Michael Des Barres

Which of these terms best describes your relationship to Los Angeles: point of origin, detour, or destination?

Girlfriend.

Destination then?

Below the waist.

What year does your relationship with Los Angeles begin?

1972.

Can you describe your first house or apartment of significance in Los Angeles? What was the street? Who were the neighbors?

Silverhead was staying at the Riot House, as they call it, on Sunset Boulevard. We had five rooms, just like the second Beatles movie where they all got houses together.

What are your memories of the interior of the Continental Hyatt House?

It made ancient Rome look like McDonald's.

Were there always multiple bands staying there or was it one at a time?

Are you kidding? We were way too egoic to think about other bands.

When the city was new to you, where did you go for fun? What were your rituals?

Rodney Bingenheimer met us at LAX with a fleet of Cadillacs filled with girls who all came from the Palisades. There were 30 girls there. And we all took Quaaludes—Mandrax actually, which was the English equivalent of Quaaludes—so we were waking up in our limo to a cavalcade. I felt like the President of Rock and Roll. I mean, there's all these girls out there hanging out the car screaming. It's classic, it was like the Beatles, or 3% of the Beatles.

A mini mob.

Which is a great band name!

Having already spent time London and New York, how would you characterize L.A. at that time as unique from those cities?

To us, Los Angeles was a Tolkien-esque world. London is the Artful Dodger and Dickensian and all of that. And New York was stoned heroin fools that are now dead. And then L.A. was the shining, shimmering, fake set. I looked at the whole world of Los Angeles and Hollywood as a set. I've done 150 hours of American television, 40 movies, so I've been on real sets but the city itself felt like a set. And I was the director of that movie. That's how I saw it.

Rodney is gnome-like.

Rodney Baggins! With these beautiful girls that did not have big ears, but big boobs.

It is Tolkien-esque.

Tremendously.

Rodney truly believed rock and roll could keep him young forever. He’s Peter Pan.

Indeed. That's lovely. He was a tremendous man. He was a rock and roll Hugh Hefner in many ways too. What I think was charming was his love of music. This guy knew his music backwards and forwards. I couldn't believe how much he knew about rock and roll and Brits especially. That was what he really loved. He orchestrated everything with a singularly unique power so you didn't feel that you were being worked. I think he did it out of sheer pleasure. He just loved the music and he loved his world.

What did you make of Rodney’s English Disco, which was this L.A. guy's conception of an English rock and roll pub?

It was a horrible little room! It was the size of a postage stamp and the VIP section was one table with a little velvet rope (laughs). That table was bigger than the fucking dance floor. So you had Robert Plant and Iggy and everybody in this tiny booth with girls just staring at 'em. It was so surreal and so Dada and so up my alley. Because I had encyclopedic understanding of America's blues and the South and Lighting Hopkins meets Elvis with Liberace on piano. I was very knowledgeable of what Los Angeles stood for and what Hollywood stood for since I was a child. I understood the whole notion of Tyrone Power and Raw Power.

What song or piece of music evokes the period when L.A. was new to you?

“16 and Savaged” by my band, Silverhead.

When you first ventured into the city beyond your immediate environs, what were the places that made an impression? Who showed you these places?

Miss Pamela's little apartment on Maryland Drive in West Hollywood. We lived there when I broke up Silverhead in ‘74. Phenomenal sex with the greatest woman alive, apart from my current wife. We were 22 or something, and here I am in the United States, which was James Dean and Elvis and Coca-Cola. So that little apartment was an electric church.

Did you stay in Los Angeles because you fell in love with Pamela? Or do you think you would've stayed here regardless?

Pamela was Los Angeles. And so was Kim Fowley, and so was Rodney.

When radio mattered in Los Angeles, what program, station, or announcer did you love?

You know what, I never listened to the radio. I only listened to myself (laughs). Fuck the radio!

Describe your first, favorite or most memorable car.

I never got behind the wheel until I was 40. I was driven everywhere. Miss Pamela drove a little Volkswagen and for the rest of it, I was on the road. After Live Aid, my song "Obsession” was number one all over the world. I had tons of money and bought a Roller, a beautiful white Rolls Royce, and I would go around in that. And then I got MacGyver, playing Murdoc up in Canada. So for five years, I didn't need to drive, they drove me. Then when me and Pamela broke up, at that point I thought, well, I've gotta drive now to go see my kid, our beautiful son, Nick. So I learned how to drive and I got a Mercedes. I bashed it, scratched it, punched it. This beautiful car was just absolutely destroyed. But in a way it was kind of interesting. The gleaming Mercedes is, to me, a facelift. It's cosmetic. I just wanna get to see my kid.

There's something very beautiful about a mistreated luxury car.

Exactly. Well, I'm a mistreated luxury car!

Describe the restaurant in which you've spent the most hours.

Musso and Frank. I went there early on because Miss Pamela was always remarkably knowledgeable about early Hollywood. I'm talking Clara Bow and Louis B. Mayer, all of that stuff we knew backwards and forwards. Musso's was that. The waiters were that, the food was that, the beautiful decor, how it looked, how it felt. The asses of the famous were on these red leather seats.

What outdoor space in Los Angeles have you spent the most hours?

The Self-Realization Fellowship on Sunset. Pamela and I were both Krishnamurti and Paramahansa Yogananda fanatics. I love Chuck Berry but I love Eckhart Tolle a lot more. You've been there, presumably?

The one in the Palisades? Yes. There's one in Mount Washington too.

Fuck that. That’s for the roadies (laughs). We're talking about the star, Paramahansa Yogananda. That's where we would go. We had this strange duplicitous thing because she had a boyfriend, I had a wife, and where do we go? To the most holy place in Los Angeles, which is what that is. When you ask me what is the place that you remember the most, it wasn't Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco. It was the Self-Realization Fellowship. As a kid, I read a lot about Krishnamurti. I didn't have parents. My father was a marquis, and I went to these boarding schools. I'm the opposite of the cockney rock and roll guy. I'm a marquis, you know, the 27th Marquis of Des Barres. It’s a title that has been there for centuries but that's not rock and roll so one never really delves into that, you know? But we sure did get philosophically beautiful. And it was very sexual too. We were coming off the physicality and freedom of the Sixties but now added to the cocktail would be spirituality rather than just pure freedom and liberation.

Christopher Isherwood came to Los Angeles for the same combination. He was here for Ramakrishna but he was also enjoying the hedonism of L.A.

Then Christopher Isherwood was in my band.

Whether or not you swam, what beach or pool lingers in your memory?

The pool at Chateau Marmont. When you sit around that pool, there's ghosts sitting in the water with you. And Malibu. A dear friend of mine, Danny Goldberg—I don't if you've heard of him but he's a brilliant writer and also managed, with Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin. We met when Zeppelin signed me to Swan Song. But Danny is very, very, um... rich (laughs). He had this estate in Malibu, so I've spent 30 years in these beautiful homes in Malibu in the summer with the children. You’re walking down the beach and there's Cuba Gooding Jr. unconscious.

What movie theater would you bring back from the dead?

It's not quite dead but Grauman's. I mean good God, there it is. Handprints, hello? That's it. But I don't go to movies anymore, I watch at home on my massive screens.

What is a bar or nightclub you loved that no longer exists?

The Whisky A Go Go, as it was when I first saw it in 1972. Silverhead played there for a week. We brought a tiger onstage. We were staying at Riot House and there was a big hearse outside and there was a tiger in it. The tiger had been the star of a TV show called Daktari and it had a drunken man who was looking after it. I said, "Can I rent that tiger?” I had the roadie give him a few hundred bucks and I got the tiger up to our room. See, in those days, Los Angeles in 1972, there was no security. Anybody could get backstage. So when you ask for my first impression of Los Angeles—a tiger. A tiger was in our fucking room.

On our first night at the Whisky—this is one of the reasons that I love Los Angeles—I brought the tiger on stage with me on a chain and it was somewhat subdued. The tiger had more drugs in it than I did because obviously they had to be cool with the fucking tiger. His handler is in the wings drunk, I'm front and center with the tiger. What does he do? First song, takes a shit on the stage. There's a girl in the front, of course, with a bouquet. And I take the bouquet and I shove it in the shit. And I said to myself, “Michael, welcome to Hollywood.”

That’s the night I met Miss Pamela. She was on the balcony with Chris Hillman and he went off to get some heroin. I was onstage, topless, with a tiger.

What household threw the best parties or the parties that you remember best?

Gail Zappa at Frank's house on Woodrow Wilson. Gail had everybody from Henry Rollins to Chevy Chase. I mean, these parties were so intellectual and so funny. You know, you had the brightest, brilliant, fun comedians and… Henry Rollins. I mean, so eclectic, extraordinary. And we relished those parties, both me and Miss Pamela, and then later, me and my wife Britta. We’d actually all go together, Pam and Britta and myself. But those parties were all Gail Zappa. Gail was hardcore. She was so honest, you know? Personally, I didn't get on well with Frank. I thought he was a self-important shmuck. He changed things and made things more interesting, but as a person, no, didn't like him. Gail was brilliant. She was able to create an atmosphere where people felt free. Those parties were exquisite. I was so sad when they were gone. I wept buckets when she passed. Seeing her in that coffin was one of the worst days in my life. A lot of things were buried with her, put it that way. Gaga bought the house and then Gaga sold it to Elizabeth Jagger.

What was your first earthquake or worst earthquake?

The sexual activity was so extensive that every time Pamela and I made love there was earthquake. The first earthquake I actually felt, I just wanted it to keep going. I remember loving it because we were narcotically altered most of the time. It was sensual, almost like you were on a carousel, you know? Me and Miss Pamela were swaying, you know, half naked with scarves and shit. The bracelets were jangling and we were stoned and high. And there was this beautiful feeling of… I loved it. I just wanted it to never stop.

If you had the power to preserve a space or building in Los Angeles, what would you protect? Not necessarily for the public good but for personal reasons.

I don't think one could precisely say that bus stop or this building.

Conversely, what’s something you would tear down?

To answer that question would just be reaching for something clever. What's important is, I don't want to destroy anything. I want it to breathe and live in a beautiful way. In terms of something to get rid of, I'd rather see them change into something else than to get rid of them. Because whatever you get rid of is going to appear somewhere else soon.

Besides the traffic, what’s one specific change you observed in Los Angeles over the period you’ve known it?

I love Chaplin, Valentino, the great male stars. Now the men are all buffed up guys that go to the gym and shoot God-knows-what up their ass to look great for the three months that they're making a movie. It's all a load of bullocks. I only follow the actresses. Now they are so much more talented than the men.

Conversely, what’s one thing that hasn't changed—in other words, one thing in Los Angeles that is timeless?

Ego.

What is a place in Los Angeles that was described to you but you never got to see for yourself? In other words, a place that lives only in your imagination?

Rudolph Valentino's house, where he lived when he was at his peak. Valentino is the first rock star. He was a dancer in a bar with old women and somebody came along and said, "Excuse me, you are gorgeous. Let's go to Hollywood."

What demolition that broke your heart?

Oh gosh, I'm not attached to buildings. No, I don't care. Knock down anything. Just don't knock me down.

Even the Chinese theater?

If they go, they go, dude, you know?

Sure.

They'll always live in my mind, in my heart, soul. When I look at Grauman’s, I don't even see Grauman’s. I see Douglas Fairbanks Jr. I don't even see the fucking thing. It's what it represents spiritually rather than physically. So anything can go and I wouldn't be moved by it because I already own it. So you can knock down anything. Just don't knock me down. And that, by the way, is impossible. Don't bother! You'll hurt yourself.

Whose backyard you would return to if you could?

I live in Altadena now, which is beautiful. I've worked hard for it. I've been doing this since I was eight and I'm 75 now. I’m with Britta, my third wife, who is just extraordinary, and over the last few years we built a studio on the property so I can do my radio show for Little Steven's Underground Garage. For an egoistic man like myself to adore and explain rock and soul music to others is incredibly therapeutic. And that's been an amazing feeling to have such an amazing job right in the backyard. Now we're building a beautiful new deck but I'm going crazy because I'll be playing Alejandro Escovedo and all I hear is fucking drills, you know what I mean?

What is the current view out your window or a view that you see on a daily basis?

I'm looking at a photograph of Steve Jones here in my home studio. There's a picture of he and I laughing our asses off. I don't have a ton of friends. There's a couple of people I trust and Jonesy's one of them. All I can say is this: the most honest man in Los Angeles is Steve Jones. He's incapable of lying.

What is a specific memory of Steve Jones in Los Angeles?

Miss Pamela and I lived in Laurel Canyon for years with Jonesy, when I was in Chequered Past. We taught him how to read and write so he could get a green card. But that's another story.

Can you describe a personal memento of Los Angeles—a token of the city you've kept in the form of an image or an object?

A venereal disease.

A picture will be posted with the interview.

Oh, okay. Let's see. Any photo of Rudolph Valentino or Errol Flynn. ◆