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writings
Work Music
NYC's Number One Antidrugsex Band
The Saga of the Workdogs
Horse: The True Story
Dog daze
Maxwells, 6-2-89
Goin' Down Under
WORKDOGS
There's No Tomorrow for Red
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Horse: The True Story
by George Petros
HORSE is the hip name for Heroin. A HORSE is a wooden barricade that prevents cars from taking forbidden routes. HORSE rock is a mass of rock, within a mineral vein, which possesses the same geological characteristics as the surrounding wall rock. A HORSE is an animal that you get on top of and ride into the ground. HORSE is a dirty game that little children play with hip adults. Remember?
Actually, HORSE is the estranged rhythm section from Gary Puckett & The Union Gap combined with some of New York's neo-psychedelic acid-rockers and a Japanese guitarist.
Malcolm McLaren produced their debut album Sucked in By Lucky Horseface. I did a McLaren article/interview in November. He insisted that information about HORSE be omitted, but after it appeared in The Face, Malcolm mysteriously asked me to print the rest of it in the American press. What can I say? Here it is.
My friends, if you think Gary Puckett and his former band is yesterday's news, think again. If you think acid is the stuff to throw in someone's face, you're only part right. And if you think Japanese rock is anything like the lame bullshit over here, you're way off base.
PETROS: It's surprising that you got involved with a band like Horse.
McLAREN: It all goes together.
PETROS: Together with what?
McLAREN: What's the difference? People know or they don't know - it doesn't make any difference to me.
Gary Puckett & The Union Gap was an organized crime-connected band that had a cycle of hit songs celebrating a girl's transition from innocence to maturity. Young Girl, This Girl Is A Woman Now, Lady Willpower, Woman Woman, and so on… Gary claims that Colombia refused to issue the songs in their proper order as a sex-rock opera, instead scrambling their release sequence. Problems arose between Gary and The Union Gap and Colombia and the distributors and the musicians' union and the Big Boys… problems that persisted long after the last faded eight-track cartridge of Gary Puckett & The Union Gap's Greatest Hits Volume Six had become a garbagey proto-fossil shooting streams of billowy, loopy tape along the highway.
Last year, Gary Puckett went to prison for tax evasion and drugs and forgery, leaving his band members hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
Shortly after his incarceration, he was savagely gang-raped. Two days later, in the prison infirmary, he attempted to hang himself, and almost succeeded. Gary went into a coma on February 14th, the same date on which some of his more enterprising band members said good-bye to the legal jurisdiction of California and set out for New York.
Last year, America's Promoters - and you know exactly who I mean - took a pass on the New York acid-nouveau bands, leaving them to suffer their own unfinanced fates. America's Promoters instead pursued and abused the cocainized offspring of the FM Radio Revolution.
Last year, the Japanese police cracked down on "punk rock." They didn't need any more judeo-christian mindfuck propaganda over there. Punk rockers who couldn't do anything else profitably had to leave.
PETROS: So who was The Union Gap?
McLAREN: Let's name them: Jason Schriber, the rhythm guitarist; Scotty "Jarvis" Miller, the drummer; and Robby Kennedy, who played bass. The Union Gap was essentially a front for low-echelon mafia operations. Their years of touring on what those in the know call "the extortion circuit" and cruising the hard-meat circuit had fucked them up good.
PETROS: And who were the acid-rockers?
McLAREN: Let's name them too. Jerry "Asif Chaundri" Williams, guitarist, sitarist, and co-founder of Missing Foundation, and Mikey Rohoff, bassist who had played with Patti Smith, My Mother My Whore, and a gay orchestra.
PETROS: And who was the Japanese guy?
McLAREN: His name was Samoa and he was in a band called Bozo's Penis that had a number six record in Japan. He got the opportunity to play with Billy Idol, and that meant a green card and money. Over the next few months he also played with David Johansen, the Village People and Sam Flatterer.
Gary survived his suicide attempt. Lost and confused in his comatose nightmare world, Gary got his recent history all mixed up. He dreamed that his former band members had robbed him, drugged him, imprisoned him, raped him, and tried to kill him. His coma-dream's correlative neurochemistry caused some memories to be replaced by dream-generated misinformation. When Gary came out of his coma, the misinformation was translated into subjective facts. From the moment he was able to speak, feverish assurances of vengeance were barked at anyone present.
The Union Gap survived. They faded into the love-hate matrix of NYC's gay S&M rock scene, abandoning themselves to torrents of whatever while keeping an eye peeled for new opportunities.
The acid-rockers survived. They smashed their parent's faces in with strawberry alarm clocks and suffocated their little sisters with surrealistic pillows and caused iron butterflies to excrete wheels of fire within you and without you.
And the Japanese new wave musicians survived on New York's rock scene, which was dominated by talentless trust-fund recipients.
PETROS: Gary Puckett - who was he really?
McLAREN: You mean after he bounced back into shape in no time flat and was moved from the prison infirmary to a private hospital? Well, three psychiatrists pronounced Gary sane as Sigmund Freud Himself. Not one of them realized he was burning with the hypnotic revenge imperative to kill his former band members. Anyway, he got pardoned by the Governor of California.
PETROS: And The Union Gap - who were they really, I mean, in reality?
McLAREN: Honestly? Fucking creep cocksuckers, rip-offs, absolute fucking scum. When they were The Union Gap they sucked; when the routines had worn out and the cum had turned into sour piss, they sucked even more. In New York, Jason worked the midtown bath houses, Scotty hung around Christopher Street, and Robby worked the Times Square bars and J/O joints.
PETROS: The acid-rockers - who were they really?
McLAREN: Samoa was in Mandate and Blueboy. He wore the tightest, hottest outfits you've ever seen. You remember: "He took it all off and took you into another world. He blew your fucking mind back to the year zero." Remember?
PETROS: Yeah. So Puckett's still in L.A. at this point. How did Horse start?
McLAREN: I must have heard this one a million times. Mikey and Jerry were tripping at the bath-house. Scotty and Robby and Jason arrived and they all met and talked and laughed and smoked cigarettes furiously. Samoa was there alone, freaking out, and was gonna tell the awful bitches shut up, when they mentioned forming a band. For Samoa, being in another American band would mean keeping his green card. He decided to talk to them. They were fucking and hooting and hollering up a storm and just about swallowed their tongues when he asked for a light. They were only too pleased to give him one.
PETROS: Interesting. Then what happened?
McLAREN: It came to pass that some previous exploiters of the psychedelic marketing experience threw in their lot with some current exploiters of scum culture. The fusion of yesterday's Union Gap with today's acid underground was the logical outcome of Business Rock. I'll spare you the details because this interview will probably be shortened to make room for a UNICEF advertisement.
PETROS: No doubt. What came next?
McLAREN: Gary was all better, in great shape, and he came to New York to kill his former band members. Remember that he thought they had raped him and everything. They had no idea he was out of jail or had been in a coma.
PETROS: What were they doing?
McLAREN: They played the Downtown Film Festival and toured with Guns & Roses and REM. They were playing at the Limelight with The B-52's on the night Gary got to New York. Everybody knows about that.
PETROS: Tell us again anyway, one more time.
McLAREN: I happened to be with Horse in the manager's office. Whoever was the security person outside the office let Gary in, because he recognized him as some star, if you know what I mean. So Gary walks in and Jason and Scotty and Robby just about die. Gary owes them a fortune, but the band had ripped him off for the rights to the song cycle. All of a sudden, Gary whips out a .45. Everybody freaks out. But Samoa is a fucking Black Belt karate champion. He kicks Gary in the head, just like that, and it's all over… Gary flies against the wall and sort of slides down it. He was just laying there with the side of his head bleeding. I heard later that he was in another coma.
PETROS: That's too much. Then what happened?
McLAREN: Some really weird guys started talking to everybody and calming everybody down. Before I knew it, they had moved Gary somewhere outside, and some girl was passing cocaine and drinks around. They said that they took him to a private hospital. That's all I know.
PETROS: What about Horse?
McLAREN: They went ahead and played. That was the last time I saw them.
PETROS: How come?
McLAREN: I don't know, it just was.
PETROS: So you're not working together anymore?
McLAREN: No. I don't know what they're doing. We finished the album about a week before the Limelight thing. It hasn't come out yet.
PETROS: Why not?
McLAREN: I don't know.
PETROS: How's the music?
McLAREN: It sucks.
PETROS: I see. Could you tell us about the Horse conspiracy thing?
McLAREN: That there's these lies and conspiracies? It's pretty cool. For example, The Grateful Dead Zeppelins were raped and murdered on Christmas Eve. Neil Jung was strangled by a prostitute on Valentine's Day. Louie Reed died from injecting feces-tainted heroin on Thanksgiving. See what a coincidence that all is? And the last three Beatles were blown to bits by the IRA on the anniversary of John Lennon's assassination. Some coincidence. But here's the one that takes the cake: on New Year's Eve, the Rolling Stoned Bourgeoisie got hunted down like wild animals and violated by black cops, down by the river-side. They were held captive and tortured for awhile, and then killed - on Ruby Tuesday. Now that's a fucking coincidence!
PETROS: You can say that again. Anything else about Horse?
McLAREN: Nope.
That's enough information for now - you can draw your own conclusion.
GEORGE PETROS
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