I Double Dog Dare You To...

On a recent Thursday I was invited to guest DJ at Fusion, the weekly nightclub endeavor created by Michael Blue, Lewis Walden and Nikki Rivera, three DJs of merit who can be found spinning at a variety of other venues throughout the week. My participation was in conjunction with a thematic incarnation of the smaller bar you enter first in this dual-atmosphere-providing nightspot. That front bar has presented many a wondrous theme night, and the theme I was invited to play for, tag team style with Michael Blue, was Kegger Party. I was overjoyed. To many, Kegger Party has a kind of collegiate/fraternity connotation—you know, beer bongs, goofy hats, male bonding, pledges puking in the bushes outside, etc. To me, it means something completely different, something pre-college, definitely against a parent’s better judgment, and slightly dark and forbidden. Keggers were something you had to sneak out of the house for. Most of the ones I went to took place in the outdoors, like at a lake or pond, or under a bridge, and always at night. The crowds in attendance were usually half familiar high school mates and half older guys who were strangers, older brothers, weapons enthusiasts (someone always shot their gun off in the air or at beer cans), and scary notorious tough guys with tattoos and pit bulls. Girls would flirt, pull a train in the mud if drunk enough, start crying about something or pout motionless in their boyfriend’s car or, of course, puke and sometimes fight with each other. Then the cops would come and everyone would scatter... or not. And the whole time someone’s eight-track stereo would be blasting out at a shabby, distorted volume AC/DC’s Highway to Hell over and over again. Another car full of people would be enveloped by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon for optimum bong-hit space-out. When AC/DC’s battery goes dead its replaced by “Dazed and Confused” and air guitar with jumper cables pulled from a trunk right when the solo starts. Guys shoot beer cans by jeep lights set up at a distance by their girlfriends, who now run away to the strains of ‘Cat Scratch Fever” by Ted Nugent. Someone suddenly blasts the B-52s and some tough drunk hurls a bottle, yelling, “Punk rock pussy shit... fuck you!’ You get the picture.

TEEN NOSTALGIA

Well, Michael Blue hails from the Pacific Northwest, like myself, so his overall vision of kegger parties was similar to mine and his record collection for that night spoke volumes about juvenile delinquency and chugging beer and knowing what name Heart used to go by before the Seattle-based band broke big with his favorite song by them, “Magic Man.” My selection of records hardly duplicated his, which was almost a miracle, and it said a lot about my teen years. Boasting the soundtracks to my first bong hit (Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle”), my loss of hetero virginity (Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”), my loss of homo- virginity (Van Halen’s “Jamie’s Crying”) and the last fight I had with my parents before moving out of the house (The Clash’s “Clampdown”) and my first teen suicide funeral (Lynrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird’ ‘—I know... isn’t that gross! I actually don’t own that still).

Unfortunately the planned entertainment for the evening, three-time Miss Uranus pageant loser Rena McDonald, canceled for the night, and then ever-the- spectacle Miss Jerome decided to not show up and grace the room with his lack of clothing and skinny ass, and for some reason no keg was present. Had there been a guarantee of free beer I bet the room would have been hopping but as it was, most club patrons whizzed right through the first bar in favor of the big house and techno-rave room, DJ’d by Lewis and Nikki, who were really playing well that night. Undaunted by the lack of happy rock-loving patrons, Michael and I joyously relived our formative years, taking turns spinning. We started having so much fun we stopped looking through the small window to see if anyone was hanging out in that room. It didn’t matter. We had hit the carefree level of indulging in our favorite Pink Floyd cuts. I wanted a bong hit.

Eventually I did see a burst of enthusiasm from downstairs and upon closer inspection realized it was Danielle Willis and Brigid, aka God’s Girlfriend, the couple I’d most like to see reproduce. Danielle’s one- woman show, Breakfast in ihe Flesh District, is back for another lengthy run at Climate Theatre if you haven’t seen it yet and I hear Brigid has a few secret new projects in the works also. At any rate, they’re rockers all the way and were soon in the booth with us getting stoned and diving into our record stacks with requests galore, many of which we had played already, coincidentally. But hell, we played “Smoke on the Water” four times that night. Justin Bond showed up in the booth with glowing words of appreciation for the music and a super-butch five o’clock shadow; then Jerome popped in after all, wearing real pants. It was an instant and intimate record party with a number of friends milling through. One of the loveliest visitors of the eve was the woman who tended the bar in the room we played. She came upstairs to cash out or whatever and proceeded to compliment us for the music we played all night, saying she had worked at Townsend for four years hearing nothing but house music, and rock was such a nice switch from that. Her enthusiasm had been rekindled when she and a friend went on a road trip to Vegas, fear and loathing style, and found that AC/DC, Van Halen and such was the only good music for driving real fast. Michael and I adored her instantly and felt we’d been given our finest compliment. She made the whole evening worth it.

Danielle started rambling about a plan to put subliminal messages in house music that would bum people out or suggest murdering one’s nearest neighbor to the right or left, while she begged Michael to play a sick-flick Stevie Nicks ballad, which he did. Then Danielle suggested mischievously, ‘Don, take this record into the other room and double-dare Lewis to play ‘Stop Dragging My Heart Around’ for the last cut.” Then Lewis walked in and Danielle dared him to do it but he said they were already playing the last song or he would. Oh, sure you would, Lewis!

As everyone started to drift out of the booth while I packed records up, Danielle turned to me and said, “That’s what you should write your column on, Don. Make up a bunch of dares for people.” Danielle’s a genius and that idea will be expanded upon in the future, but as it stands now, I dare all the techno house rave deep love unity funny hat-type music DJs in town to suddenly mix in Black Sabbath’s “Iron man” in the middle of a busy set just to see what happens. I double-dog dare you.

In the weekend following that Thursday night, I finally dared to visit the new monster club in town, Cyclops, for the first time. Cyclops will be featuring an appearance by Marky Mark, his only SF date, on Saturday, Feb. 13. This is a booking coup that I find almost too frightening to attend. A sea of men with the dominant shirtless gene in their DNA’s molecular structure—or a gym membership, all drooling and slavering over a bought-and-sold piece of pop flesh with a gay-positive outlook. Mark is part of the recent discovery of economists that a real and wealthy gay market is out there and they just can’t spend enough money, even during a recession, and especially if it feeds their narcissism. For every five pairs of Calvin Klein undies now sold, you can’t tell me some gay male isn’t feeling a little closer to his ideal: a beefy, boyish, masculine 20-year-old, who’s so hot he must want himself. Well, that’s next week. I went to Cyclops for something else: Drag Queens.

“DOLLS” CAST AT CYCLOPS

The cast of Phillip R. Ford’s Dolls, opening soon with the gala premiere set for the same night Marky Mark will create an orgy of gay shame the likes of which SF hasn’t seen since B.B. Jane was extended, previewed a couple of musical numbers for the Cyclops crowd. This took place in one of the smaller bars away from the main disco fantasyland room, on a small stage. The cast was given a restroom with a doorperson to keep out the general patrons, a nice feature indicative of the professional respect and overall courtesy extended to the cast. It was when they hit the stage for the first number that Cyclops fucked up.

Perhaps I was too outraged over this, but when Connie Champagne sang “The Theme From the Valley of the Dolls” to a taped backing track, the tape volume started loud and just got louder, completely masking her vocal performance at a steady incline. I was infuriated by the complete lack of respect for a well-known, bona-fide local talent like Connie, whose performance was literally wasted due to a technical situation that could have been corrected by any half-wit, let alone some sound technician of apparent world-class standards at the helm of a million-dollar sound monument, wearing a Sound Factory T-shirt. I mean, c’mon, let’s get this right. It was a simple situation to produce properly and no one rose to the occasion. That’s fucked, inexcusable. The same big money that would probably stock Marky Mark’s dressing room with a harem of nubile 15-year-old girls if he asked for it, couldn’t simply host and frame a performer effectively. Lame is too nice a word. The song drew to a close with Connie yelling into the microphone. ‘Now turn the volume of that goddamned tape down!” The audience identified with her indignation with forceful cheers.

Things did even out in the sound area for the
next two numbers and from what I saw onstage,
Dolls stand to be an epic and glamorous production. Get
your tickets now—it looks like Phil Ford has done it again. He’s inimitable and when he waltzed into the dressing room afterward and joined some cast members and journalists sitting on the floor smoking pot, he smiled, dragged on his cigarette and said, “Sound Factory... you mean Horror Factory,” letting loose with that high- pitched cackle. Over his shoulder I saw a buffed guy wearing a tight one-piece lace-up-the-front body suit from International Male. Phil continued. “No, I guess they did what they could.”

The cast dissipated and we chose to take a look at the rest of the club. There was one lounge with some huge video screens playing some great and weird old bondage and spanking footage, which was cool, and the big room really does have spectacular sound quality and a great mirror ball constellation. The door people were quite courteous and treated people well, and the lighting was innovative and plentiful. The crowd was benign, beautiful in that chest-implant-for-men way, and somewhat mixed. Girl-about-town and one heck of a music writer these days in The Press, Gina Hall escorted us to the VIP lounge for a look. The small room looks out over the big dance floor through glass, which is neat, like being a princess or something.

Then came the big laugh for the evening, the crowning glory for my inner juvenile delinquent. Standing there with a couple of friends, I noticed a guy with a white baseball cap walk into the room. He looked around, walked toward us and asked the person to my right, “Have you guys seen Harry de Wildt in here?” Not knowing who that pretentious socialite pal of Herb Caen’s was, unfamiliar with that certain Mr. Fag who gets chauffeured around in that fancy white car by definite Jim Gabbert-boyfriend-material-type guys, he responded, “I don’t know him.” The white cap turned to me and asked me the same question. I promptly responded, “Harry de Wildt? Yes, he crawled up my butt and died.” He turned away horrified and cleared my view of the door in time for me to witness the beginning of a fag fight, tastefully started with someone spitting in someone’s face, then both of them slapping each other in non-fisted fag fury. Pretty, but I’ve seen Catholic school girls fight tougher than that. It was a hoot though, and in a sense everyone was there... for a little while. But even alone, you could amuse yourself by shouting, “Hey, there’s Marky Mark!” and then watching how many heads would turn. *