Roy Loney

Teenage Monster —
California Born and Bred

Interview by John Battles

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That’s why we went for it. We recorded the album here in San Francisco, and then I went to New York to mix it, and when I brought it back, everybody hated the mix! Everybody in the band said, ‘This stinks! This is fucking horrible!’ They expected it to sound fuller, or more polished, and I don’t think they remembered that there wasn’t that much ON it! There wasn’t much to really fill it out with! It was just US. It sounded like us, and I think maybe it was a shock to them… ‘What? But, you’re supposed to make it sound a lot better!’ ‘No, no, this is what we SOUND like!’ Now, people like it. I’ve gotta say, with that album, every other time I listen to it, I love it, next time, it’s like, ‘Well, I dunno’ then it’s ‘Oh, it’s great!,’ and then, ‘Boy, this sucks!’ and then, ‘No, that’s pretty good.’ So, I have a love/hate relationship with that album, but, most of the time, I like it. I think we all think of this as our raunchiest, rawest sounding record. Depending on how you feel about raunchy and raw at any given time, that’s how much you’ll like that record. But, I think it’s real representational of what we sounded like.”

     The Flamingo cover has a special thanks to John Zacherle. “He was a friend of Richard’s, he came to the studio with him. Yeah, Zacherley was great, and, of course, he was an idol of mine as a kid. In fact, Famous Monsters magazine was the main connection between Cyril and I… We’re both monster movie freaks. We collected Famous Monsters magazines, and Zacherley was godlike to us. He’s a funny guy, but just really normal. I really liked him a lot, super cool dude. He was starting to make a bit of a comeback at that time, doing some more shows and recording.”

     The band played The Fillmore East and at a press party at The Bottom Line to promote the album, but again the sales were low. Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, Bill Graham moved his Fillmore to The Carousel. The last old Fillmore (Straight Theater) show was Iggy And The Stooges, MC5, The Flamin’ Groovies and Alice Cooper. The Groovies rented the Fillmore in the Spring as a rehearsal hall and soon started promoting dances there and were the house band. “We ran the place for a year, it was our place, so we did what we wanted to, pretty much. We played with The Stooges, Alice Cooper, and Commander Cody, there was that show (immortalized on a now - famous poster by Mark T. Behrens).We brought in The Dead. Every night that The Dead played, it was jam-packed, also Freedom Highway, Mama Mae Thornton, Country Weather, The Charlatans, mostly bands we liked. Our manager was managing the place, he had an office there, so, we got to hang out there, we spent all our time there. We had the run of the building, which was pretty amazing. And, one of the great things that came out of that was, Pink Floyd was in town, and they wanted to tape this thing for PBS, and didn’t know where to do it, so we offered our place. Pink Floyd set up in the middle of the main room, and did a set!

The only people there were The Flamin’ Groovies and a few friends. That was pretty cool, ‘cause we were big Pink Floyd fans back then. It was about the time of Ummagumma, after Syd Barrett had left, unfortunately. I was a big Syd Barrett fan. They never get above a medium tempo, and they’re not great musicians by any means. Their tunes are so simplistic sometimes that you can’t believe it, and the lyrics are like, ‘Forget it,’ BUT, if you’re in the right mood, they’re kind of good. They’re kinda late night music for me, so is REM and The Dead. I can listen to The Dead as background music late at night, works fine for me, but not when I want to rock out.”

     While playing at their own theatre, the band became more theatrical. “I started out as an actor, and I had been acting since I was about eight years old, amateur stuff for the most part. I went to San Francisco State on a Drama scholarship, and I starred in a lot of plays, and I won a scholarship to The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, but I was very young, and I just didn’t feel up to it. So, I still think of myself as an actor who became a musician on the side, that’s how it was, back then. We’d appear in costumes, real costumes. We had this one thing that we used to do, that, unless you saw it, you wouldn’t have believed it. It was a thing called ‘American Soul Ballet,’ we had a song called ‘Do The Riot,’ it was kind of a ‘funk’ thing, it ended up being ‘American Soul Spiders,’ which is just a track, just the basic set up of the song. But, at one point in the song, these guys come out in Ku Klux Klan robes, waving American flags and dancing behind me, and then when I start this ‘riot’ thing, they pull off the Klan robes, and they’re cops! They pull out their clubs, and they drag me behind the amps and beat the SHIT out of me! Then, they drag me out to the front of the stage, and I’m just covered in blood, and then, they think I’m dead, but I get up and start doing these James Brown steps, and we’d just finish the thing out! I heard that Timothy Leary once said, ‘You know, I saw you do this THING!!’ It’s like, they still can’t believe that we actually DID it! We were very much into theatrics, but it was pretty stupid. I remember, once, in the front row of The Avalon Ballroom, a couple of girls threw up (laughs). They probably just saw this thing, all bloody and stuff, and took it way too seriously! There’s one gag that I liked where they’d carry me out like I was dead, holding a tambourine, and they’d set me down and I’d be totally stiff. Then, as the music started, the tambourine would start going, and I would start coming to life, y’know, stupid stuff like that. Of course, I was just very theatrical in my movements always, a lot of throwing myself off the stage. When I saw The Stooges, it got even worse!” (laughs).