The Grateful Undead The rise and fall and rise of L.A.'s Pigmy Love Circus By Michael Gougis The topless woman thrusts her breasts into Shepherd's face, and Shepherd responds like any other red-blooded heterosexual American male would be expected to. He reaches up, pinches her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers and starts tweaking them like the dials on an old radio set. Not really the oddest thing that's happened this morning in the loft, studio and party pad of Danny Carey, drummer for Tool, who's been sitting on the other couch all morning, pounding down Pabst Blue Ribbons, playing with knives and thoroughly enjoying his time off from his "real job." Tool is between shows on a two-year-long world tour, and he's back in L.A. for a few days before heading off for the next show. The loft, in a trashed-looking building behind a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, seems to have been decorated by an early 21st-century rock star -- gargoyles, skulls and a toy pterodactyl hanging from the ceiling, a foosball table in the corner, bongs of unusual shape and design resting on the bar, and a massive set of expensive speakers bolted to the wall. Shepherd's been drinking straight from a bottle of Glenfiddich scotch. His gun-toting buddy Michael Savage, a huge side of Western range-fed beef who stands 6-foot-7, sports denim overalls and an American flag bandana on his tightly cropped hair - a recent attempt to combine a Mohawk and mullet having failed dreadfully - has been tossing around a foot-long knife that he later uses to tear open a large cardboard package stuffed with pills. Another friend, Peter Fletcher, has developed a large wet spot in the crotch of his pants, and there's a pile of white powder on a mirror in the next room. It's sex, drugs and rock-and-roll writ large. But this is 2002, not 1992. The difference is that nowadays someone yells "Cut!" The topless woman is an actress, the pills are placebos and the stain in Fletcher's crotch is plain water, as is the stuff in the Glenfiddich bottle. The Pabst that Savage has been gulping is actually O'Doul's nonalcoholic malt beverage. The white powder on the mirror is for makeup purposes. The whole scene -- well, most of it -- is staged, the first day of shooting for the latest music video for the Pigmy Love Circus, an icon in Los Angeles' underground music scene for the past decade and a half. The drugs, booze and boobs make up the visuals for "I'm on a Drug Run to Fontana," one of the songs off the band's newly recorded The Power of Beef album. Someone played the cut earlier, the hard, pounding bottom end drowning out virtually all conversation in the loft, audibly cleaner, sharper and meatier than the Pigmys' prior recordings. The stomping sound system the disc is being played on may partly account for how good the new stuff sounds. But there's also the fact that it was recorded using Protools, the latest digital recording technology, in Carey's loft, the fact that the Pigmys had as long as they wanted to cut the record and took their time to get it right and the fact that Carey flew into L.A. a guy who's worked with artists from David Bowie to Dr. Dre to do the final mastering. It might be garage rock -- or, as lead singer Savage calls it, "monster truck rock" -- but the resources thrown at the latest record are beyond most garage bands' dreams. There's a reason. They might look and sound like a garage band, but just as running water wears a groove into stone over the years, the Pigmy Love Circus has tunneled its way into the musical landscape of Los Angeles. Musicians who have performed with the group have gone on to work with artists like Iggy Pop, Danzig and Carole King. People throw gigs and recording opportunities at them, refusing to let them slide gracefully into oblivion. When someone puts out a compilation of underground L.A. music or does a documentary on local bands, the Pigmys frequently show up there. "They've become sort of elder statesmen for this city's music scene," says P.J. Wolff, director and producer of "Badsville," his cinematic look at Hollywood's live musicscape. "I think they're fascinating; they've lived through so much in Hollywood. I mean, if some 22-year-old is making great music, excellent, but I'm not interested in a damned thing they've got to say about life yet. The Pigmys have something to say." For a while, the Pigmys were on the verge of superstardom, living clichés who followed their rock 'n' roll dreams to Hollywood and made it big. They toured North America and Europe; in the heady days of the late 1980s and early '90s, when Los Angeles boasted a stunning diversity of rock bands and clubs, the Pigmys were the clown princes of the city's underground music scene. A fat deal with a major label seemed inevitable; they'd actually gathered one night at the Cat and Fiddle pub on Sunset Boulevard, the home-away-from-home for band members, and set fire to a contract offer from Interscope Records that they viewed as an inadequate insult. All around them, bands they knew, their friends -- Jane's Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers -- were getting signed. The Pigmys were sure they were next. But the deal that would "make" them as an act never materialized. And as the early '90s segued into the mid-'90s, patience gave way to frustration, substance abuse and madness. It was a story line straight from a VH-1 "Behind the Music" special, a descent that saw the band members at their lowest points as individuals since they moved to L.A. Their friends started dying; a former manager called them from New York to boast that he'd landed them a seven-figure deal with Sony, then died the next night when a hooker shot him full of heroin. A dispute with a record label left them penniless in Europe in the middle of a tour that collapsed around them. Pissed off and disillusioned, the band just dissolved. Rand Walters -- the guitar player affectionately known as Pig -- fled back to Colorado, where he took up chainsaw sculpting. None of the band members ever expected to be in the position they found themselves in on a recent Saturday morning, in front of the camera again, a new album crafted by some of the best musical technicians available blasting through the monitors, an up-and-coming film director working the cameras for their new video. But being a rocker in Los Angeles is sort of like being a race car driver: you can become a legend if you reach 50 and you're still alive. Michael Savage was on the edge of the music scene in Denver, but he didn't exactly have the glamour job. He was big and muscular, and his willingness to throw and take punches made him a natural as a bouncer. But one day in 1985, "My brother and his drug dealer threw a ticket in my lap and said, "Dude, you're going to L.A.,'" Savage recalls. "I watched all these other guys doing this, and I wanted to so bad." Savage, then in his 30s, had a little band called Mau Mau 55, and was a little old to be starting a career as a rock god, and Hollywood was a little overwhelming to him. "The first time I came here, I lasted about a week and split for San Diego. That's where we met Pig. He was a painting contractor, he owned a condo, he had a pretty good thing going down there." Listen to Savage talk today, and he's just a blur of topics that you want to explore more fully, but you can't because he's already three fascinating topics down the road. At the video shoot, he holds up a revolver with a four-inch barrel to the light to make sure there are no bullets in any of the chambers ("My little friend," he says) while talking about his machine-gun collection, his daughters, his failed marriages, being ordained as a minister, his experiences as a tattoo artist... At heart, Savage, now 50, still is a bit of a cowboy lost in the city. In his dreams, when the band hits the big time, he wants to buy a place in the deserts of New Mexico and raise big, nasty rodeo bulls. "I've been checking out the Web sites, the ones where they sell the sperm from the champion bulls, it's about two grand," he says. When he got back to L.A., Savage looked up one Edward Shepherd Stevenson -- they knew each other from Denver. Shepherd, now 45, a kinda scrawny guy with a bit of a gut and long, stringy hair to match his scraggly facial hair, was the lead singer in a band called the Aviators, one of the best-known new-age acts in Colorado. "We were the Duran Duran of Denver," Shepherd deadpans. He moved to Hollywood with his band, following the dream, which lasted for exactly one poorly received album. Still, the mid-1980s were a blast for the boys. For fun, Savage and Shepherd became regulars on the nude beaches near San Diego. "We'd buy five cases of beer and a bunch of acid, and we'd wander around naked and sell beer," Shepherd says. "Life was good back then." Well, everything but their Hollywood abode. It was a single room in a cockroach-infested, now-demolished place called the Rector Hotel at the intersection of Hollywood and Western, a sty peopled with what the band used to call the Reagan crazies, the mentally ill turned out into the streets by California's former governor. But at least no one complained when it was time for band practice, when they'd turn their secondhand public address system and crap guitar amps up to full. By 1985, they'd already landed Peter Fletcher as a second guitarist. Originally from Littleton, Colorado, Fletcher had played in a band with Kip Winger, but quit before Winger hit it big. He'd headed for San Jose, then in 1982 moved south to Los Angeles, hooking up with Savage, Walters and Shepherd in a band that was supposed to be a continuation of Savage and Walters' Denver project, Mau Mau 55, which became the Pigmys. Fletcher, who won't disclose his age, is a ball of nerves and tension, a guy who won't smoke until he gets home from work, then starts firing up American Spirits "not because I'm addicted, but because people tell me not to." Fletcher helped launch one of the band's most colorful eras when he convinced the boys to join him at Beacon House. This old, sadly trashed Victorian home, located in a gang-controlled area around Beacon and 8th near downtown L.A., warrants its own chapter in local music legend. Technically, it was a substance-abuse recovery home run by Scientologists. However, starving, troubled artists who needed shelter flocked to the place, drawn by cheap rent and the license to pretty much do whatever the hell they pleased. A cross-dresser lived in the space under the stairwell. A former Mouseketeer was among the residents. Loud, drunken, obnoxious parties, with roaring music and drunken people fucking in the kitchen and on the front porch, took place day and night. The Pigmys took Beacon House by storm, renting four rooms for the princely sum of $150 a month, practicing five hours a night at top volume and taking great delight in tormenting their neighbors and landlords. "We'd be drunk and screaming, "Scientology sucks! Fuck Scientology!' and just blasting out music," Savage recalls. "They were terrified of us. They thought we were out of our minds." The band's core members lived at Beacon House on and off for years. Savage and Shepherd worked as temps. The best gig they had was as waiters and busboys at a restaurant where the owner not only paid them, but let them eat free. "He was always giving us just these huge amounts of grub, slabs of ribs -- "Take what you want,' he'd say," Savage says. "About six months later, these guys who looked like mafiosi walked in the front door and locked it behind them, then told us the place was closed. The owner had borrowed some money from them and apparently he'd never made a payment. We didn't ask what happened to him, didn't want to know." It was at Beacon House, in that bizarre cauldron of artistic dysfunction, that the Pigmys forged their sound. Straight-ahead hard rock anchored by Fletcher and Walters' two screaming guitars and Shepherd's throbbing bass framed Savage's ragged vocals as he screamed about -- well, unhealthy things. Songs about murdering rock stars ("I'm the King of L.A! I killed Axl Rose today!" Savage growls during "King of L.A."), mental instability, fisticuffs, a tragic tale of Dagwood, the comic-strip character, decapitating Blondie and "buggering the family dog Daisy," as well as perhaps their best-known tune, a ditty with a chorus of "Suck my dick, you fucking bitch," made up the band's repertoire. Their stage presence during concerts could be disconcerting to the uninitiated, an hour of hillbillies dressed in drag or wearing kilts like true Scotsmen (i.e., sans underwear, and they weren't shy about proving it), binge drinking and exhorting audience members to start mixing it up. "Let's get a little action going here!" Savage would growl at the crowd, and the bashing in the moshpit would begin. Always, however, the audience would stop its enthusiastic slamming to yodel along with the chorus to "Madhouse Clown," which one critic once described as a cross between "Shenandoah" and the "Star-Spangled Banner." If you want to use fancy artistic terms, the Pigmys could be viewed as harbingers of a movement that was a reaction to L.A.'s famous era of heavy-metal bands of pretty boys wearing makeup, hairspray and spandex. "There was nothing pretty about the Pigmys at all. And this was their charm. They were just big and fat and ugly and crazy," says filmmaker Wolff, who attended several Pigmys shows during the early '90s and whose own band opened for them. Their first show took place at a party in a loft in the old Canadian Embassy building downtown. George, the resident manager of Beacon House, was on drums, "but he was tempo-challenged, and that's not a good trait in a drummer," Savage says. "So it was the only show he did with us." In the early years, the Pigmy Love Circus went through drummers as fast as Spinal Tap. But their live shows caught the attention of many. They started getting gigs at some of L.A.'s coolest clubs and shows, although not everyone appreciated them. Their performance at the Sunset Junction Street Fair was a rousing hit with fans, but the organizers disliked the "Suck My Dick" song so much that they wouldn't book the Pigmys for another five years. The band recorded its first album in 1990 at Raji's on Hollywood Boulevard. They got some airplay on alternative radio stations, did some one-record deals with smaller labels. They got gigs that other bands only dream of. They played the John Anson Ford theater, opening for Jane's Addiction -- Pig shaved his head and wore a diaper, Savage dressed as a clown, Shepherd wore a cowgirl's dress -- in a performance that nearly turned into a riot. Audience members pulled Shepherd off the stage and into the moshpit, and he literally had to fight his way back on stage. "I remember seeing him go, and then he just started swinging," Fletcher says. Get a band member started about the old days and it can go for hours about beating up security guards, getting maced and patching up wounds. The Pigmys played sold-out shows at the Palace with Electric Love Hogs. "Hole [Courtney Love's band] actually opened for us once," Fletcher says. Around the same time, the band did its first U.S. tour. In 1991, they toured the United States, Canada and Europe, doing about 30 shows in Germany, Holland, Austria and elsewhere. They signed a short-term deal with Hellhound Records in Germany and recorded "When Clowns Become Kings" in Berlin. When they were in Los Angeles, it seemed they could gig every week at a different place. Club Lingerie was home base; management loved the band and booked them as often as possible. The Coconut Teazer, English Acid, Scream -- they had their choice of venues to play. Savage married, divorced, and married and divorced again; when he was in town, he worked the door at various nightclubs. The band did showcases for record company representatives, and delighted in doing everything they could to sabotage themselves. "We did one showcase, a private thing, for these record company guys," says Savage. "They showed up in suits, these babes in heels and shit, you know, and they showed up at the place we were rehearsing at the time. There were literally dirt floors. They couldn't believe it. The chicks were disgusted. You should have seen the looks on their faces. There were piles of drugs, a bunch of knives, guns -- we were a bunch of dangerous fucks. They got in their car and never came back. We didn't give a shit. We didn't have a business plan. All we wanted to do was play music." Yet in spite of themselves, everything seemed to be coming together. As Fletcher puts it, "We were on fire, we were so good." When they got back to L.A. after the '91 tour of Europe, they lost their drummer and replaced him with another L.A. guy who had fallen in love with the Pigmys, Danny Carey. They quickly made plans to head back overseas. But as they say in those "Behind the Music" VH-1 specials, disaster lurked right around the corner. When the Pigmys got off the plane in 1991 in Berlin, they already had swilled all the beer they could find while airborne and were buzzing hard. They were met at the airport by folks from the record label, Hellhound, who were holding another case of beer; the boys slammed that back, too. They were escorted someplace where they remember there was a refrigerator of beer -- Becks, that much they can recall -- and then the guys from the label started to worry. "They said, "Are you guys going to be able to play tonight?'" Shepherd says. "We said, "Is that tonight?' That sort of became the mantra for the Pigmys -- "Is that tonight?'" Some members of the band bought into the whole rock lifestyle and simply didn't realize when beer, booze and drugs had become a problem for them. It's not exactly a new tale in Hollywood; the city has its fair share of walking victims of alcoholism and drug addiction. Savage and Shepherd tried all the way back in 1988 to sober up. They stayed clean for a month. Then they showed up for a show at a Reno club and someone let them have free run of the bar. They were shitfaced for the better part of the next five years. "We were doing a video shoot in Culver City back in 1991," says Savage. "There was some company that had put up the money to do it. They had rented some big sound stage, built this big bar set. I was trying to sober up at the time, but I'd gotten just hammered at the Cat and Fiddle the night before, and on the way out I'd tripped or something and just cracked my skull on something hard. I showed up the next morning for the shoot at 8 a.m., my head was pounding, and they started handing out beers. I thought, "Oh no, don't give these guys beers at 8 in the morning.'" An hour later, the destruction started. "We started throwing drum sets around, we totally wrecked the set, we were chasing around the girls who were supposed to be in the video, "Hey, bitches, get over here,' that kind of thing. But the director just kept the camera running, saying, "This is great, this is great, I love this.'" Savage nearly died a few months later in a motorcycle accident. He was drunk, wasn't wearing a helmet and crashed, the borrowed bike coming to rest on top of him. He was knocked unconscious. "I came to and just big chunks of flesh from my left arm were gone, and there was this black lady standing there, just saying "He dead, he dead" over and over again. I got up, left the bike and my skin there, and ran, because I knew if the cops showed up I was going to jail on a DUI. I got to my apartment and my girlfriend poured a bunch of liquid skin into my arm; it felt like acid. And the guy who owned the bike was there, and he said, "Is my bike OK?" I told him "Yeah, it's down the street where all the cops are.'" If you went to the Cat and Fiddle and asked the bartender for a Pigmy Cola, what you got was a tall glass of rum with enough soda in it to give it some color. "Let me put it this way," Shepherd says. "We used to practice drunk so we could perform drunk. I can play our music in a blackout -- and did. We toured Europe, but I only remember little bits and pieces of the tours." And while band members were losing pieces of both their memories and their bodies, friends started dying of overdoses and in violent, drunken escapades. "We lost three guys one year," Savage remembers. "I've probably been to like 15 funerals for my friends, and almost all of them had to do with alcohol and drugs." Meanwhile, their in-your-face attitude started wearing thin in some circles. Their song "Cold Chili Pepper," about the member of that band who had died, cost them a chance to open for a Red Hot Chili Peppers tour -- something that would have exposed them to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who otherwise wouldn't have heard their music. And the flow of contract offers started to dry up. "We were always waiting for the next big offer to show up," says Savage. "They'd want us to sign for seven albums, we'd only agree to do one. And we fuckin' hated A&R people from the record labels. When we'd play live, we'd say shit like, "If there's any A&R people here, go fuck yourselves.'" Their second tour of Europe, in 1992, turned into a disaster. Their drummer at the time, Carey, had gotten involved in a side project that suddenly became huge -- Tool. On the eve of the tour, Carey had to tell the band he couldn't make it, Fletcher says. They scrounged up another drummer, but when the Pigmys got overseas, the folks from Hellhound were pressing them to make commitments they weren't interested in. "That was not a fun tour. The record company had blown us off because we wouldn't do another record," Fletcher explains. "They got us really drunk in a bar one night and shoved a contract in front of us. We signed it, but we had no idea what we'd done. The next day our attorneys back here blew up, and we backed out of it. The record company dropped us in the middle of the tour. We had the tickets home and nothing else. If we didn't have friends there, we wouldn't have gotten out of Germany." Savage remembers the low point of that tour as hearing that yet another friend of theirs had died of an overdose in Santa Monica. "We sat under the Brandenburg Gate, drinking brandy, and cried like babies," he says. Things didn't get better when they got back to L.A. "We came back here and waited and waited. We were always waiting for the great big deal, when there were good deals in front of us. We kind of waited until no one was offering us anything anymore," says Fletcher. Savage knew something had gone badly wrong at one year's Sunset Junction Street Fair, when he was wandering around and saw Pigmy albums being sold by one of the trinket vendors. "The guy was like, "Wax images of Christ! Pigmy Love Circus albums!' That was our distribution network," he says. Predictably, things fell apart. In 1993, Rand -- the Pig -- split for Fort Worth, Colorado. "He fell in love with a girl and they literally fled from her ex-lover under the cover of night," Shepherd says. "I really don't think he ever liked L.A. much. He never listened to any "popular' music. We'd be like on a radio show and the host would tell him to pick out something to play and he'd be like, "I have no idea what you're playing nowadays.'" Shepherd enrolled in film school at Cal State Northridge, and staggered into his first 12-step meeting. "Somebody told me that whatever else happens in life, you don't want to wind up as the 45-year-old guy hanging out at Gazzari's [a now defunct Sunset Strip club that was the spiritual home to some of L.A.'s worst heavy-metal musicians] with some underage bimbo and a pile of blow. And it hit me -- that was exactly where I was going." Savage sobered up, too. His third marriage behind him, he got a Screen Actors Guild card and started doing movies, TV and commercial work, just bits and pieces. The realization that they'd pissed away their opportunity to make it big led to frustration and infighting. Savage started singing with other bands. "The Pigmys fired me," he says simply. In 1995, Fletcher grabbed his guitar and his wife and headed back to Colorado. "The club scene had changed; all these places got taken over by Armenians and Koreans. And you couldn't smoke anywhere. No one seemed interested in playing anymore. It was such a hassle to go out. And without my beloved Pigmys, I had no reason to be here," he says. For all practical purposes, the Pigmys were in a deep coma. But the band wouldn't die so easily. In 1999, Fletcher moved back to Los Angeles. He'd left because he wanted to play guitar, but had no one to play with or come hear him play in L.A., so that's what he did in roadhouses all over Colorado. He played everything from Thin Lizzy to Neil Diamond covers, going from gig to gig, "developing fingers of iron. One day my wife just said, "You're wasting your time here,' and we moved back to L.A.," he says. Within two weeks, he hooked up with Savage, Shepherd and Carey again and they were gigging, playing the closing night at Bar Deluxe. "Some douche bags before us had smeared marshmallows all over the stage, and it was like a fucking ice rink up there," Fletcher complains. Someone offered them a show at the House of Blues, and they jumped at the chance. In the meantime, Carey's band Tool had become huge, its 2001 album, Lateralus, debuting at the top of the Billboard charts. Carey was doing OK financially, had the money to equip his loft with the finest in recording gear and musical instruments (he's got a solid brass drum set that reportedly cost $25,000) and, most importantly, had connections in the industry. When someone offered the Pigmys $50,000 to record another album, they thought long and hard about it -- and turned it down. In this business, you give up a lot of things for the privilege of using someone else's money to record -- things like control over what songs appear on an album and other artistic issues. Besides, Carey was willing to let them record for free in his loft. When it came time to put the finishing touches on the new album, Carey brought in a guy named "Big Bass" Gardner to work his magic on the mix. Gardner's worked with artists from Tupac Shakur to David Bowie. Expertise like that gives a garage band some credibility when it comes time to meet with record companies. The Pigmys' album is scheduled for release early next year. Fletcher got back his old job at the LA Weekly as operations coordinator and started publishing his rantings on his own Web site, legitimatebitch.com. Shepherd graduated from film school and started working as an art director on various films and television shows. He's actually taking music lessons now, studying bass theory, learning how to really play. "A lot of people I knew looked at me when I was in my early 30s and thought I was living the greatest life," he says. "But we were living off our girlfriends, didn't have shit, and after a while, I just had to figure out if I really wanted to still be a musician when I grew up. I did. I got into doing films because there was plenty of time to still be a musician." Savage suffered a minor setback after about four years of sobriety. "I was sitting on a beach in Hawaii one night, it was clear and warm and I was thinking, "God, wouldn't it be great to get high?' And someone rode up with some killer bud and a Foster's, you know, the oil can. I grabbed it and drank it down in three gulps. Three years later, I walked home through Hollywood from a party at 4:30 in the morning wearing nothing but a hat and some boots. I went back to meetings the next day." One of Savage's biggest joys these days is his daughter, who just became general manager of a Target store in Arizona. He's just quit smoking, too, or at least he hasn't done it for a few weeks now. He's getting old and can't ignore some of the stuff that didn't bother him when he was younger. "You know, I get up nowadays and there's a pain that wasn't there when I went to bed and I start to panic a little," he says. They may be a little older, but live, the Pigmys haven't lost a step. "Being a Pigmy transcends everything. When I came back and we went to our first rehearsal, it was like putting on a really good pair of shoes that you'd lost and you never wore enough," says Fletcher. One of their most recent shows was last summer at the Sunset Junction Street Fair, the festival they once were thrown out of. The band sounded tight, and for anyone who knows its history, there was a bit of poignancy when they burst into "Face Bit Dog" and its chorus, "I'm an angry...old...man!" Savage lurched onto stage wearing a loin cloth, aboriginal body paint and a Mexican wrestling mask, and the moshing in front of the stage was as enthusiastic as ever. "Some guy came up to me a few weeks later and handed me a tooth," Savage says. "And he goes, "Dude, I lost this in the moshpit at your show!' And I thought, Now that was a Pigmys show." lost and you never wore enough," says Fletcher. One of their most recent shows was last summer at the Sunset Junction Street Fair, the festival they once were thrown out of. The band sounded tight, and for anyone who knows its history, there was a bit of poignancy when they burst into "Face Bit Dog" and its chorus, "I'm an angry...old...man!" Savage lurched onto stage wearing a loin cloth, aboriginal body paint and a Mexican wrestling mask, and the moshing in front of the stage was as enthusiastic as ever. "Some guy came up to me a few weeks later and handed me a tooth," Savage says. "And he goes, "Dude, I lost this in the moshpit at your show!' And I thought, Now that was a Pigmys show.