Thirty years ago. That’s Edwin Letcher and Edward Huerta of Moist and Meaty chatting up a rock star storm, though considering Edwin’s street garb I don’t think M&M were playing that night. Photo probably by Don Butler. Al’s Bar maybe?  I look like a bouncer. I wasn’t, but then I always looked like a bouncer. This was back when I invariably seemed to be the tallest, strongest, and gnarliest dude in a room full of ill fed bohemians and fucked up punk rockers. Pretty punkettes would ask me to walk them to their cars in the crackhead neighborhoods our hangs were always in.

That’s Dolph Lundgren’s jacket I have on. A friend was working a shoot and realized he had two matching jackets so she copped that one for me. I wore it to death. Then I switched to blazers. Before then I was strictly the flannel tied around the waist kinda guy, sort of the uniform of the day, though I believe only Mike Watt fans sport that fashion these days. Back then I could tie a long sleeved shirt around my waist.

Before then I used show up at the crazy clubs to watch berserk bands while wearing an outrageously hot pink shirt and telling people to fuck off. The chicks dug it but the dudes would back off, bewildered, a big giant scary guy who might hurt them in the queerest shirt they had ever seen. Punk rock, baby. Reagan was president, fuck the world.

Doubtless later the same night after this photo was snapped everyone piled into our little pad off of Sunset in Silverlake. We had loud crazy parties till nearly sun-up almost every weekend, people making a mad dash for the liquor stores before 2 a.m. and then coming to our place to wake up the neighbors. Thirty people crammed in a backyard bungalow, laughing and yelling and high as kites, the music–I had a hundreds of incredibly loud and/or weird records then–roaring incessantly. On a good weekend we had parties on both Friday and Saturday. I remember one weekend people leaping off the roof into the hedges. I have no idea why. After the people finally staggered home we’d screw loudly in whatever darkness remained. Oh, we were the perfect neighbors.

We threw hundreds of parties in our hosting career. Some spontaneous, some planned, none nice. I would so hate living now next to us then.

If I ever give up writing and turn to scanning, I have thousands of pictures from those days. There are ten photo albums–remember those?–waiting in analog silence above my record collection. Though they are just a couple arm lengths away, they seem a million miles from these quick and easy electrons I’m staring at now.

Edwin in his beloved green corduroy jacket with Dukie Flyswatter’s fake blood on it, Ed Huerta looking eerily like a stoned version of his current unstoned self, and me probably unsmiling because I had had a front tooth yanked and it made me look like a hockey player until they could replace it. The look did fit the jacket, though.