Preparing for Austin: 1975-1984
Hawaii to Albany and back: the rubber cement years
Louis Black likes to think his Austin Chronicle discovered me working in a t-shirt shop and made me what I almost am today. But I’d been toiling in the word mines for a decade before my “Don’t You Start Me Talking” column dropped in 1985. Everything led up to that point.
I bought cocaine before I ever bought marijuana, splitting a gram with my Sunbums editor in 1975. Kate sent me to McDonald’s to order coffee, which I didn’t need because of what was in my pocket, but it came with a plastic coke spoon back then. I got it on the way to review Earth, Wind & Fire at the Waikiki Shell. I was surprised to get a backstage pass with my ticket, so I walked back there to test access- the groupie soundcheck- and security kept waving me through until I couldn’t go any further besides onstage.
After the opening act, I went backstage to the bathroom, and sat inside a stall to snort the coke, when all of a sudden a swarm of people charged into the restroom. There was some yelling back and forth about getting high before the show, and then Earth, Wind and Wired went out and blew everybody away. I was high, more on the drama (and access) than the few flecks of powder I didn’t exhale onto the bathroom floor. That was the moment I decided to chase the rock and roll life.
My Sunbums glory year was over by 1976, as the mag went on hiatus, and Kate moved to the Mainland to train as a tattooist with Ed Hardy. A couple of bad years followed, as I wrote for a tourist rag called Hotlines Hawaii, owned by a couple of asshaoles in competition to nail whoever was on the cover that week. They’d host wet t-shirt contests and bill themselves as “celebrity judges,” and it worked. Hawaii was horny and high in the ‘70s- just like Austin- with Deep Throat on the marquee. Love wasn’t free like in the ‘60s, but it was cheap, with enough to go around for even me.
I had a fling with the Hotlines art director Pam, in her early 30s, who had lots of cool stories about living in NYC with legendary rock photographer Bob Gruen. Bubbly and goofy like a sitcom blonde, Pam was always on the hunt for cool stuff, which wasn’t easy in Waikiki. One night she dragged me to an apartment building which used to be a hotel, so there was a little showroom with a capacity of about 200. Roughly 198 were gay males on this night when a Black woman with a shaved head sang to disco tracks and a live piano thumper. I’ve never forgotten the amazing Cheryn Gray! It was house music ten years before and the boys just lost their shit. Suddenly, Pam and I were on a date.
Unfortunately, nothing could live up to that beginning, and she moved on to Neil Abercrombie, the longhaired leftist politician who drove a Checker, and later became the governor of Hawaii. A natural gas heiress from Oklahoma, Pam had rejected that life in the ‘60s and was drawn to socialist causes.
One night, she showed up at my front door with a new boyfriend, who she introduced as a friend from her years as an anti-war demonstrator. He was a short, muscular Canadian who, instead of renting a car, bought a Corvette upon his arrival to the Islands. He had a problem, they explained. The Canadian’s brother was a marijuana wholesaler who’d been popped in Thailand, and had pounds of weed on Oahu to sell. Could I help him out?
As Albert Brooks once said, greed almost ended my life. But this gig wasn’t opening for Richie Havens in San Antonio.
We spent an entire night snipping and bagging buds from pot plants that were hanging upside down in a timeshare off the Ala Wai Canal. The Canadian gave me two pounds to try to move and I saw dollar signs. I did some math and figured that, at the rock bottom prices he was selling to me, I could walk away with $2,000. I’d never had more than $150 in my bank account my whole life.
But the dope was seedy and didn’t get you as high as primo Hawaiian bud. I sold a couple ounces to sailors in line at a pay phone in Pearl Harbor, but the veteran potheads I was counting on all turned it down. I ended up giving the paper bag and about $160 to Pam’s new boyfriend. Then she called that night. The weight was light and the Canadian was livid. “He said you owe him at least a couple hundred dollars more,” she said. Well, I didn’t steal any, I said. We bagged up the pot when it was damp and I returned it dry. The weight must’ve been water that evaporated.
“Listen,” Pam said. “[Redacted] isn’t an old friend like I said. I met him a couple weeks ago. He’s in the Canadian mob and just got out of prison.” Didn’t sound like he’d go for the evaporation theory.
Just that day I got a financial aid check for $200, after re-enrolling at the University of Hawaii. But that money wouldn’t be going to the Gordfather. Instead, I bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, where “Shanghai Kate” was working at Tattooland in East L.A. She had been enticing me with punk fanzines and Devo singles, so I took her up on the offer of a couch in her studio apartment in Pico Rivera. When Kate had male company, she’d give me a blue valium and, washed down with a beer, that would knock me right out. Better than a mob stomping.
Pico was a two-hour bus ride to the Licorice Pizza record store on the Sunset Strip, which was my home base on thrice-weekly Hollywood excursions that became weekly and then monthly. That bus ride was brutal, with the last one leaving downtown at midnight, so after punk shows I’d go to an all-night porno theater until the first bus home at 5:30 a.m.
I was living the lifestyle, so I needed a punk rock name. One morning Kate threw open the curtains and the sun was so bright she just yelled “Yikes!” And I said, ‘that’s it, Yikes! Crawford. That’s my new name.'”
Slash magazine and all the fanzines, especially Youth Party, were really influential, so when I moved back to Honolulu after the coast was clear, about five months later, I decided to put out my own fanzine. Jim Wood, the singer for the Honolulu Doggs, a great blues band, had the same idea, so we joined forces for what was originally going to be called the Oahu Lie. Jim did the cover- a close-up of a military man sweating profusely- but then left town for San Francisco, leaving me to finish it. I never liked that title, so I changed it to Honolulu Babylon, after Kenneth Anger (not his punk name!)
I slid the first issue, 12 xeroed pages, under the door of Mike Malone’s China Sea Tattoo on Smith Street, and soon he was trying out his own punk name: Rollo Banks. We were Yikes! and Rollo, the first punk publishers in Hawaii. It was 1979 and I was 23.
Rollo went right to work on the second issue, which he always referred to as the first, and drew that beautiful cover of a hula dancer in bondage. We made up a punk band called Moke Bait and wrote a big article about ourselves and our first single “The Karen Quinlan Shuffle.” Rollo’s girlfriend Kandi, a great tattooist herself, was hesitant to be part of the Babylon at first, but it turned out that her cartoon strip was one of the best things in the issue. We did a third (or second) issue pretty soon after that and then I was off to New York City with the first absolute love of my life. She was escaping a bad marriage and I was going to be a famous writer.
Donna was from Mount Vernon, New York, near the city, so she stayed with her folks. I stayed with my aunts and uncles in Suffolk County on Long Island. Our plan was to save up enough money to get an apartment together in Manhattan, but rents were outrageous, even then, about $700 for a studio.
In order to be together we took a bus to Albany to visit Donna’s cousin Tony. It looked like New York City to me, especially the area around Lark Street, where we found a studio for $190 a month. I was living off unemployment checks of $79 a week, from when I was laid off from my job as apartment complex custodian in Hawaii. So I decided to put out an Albany version of the Babylon, with more community culture content aimed at all the shops and cafes opening on Lark Street. Donna wrote a big article about the crisis hotline call center on Lark Street where she volunteered, for instance.
But I got hit with Travis Bickle Syndrome. You remember how the taxi driver took Cybil Shepherd on a date to a porno theater because that was the life he knew? I went too far with the satire and lost almost all my advertisers after the first issue.
One thing about the Babylon that was really strange was that it was really big with the gay crowd around Kuhio Boulevard. Jack at Hula’s Bar and Lei Stand and Jerry from Hamburger Mary’s were two of our full-page advertisers. For the “Terminal Issue” of the Babylon, Rollo decided that we didn’t want anyone to like us, even the gays that pay, so we went all out insulting their lifestyle. It was the Rectal Insertion issue. One ad was a telethon for colonitis, “the disco crippler,” plus we also had a report from “the Homo Olympics,” where the three-legged race was a guy running with another guy’s foot in his ass. Fist-lifting was another event. It was pretty gross and we braced for the backlash. Instead, we became local gay icons!
Jerry (or Trixie, as he liked to be called) had a secret bar in back called Dirty Mary’s, where straight people were not allowed. At all. No fruit flies. That was the Babylon’s best-selling location. I’d stop by to pick up money and the stoolies would insist on buying me drinks. I’d hear so many funny things, like one time a guy was trying to get his friend Randy’s ear and he kept being ignored, so he finally started screaming “Randy eats pussy!” and he got his attention.
Being accepted as a honorary queer in Waikiki didn’t exactly travel to the capital city of New York. When I was laying out the first Albany Lark there was a hole on one page I filled with a fake movie ad for Fists of Glory, about a decorated all-gay regiment during WWII. Albany was not amused! A group of concerned citizens visited my advertisers and got almost all of them to drop me. Me and Donna were banned from our favorite restaurant by the waitress Gigi (who would later become a good friend). “I can’t believe it’s you!” she kept saying over and over. I was called a Nazi and had a drink thrown in my face at a club. It’s not fun being a pariah, but fuck it, I was in love, and Donna stuck by me.
Things started turning around after the second issue. (I went from clueless to fearless.) I got an Albany artist named Raoul Vezina to design a new logo and he did a take-off of LOOK magazine that everybody loved. On the cover, were three notorious Lark Street drunks. Unburdened by ads, the copy flowed cohesively and knowing the town a little better I was able to poke with authority. Unfortunately, I went after J.B. Scott’s notorious co-owner Vinnie “Little Caesar” Birbiglia a little too hard, and he banned me from the best club Albany’s ever seen. U2 played the 600-capacity club on their first U.S. tour and loved it so much they came back a few months later. Before the ban, I saw B-52’s, the Specials, the Jam, Captain Beefheart, NRBQ, the Ramones and on and on.
I ended up doing five issues of the Lark, while working fulltime at Daybreak Antique Clothing on Central Avenue. David and Maureen of Daybreak were the only advertisers who didn’t flee after the first issue. I found an artist named Brad Whiting who drew great cartoons, giving the paper some needed visual deftness. Unfortunately, I drew poor, unsuspecting Brad into a visit from the Secret Service when I used his drawing of Ronald Reagan to make a crude- and illegal- joke. Doing a takeoff of the Christmas shopping countdown, it said “Only 43 more assassination days until the inauguration,” with a bullseye over the President-elect’s face.
Besides getting me in trubbs with the feds, the last issue of the Lark also introduced me to the miracle of speed. I made a little spare change writing for a paper called Metroland, but I made more money delivering it all over the Tri-City area. My partner owned a pharmacy downstate and after awhile he realized that if he gave me a black beauty (the real ones), he could head home a few hours early because I’d be delivering that shit around the clock and loving every second of it. On speed, I would constantly pull over and write whenever I had an idea. I remembered that performance-enhancing euphoria and stamina when I started writing the Austin Chronicle column.
In Albany, I also did a smaller sized publication called Mind Camp, which was a manifesto about what was wrong with Albany and the world. I sent a copy to R. Crumb, whose address was published in Weirdo magazine, and he sent back a nice postcard. He liked the writing, but said I needed to find someone to do graphics. I wrote back, told him about Rollo and gave him some copies of Honolulu Babylon. Crumb shot back another postcard. “Tell Rollo Banks that I’m a big fan of his work!” Well, when I sent Rollo the postcard from his idol, he was completely recharged about the idea of us working together on another issue of the Babylon. “Posterity will love it,” Crumb wrote.
Rollo invited me to come back to Hawaii for the winter (fuck love!), but I didn’t have enough money to fly all the way back, so I bought a one-way Greyhound bus ticket from New York City to San Francisco, then flew from S.F. to Hawaii. It was one of those fares that was good as long you you were continuing away from your destination so it took me a week because I got off in Chicago to absorb the news that John Lennon had just been murdered, then spent a couple nights in Salt Lake City with Hellenbrand.
I left the day after distributing the final issue of the Albany Lark, and the news broke a couple days later that I was wanted for questioning by the Secret Service. It was on the news because I was a fugitive still at large. Nobody could find me. When I got off the plane in Honolulu, my Dad was there with a worried look. “We’ve gotta make a stop,” he said, taking me to the Secret Service office in Honolulu. I had no idea any of this shit was going on. After a couple hours of questioning, the feds were satisfied that I wasn’t some loner lunatic (fooled ‘em!) and cut me loose.
When I came back to Albany, the town that had shunned me on arrival, I was hailed a hero. Donna had been seeing someone in the four months I was in Hawaii, and I’d met someone, too, so that great romance was over.
In the meantime, Rollo had started a t-shirt and tattoo flash business, but couldn’t find anyone to run it with any energy, so he offered me the job. My first assignment was manning the booth at the Tattoo ’82 Expo on the Queen Mary in Long Beach. This was to be a landmark gathering, with Hardy and his two business partners presenting tattooing as an art form first and a cash business second. They brought in the Japanese tattoo master Kazuo Oguri and programmed lectures and films. Rollo’s shirts and flash kept me busy all weekend.
Back in Honolulu, Mr. Lucky T-shirts started to take off nationally through advertising in biker magazines. Harley Davidson dropped any kind of skulls or cool biker imagery from their t-shirts and started going for more All-American themes of freedom and family, but Rollo went all the way in the other direction. He was throwing out the meanest, badass designs, based on popular tattoo motifs like the Grim Reaper and viking skeletons, and readers of Easyriders and Iron Horse were ordering shirts like crazy.
I’d spend over an hour a day going to the Chinatown post office and waiting in line to send out shirts first class. In Hawaii, bulk mail sits on the dock until the ship is full, which could take weeks, so we had to mail each one individually, which was not only a pain, but a big cut in the profit margin. We were getting bored with “the Rock” anyway. One day I got a postcard from my old Hollywood friend Andrella, who went off with Bryan Gregory of the Cramps and did lights on the tour. She raved about a show they’d just played at a club in Austin, Texas, of all places, called Raul’s. The same day, Rollo got something in the mail from his friend from Jerry Jeff Walker’s New York band, Travis Holland, who was then living in Austin. Boom! That’s it, let’s move to the middle of the country for our t-shirt business and let’s see what trouble we can get into in the capital of Texas.
Keep 'em coming!
How are you still alive?