecstatically:)

RD: Paul, this fellow named Richard Holm emailed me and he wants to contact you.
Vanase: Wow, i can’t believe you found Rich, he knows the baby bone saga as he was my right hand man and the most wonderful friend i love and have missed for years thinking he was lost in a mist. I can’t wait till I tell him my new album is ready to go. I smell a creative juice. If you get his email or phone please forward it to me and vice versa, we need to make an obscure new film. Since I’ve been in hollywood my expertise lends itself toward that mode. Well i’m more than excited. You should write my biography and I have lots of connections in the publishing field after writing episodes of Fantasy Island with my other producer Charlene Keel. She brought me to la to do my rock opera “Cosmic Spunk” at the odyssey theatre. Those were the days- the mayor Tom Bradley came to see my midnite premiere,  the Oingo Boingo Danny and the go mickey Toni Basil  protege Janet Roston got my show up and running,  all helped my endeavors.  Oh yeah, “Torch Song Trilogy” was Harvey Fiersteins’ show that John Glines produced after i left nyc. Not bad, huh?  

RD: What caused you to move to LA? Was it to do the “Cosmic Spunk” opera?
Vanase: My agent shipped me to LA to open my new opera “Cosmic Spunk” in ‘82 maybe.  LA was ready for something different....
LA people know of Baby Bones and Club Fuck and The Ass Club. Baby Bones did lots of raves in the late 90’s.  The Weekly gave it hot pick of the week in their music picks. That stage show featured a costume for every song with so many props that the stage caught fire one night- a stuffed dog poodle got accidentally placed on a floorlamp lol oops. We dedicated our shows to things such as rain, Paris, and ants that went marching one by one.

RD: What is the Cosmic Spunk world?
Vanase: Cosmic Spunk was a new wave shock rock opera that opened to rave reviews,  a double page welcome in the LA Times announced the shockido, my new wave haircut at the time.  It was my Babybones spit curl in pink, sometimes blue.  The show ran for months.  The Sheiks of Shock backed up the insanity.  Guest stars were Darlene Love (of Phil Spector fame), Zelda Rubinstein (the Poltergeist lady), Rita Jenrette (the Wilbur Mills White House steps concubine).  I was then on the TV show "The Book Of Lists" with Bill Bixby, Leslie Uggums and Ruth Buzzi.  That’s where I found my good fairy LA Weekly founder and editor Cindy Randall. Then my producer Charlene Keel was doing the series "Rituals" and she suggested I write for TV.  Which led to my writing for “Fantasy Island.”  Herves' ranch was at my disposal.

RD: You co-wrote episodes of "Fantasy Island?" Whaaaat? Tell me more!
Vanase: I ghosted scripts for my producer, Charleene Keel, for 2 seasons.  

RD: Do you have any anecdotes about working with Divine? Jackie Curtis? The Cockettes?  It seems like an interesting exciting scene sprang up from that period that you were very much a large part of.  
Vanase: Anecdotes by the millions..  do you mean who was sleeping with who or quality entertainment at its’ best? divine was divine, i wasn’t eating no dog shit. It seemed you had to eat shit to be a star in those days. Jackie Curtis was flying high as usual and never changed her panty hose, he was a brilliant writer and I was blessed being on stage every night with the Warhol elite. The Cockettes arrived in nyc and I found myself in some limo going to the jungle putting dresses on over our combat boots. Anyone could be a cockette you just needed the --------- etc lol. I was hanging with Ruth Truth and Roller Rina in the angeles of light posse.  nyc had Charles Ludlum and Hot Peaches in the spotlight. During that time i was covered in glitter during that minute. I remember having to go to the local corner store to buy 3 gallons of homogenized milk so Candy Darling could take her infamous milk baths. More in a minute, I gotta go to the fashion mall.

(Natch, the interview had to take a break and that’s understandable as good fashion is important, especially when it is from a mall that caters to such needs, we resume-ONE WEEK LATER- like nothing happened though something must have happened, something like fashion purchases!)

PART THREE:

RD: A new Baby Bones show? Wow! Will you be performing live with a band? Is the music operatic? Or is it an opera in theme? What’s the theme of the new opera? Can you give away any tantalizing details?
Vanase: More. All i have to do is take my master tapes to the studio and turn them into vinyl or cd. The new album is textured opera music that ranges from hard rock to industrial opera if ever there was. The theme is searching for lost combat boots while sitting in a past circle. The opera takes place in circles of color past, present, and future; sort of a man of la mancha gone astray. There’s a psychedelic fly that lands and under its’ wings protrudes a me me fashion show all done in silhouettes of chartreuse green. Other details include a Bonnie and Clyde gangster scene ala 1920s flapper. The song “Bring Me Back My Dixie” is honky tonk cabaret .

RD: Tell me more about the new recordings.
Vanase: I feel like i’m gonna end up like Edith Massey The Egg Lady, running an antique store in Silverlake someplace where fans will come, sort of like a pilgrimage to view past decadence. So i should gild my combat boots silver and begin act one and create the 06 scene lol. The new album was created live in the backroom of a famous sex club in Silverlake la. I would arrive at 3 am and musicians would be everywhere plugging in wires and kinda pushing me outta the way. When they finally got set up they would hand me a mic and begin playing live and i created the melody lines and words. Along with my producer Leon we labeled the sessions from a to z so there’s 26 live sessions from the studio. I remixed the best takes and created the story line and i think only I understood where the concept was being developed into. Bands like Ethyl Meatplow and Drance and Sean De Lear and X and The Cramps even Sade visited the studio. Even Johnny Depp was around. It was the la underground scene lol.

RD: When was all of this done?
Vanase: The new stuff was created late 90s while i was running the ASS club in la. We were featured in National geographic as a tribe like culture of people. Now find that one in your excellent investigative exposes lol. The new album is created live- so live it took hours to edit. There’s so much material on it, choosing the songs was kinda mind blowing. The cast will be spontaneous and whoever is in the now will become the apparent cast. I love to cast people who are themselves already and just need a bit of fine tuning.
   
RD: When did you DJ in LA?
Vanase: I’ve djed every club in la from the early 90s till 2001 then i became a recluse and resurfaced 4 years later in vegas. I was offered an airline job yesterday so ill be able to fly around and glitterize america and all its foreign ports. You decide: coffee tea or baby bones. It’s all insane wild and wonderful and i’m just waiting to land into the hearts of all who need a touch of glitz to their lives.

RD: Anything else you want to add?
Vanase: There will be a last question I’m sure. I love digging into my past and pulling people out of the woodwork. Your excitement brought friends back into my life i thought were dead. And I also found out some were actually dead and that was sad. But it’s like a 25 year gap so i send out love to Charlene Keel my producer, Marcos my guy who got me my first dj  job, Mark Mullhal my video producer, and Robert who picked up on a babybone whim and wrote an article that got me off my butt and back into the studio. Oh yeah, i can’t forget Dane who answered the yahoo posting, who brought us together and started this whole event, and Kim who has a great mag for this kinda stuff. That's all for now,  thanks, Paul

(Paul has recently sent me a postscript/life scoop telling me, “I got a job at Wynn las vegas in the entertainment dept. I’ll be working the shows “La Reve and Avenue Q and the new Bette Midler Theatre, too. I guess that’s why i love vegas. It’s fast furious and back in show biz lol. Now that’s up to the minute, Paul.”)

** 

GET YOUR OWN SLAB OF BABY BONES WAX! Original sealed vinyl copies of "Paul Vanase in the World of Baby Bones" from the Los Feliz Goodwill Store stash can still be yours, but we have a very limited number left. Contact us to inquire.

Thanks to Sharpeworld for the link.

Visit Charlene Keel's Tantalizing Tales.