Cruising the $2 Bin: Lou Waxman on Angel’s Helluva Band

Lou is promiscuous.  He will cruise The Vogue and hook up with almost any record that catches his eye.  Except Rush.  The day Lou buys a Rush LP will be a Requiem for a Dream rock bottom moment for him.  At that instant walking from The Vogue with Moving Pictures under his arm, Lou will have the sobering realization that buying vinyl is not a pleasant diversion but a real addiction.  Recently, Lou fell into the gutter.  Lou took Angel’s Helluva Band home for some good times.  This was a classic pick-up around last call at The Vogue.  Lou knew nothing about the band or their music.  He knew it was from the 1970s, so there was a chance it was good.  The best Lou was hoping for was a Black Oak Arkansas experience.  An aural surprise.  Well, Lou got an STD:  a Seriously Terrible Disc and is currently nursing an ear infection.

Formed in 1975, out of the nation’s capital, Angel was discovered by Gene Simmons of KISS, who helped get them signed to Casablanca, KISS’s label.  They were the yuck to KISS’s wang.  Angel went the glam route and dressed in all white, with is he a boy or a girl vibes, and an over-the-top stage show.  Glam can be good and it is a serious rock form.  If you don’t believe Lou, read Simon Reynolds’ Shock and Awe on the history of glam rock.  It is one of the best histories of rock music out there.  To be honest, anything by Reynolds is good.  Angel is bad glam.  It exists.  Ask Gary Glitter.

Angel’s logo is ambigrammatic, which means it reads the same when turned upside-down as right side up.  Who knew?  Who cares?  Angel is often described as a cult band, but largely they seem to Lou to be a joke.  Frank Zappa certainly thought so.  “Punky’s Whips”, which takes the piss out of Angel’s main man, Punky Meadows, is classic Zappa, far surpassing anything Angel would ever do.  “Whips” is definitely worth a listen.  Funny, of course, and, as you would expect from Zappa and crew, awesome musicianship.  “I promise not to come in your mouth!”  Terry Bozzio gets a star turn, and he is better here than even his masterful work on Missing Person’s debut album, with his wife Dale, which by the way is one of the underrated best albums of the 1980s.

If Angel did nothing in their career other than inspire a monster tune from Frank Zappa, they would be a successful band.  But there is more.  The band appeared as themselves in Foxes, a 1980 coming-of-age ickfest, which was the directorial debut of Adrian Lyne.  You know Adrian.  He is your guy if you claim not to watch porn but secretly want to watch porn.  For such guys, there are erotic thrillers or movies that deal with sexual themes “seriously”.  So, you convince your wife to watch a VHS of 9 ½ Weeks and you get to check out a boob with your wife in the room.  This is why all that prestige TV on HBO is popular.  You can’t tell me that anybody actually enjoyed Game of Thrones.  It is dumb.  It was really just a boobfest for henpecked husbands and teenaged nerds who can’t pull wool.  Same with True Detective.  HBO has more shit with has-been, over the hill, blue pill chomping, out of shape white dudes that get young ass than any media outlet on Earth.  Woody Harrelson’s scenes with Lili Simmons are insulting.  This is pure Jurgen’s shit for the impotent.  Not to actually spank it to, but instead to stroke your old, flabby ego that you still got it.  Think this is an exaggeration.  Woody laying wood and Lili Simmons’ ass wereall the boys at the cigar shop could talk about the next day.  “Man, what I would do to that!!”  Absolutely nothing.  You would do nothing to that and can do nothing with that.  Embrace your impotence.  It is not that you can’t perform; it is that you have evolved beyond the need to perform that matters.  You have more important things to do like listen to Angel’s Helluva Band on a Friday night by yourself with about 8-10 empty PBR tallboys laying around your beat-up recliner.  Where are the HBO shows about that?  

And do not get Lou started on the Dad Bod Summer phenomenon that hit around the time of True Detective as all the Hollywood leading men got aged out and gave up trying to keep up appearances.  Leo and Ben looked like they were on the Lou Waxman diet.  Dad Bod’s are not desirable at all.  Victoria Secret models are not lusting after Dad Bods.  Fat wallets, dude.  Whoever the publicist was who came up with that People cover story deserves a bonus.

Back to Adrian.  He made a career out of being “provocative”.  What he specialized in was making high-gloss sexploitation films in some cases with an emphasis on sexualizing youth.  After Foxes, Adrian would famously remake Lolita.  If Nabokov has done it and Kubrick has done it, Lou would probably advise that you keep your hands off Lolita.  You can’t compete with those guys.  In Adrian’s version, Dominique Swain stars as Lolita.  She went through the Hollywood meat grinder and there was some rough going for a while.  Lou hopes she is ok now.  A friend of Lou’s worked on a ski movie with Swain and Tom Sizemore in the cast.  Just imagine the street value of all that snow.  That is a little dash of Booger sugar for you.

Foxes is where Adrian gets his start.  Jodie Foster is in it.  It centers around four teenage girls from the Valley in the late 1970s.  Cherie Currie of The Runaways is in the movie.  She plays Annie, a runaway (great casting, was Lita Ford not available?), who is sacrificed via a car accident in the movie so the rest of the girls can have an awakening and find their way out of the teenage abyss.  Or at least Jeanie can.  Jeanie’s father is a tour manager for Angel and is always on the road.  Her parents are divorced.  You know the everyday problems of the 1970s.  Foster plays Jeanie and at the end of the movie she goes to Annie’s grave.  From Wikipedia:  

With a smile, she muses that Annie wanted to be buried under a pear tree, “not in a box or anything”, so that each year her friends could come by, have a pear, and say, “Annie's tastin’ good this year, huh?”  

Hey Adrian, why not make it a peach tree?  Come on.

We all live in the era of Epstein Island nowadays, and it seems like we are in the Golden Shower Age of Ick, but let Lou tell you, if possible, the 1970s and 1980s were worse.  The sexualizing of young girls was a mainstream thing.  Foxes, but also Pretty Baby, Blue Lagoon, and Paradise come to mind.  Photographers like David Hamilton and Larry Clark (Sidebar:  Lou distinctly remembers books by Hamilton being sold in the photography section of the Waldenbooks in the local mall.  It is batshit insane.).  Songs like “Hot Child in the City”.  Bands like The Runaways. The entire LA scene of the 1970s catered to runaways and funneling them to rock stars and Hollywood types.  The ultimate in ick was Star, a magazine for grooming underage groupies.  Lou shits you not; this actually existed.  Only four issues, but still.  There was a centerfold in each issue and articles instructing aspiring readers on how to catch the attention of a thirty-year-old bassist from a washed-up band.  Being a groupie used to be a noble pursuit.

Let’s talk about

Groupies in rock and roll

In the beginning

It wasn’t about

Being hot

It was about being

On birth control

It didn’t matter

If you were

The top prize

Could you

Or couldn’t you

Hang out

With the guys

The greatest body

The brightest smile

Could you

Or could you not

Live the lifestyle

Rockstars weren’t

With the hottest birds

Until Keef

Dated Anita Pallenberg

Is it true she was the first

Who looked like the best

And behaved like the worst

She took sex drug and rock and roll

And put it in one package

And made it whole

Just look at

John and Paul

Weren’t their women

Just banal

Linda and Yoko

Pretty standard

But George and Ringo

Were with Patty Boyd

And Catherine Bach

Now those are chicks

Who really rock

Was Jerry Hall

The first girlfriend

At which you

Were supposed to gawk

And it didn’t matter

If she sucked cock

It was all about

The paparazzi

And magazines

And not what happened

Behind the scenes

And then with

Billy Joel and

Christy Brinkley

It didn’t matter

If the singer

Sung so limply

Rockstars took

A lover

Not if they

Lived the life

But if they

Made great cover

Maybe I’m

Being cynical

But the cover

Is never as good

As the originals

How I wish for

Those days

When rock babes

We’re chosen

Cause they did

The impermissible

It may not be fair, but Lou thought about all this shit as he was listening to Angel’s Helluva Band.  Maybe it was Gene Simmons lurking in the background like a Peeping Tom.  Maybe it was their appearance in Foxes.  Maybe it was Punky’s pouting lips.  After listening to Helluva Band, Lou needed a strong dose of medicine and Frank and Terry delivered the cure to this particular STD.  Lou thinks he may be done cruising the bins at The Vogue.  Not on your life.

Suggested Sites and Sounds:

Shock and Awe for Simon Reynolds:  Shock and Awe | Faber

Punky’s Whips:  Frank Zappa/Terry Bozzio - Punky's Whips

Twentieth Century Foxes:  Foxes Official Trailer #1 - Randy Quaid Movie (1980) HD

Teen Sexploitation in the 1980s (Make sure you check out all the links as well):  1982: Teen Sexploitation, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Porky's and The Blue Lagoon (Erotic 80s Part 5) — You Must Remember This

— Lou Waxman