A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin Read online

  That [decision] meant I had no more interest in formal education. It meant I had to put the band ahead of everything else. We needed to practice; we needed to get gigs; we needed to create our own songs; we needed to design our own visuals. I was heavily inspired by the theatricality of bands like The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Who. I wanted to blow things up on stage. I would put huge sheets of flash paper between the vox amps and they would ignite at a certain point, and then I had smoke coming out of the sleeves of the outfit I was wearing. I always wanted special effects mixed in with the rock n roll music. That’s what my group, TNT, was all about — explosive sounds and explosive visuals.

  What kind of music did you play?

  In the beginning, we called ourselves The Avengers (after the TV show), and our music was kind of derivative of the California surf music and early rhythm and blues stuff like The Rolling Stones. Then when Chris and I got kicked out of school and we went our separate ways, I started to get involved with other people’s bands. I was in a band called The May Wines with guitarist Jeff Briskin and drummer Bob Krasnow. And most of that stuff again was related to what the Stones had taught us. There was a wealth of music in the Southern rhythm and blues tradition, so we were very much into Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Junior Walker, those kinds of artists. We did their music but with more of a rock flavor. And I always sang with a slight Southern twang because it just sounded better. I didn’t want to sound like me. I wanted to create a persona. So most of the early stuff was [blues standards], and then I started writing songs that really were more about “got the girl, got rejected.” Sometimes it was “girl’s not gonna live much longer if she keeps this up.”

  Like the Beatles song “Run for Your Life.”

  Yeah. It’s funny because if you listen to most of those early Beatles songs, the lyrics are a lot of “he said, she said” stuff. The Stones added a darker twist. So even if you were not really trying to piss off your parents…

  I would think that getting kicked out of school would have done that…

  My mother would always roll with the punches. And eventually my father just threw up his hands and said, “I don’t understand him. I don’t know what any of this means.” At that point, I think he was just ready to sell me to the highest bidder. That was the period where…I wasn’t a movie person any longer. I still went to the movies and loved the movies, but I was more interested in being on stage and having girls watching me. Suddenly I felt like I was accepted and doing something that certain people could understand and relate to. The song lyrics all came out of that.

  We had a manager — this guy named Jim Demarco, who was sort of tied into what was in those days called the Freak Scene in Los Angeles. That was the Laurel Canyon crowd: Frank Zappa, Mothers of Invention, Fraternity of Man, and the guys from The Factory. It was the beginning of the psychedelic era, and the music that we were creating started to go from rhythm and blues into much more abstract noise. A lot of feedback and a lot of distortion.

  Around that time, one of the Mothers of Invention, Elliot Ingber, took a liking to our group. We were young and didn’t know what we were doing, so he became a kind of mentor. He was a complete stoner-type mentality, with huge afro hair and beard, and he would sit down and talk to us about how the music had to be. He’d say to our guitarist, “You need to play a…orange spider going up a…purple cobweb…you know what I’m saying?” And we were like, “Yeahhhhh…Let’s play something like that.” So the songs suddenly became “Happy Being High,” and my lyrics got more and more absurd. I was re-reading Alice in Wonderland and anything that I thought I could turn into the kind of abstract lyrics that John Lennon did so well.

  Or Jim Morrison.

  It’s funny that you should mention him, because it was during this period that The Doors became a big hit in Los Angeles, and we were their opening act in a number of the clubs. We got the gigs because we were a very visual act. We weren’t the best musicians, but we had a lot of passion and a lot of energy, and the word on the street was “these guys put on a good show.” A lot of things would happen onstage. We would try to be outrageous as possible. We blew a lot of things up! I would throw myself into the crowd…Whatever came out of my head that day was what we’d do on the stage that night.

  We never had a record label. I never had any sense that we were going to be recording artists. It really was about performing onstage. I did five years of heavy duty rock n roll, where we were occasionally the opening act for bands like The Doors, Love, The Seeds, and whoever came to town — The Animals, Chicago (in the days when they were still known as CTA)…on and on. We were regulars at Pandora’s Box, The Whisky, Gazzari’s and The Hullabaloo, which was the old Earl Carroll’s Vanities across from the Hollywood Palladium. But we never performed outside of Southern California.

  During that period, the Vietnam War was going on. There was an enlistment lottery and, at one point, I was about fifty numbers away from being drafted. I really didn’t know what I was going to do if I got called up. I wasn’t in school and the idea of running to Canada wasn’t very appealing. I was just blindly hoping that I’d figure it out on the day…It was so overwhelming at that age to try to have a game plan for something like that. Some did, but most of us were only focused on music. Thankfully, I never got drafted — I didn’t have to make that choice to go in or not go into the service. I remained focused on trying to be the next Mick Jagger or Jim Morrison.

  Do you have any good Morrison stories?

  Yeah. As I said, we used to open for [The Doors] at the Hullabaloo, which is now the Nickelodeon Theater on Sunset, and then at another place called The Cheetah, which was an old dance hall in Venice. The walls of the Cheetah were covered in silver Mylar so all of the surfaces were reflective. There were these huge screens projecting the psychedelic light-show shit. And in the center of this huge ballroom was a stage that was approximately eight to ten feet off the ground. It was this huge box in the middle of the dance floor. People could dance all around it, and the band had to go up the stairs in the back of this thing. And we had to carry all of our gear up there. Drums, amps, everything.

  One night, The Doors were setting up their gear right after us. They assembled all their equipment and then the house announcer said: “Ladies and gentlemen, The Doors!” The music starts — it was the opening bars of “Break on Through” — but no Jim. The other guys are looking around for him. They know they saw him a few minutes ago somewhere in the house. Finally Jim comes out of some doorway and staggers across the floor, goes up the stairs…and you can tell he is just completely out of it. I don’t know what he was on — maybe Quaaludes or maybe he’s drunk, or some combination of the two. He grabs the microphone, crosses his legs in classic Morrison style and instead of singing he just stands there. Then, for some unknown reason, he decides to do a cartwheel. And he literally cartwheels right off the friggin’ platform. Lands flat on his back on the concrete, ten to twelve feet below, legs out, arms out. And the whole place went silent. We figured he had killed himself. He just came down too hard. We didn’t see him hit his head but we figured he must have, from the way he fell.

  Suddenly he pops up. Looks around. Sees where the stage is. Stands. Goes back up the stairs. Grabs the microphone. Crosses his legs. And starts singing: “Oh the day destroys the night…” He went right into it and did a perfect set, like nothing happened. I don’t know if that fall snapped him back to reality or what, but it was a perfect example of how fucked up he could be, on whatever, and still perform.

  Whenever I’d talk to Jim backstage, I never really got anything out of him other than “Yeah, how you doing? That’s great, man.” I never got any real insight from him, or had a real conversation.

  I managed to cross paths with a lot of the major musicians during that time. Chris Mancini and I — because his father recorded at RCA — would go into RCA all the time, and run into people. One time the Stones were recording there. I think they were doing Aftermath, or th
e album after Aftermath. [5] So here we are and in walk the Stones. We shook hands with each one of them,

  and I remember it was like shaking hands with a limp fish. Very cold. No hearty handshakes. But they were all very nice and very pleasant.

  I also met Jimi Hendrix at the house where Roger Corman shot The Trip. He was there getting stoned. I actually shared a joint with Jimi Hendrix, which was pretty intense. Later we were jamming with him and a bunch of other musicians.

  Your life is a bit like Forrest Gump…

  Sometimes you find yourself in these situations, and you don’t quite understand how or why…but you can’t argue with it.

  What happened with your band?

  Over time, I found it harder and harder to get us real club gigs. We were starting to play frat houses, or backing up transsexual strippers at gigs where we had to start at eleven at night and go until seven in the morning. The thing that finally got me out of rock n roll was the fact that the psychedelic stuff took over and the music was just about jamming noise and screaming. And then all these icons were dying: first Janis [Joplin], Hendrix and Keith Moon, and then of course Morrison. People were dying and the music was getting ugly. At nineteen, I just felt like I didn’t want to be part of it anymore. It wasn’t that I thought I would die. I just didn’t see any future in the rock world.

  I recently read a book on the Laurel Canyon scene. What struck me were the author’s descriptions of the openness and acceptance of the culture. He said that the general feeling in that community in the late 1960s was that people loved everyone around them until someone screwed up. Today, people don’t love anyone unless or until someone does something cool or helpful.

  My first sense of what you’re describing was at the Monterey festival. You’d be walking around and you’d run into Brian Jones, and you could interact in a casual way. He wasn’t like, “I’m a member of the Rolling Stones.” He didn’t have bodyguards around him, preventing you from getting close. He was just part of the scene, you know? So many of the great San Francisco musicians were part of the audience that weekend, and there was an accessibility to them.

  Weed obviously helped to break some of those social boundaries…Alcohol wasn’t really cool. Some people did drink, but that was more for our parents’ generation…And that continued to be the case until hard drugs like coke and heroin became readily available. With that came the demons of real addiction, and I started seeing friends overdosing and dying.

  Then came the Altamont Festival, [6] where a guy was beaten to death. And of course the Manson murders. [7] Suddenly the word in L.A. was “hippies have gone evil.” In places where I had been accepted literally one week before, I was now being asked if I was part of “that Manson group.” I remember not getting served in a couple of restaurants. In the beginning, it was just because they didn’t like hippies. They’d say, “Get out of here and go get a haircut.” Now it was different: “Get out because you could be part of the Manson Family.” I remember a bunch of short-haired Valley guys pulling over one day while I was walking on the sidewalk. I turned and they spit at me. It all started to sour in late ’69.

  The band broke up and then I wasn’t part of anything anymore. I didn’t know where I belonged. I was living with my girlfriend and suddenly our relationship was falling apart. It was a transitional period. I knew something had to change. Out of that came this bizarre moment when I saw an advertisement about pantomime classes in Hollywood. I remembered that somebody had once asked me if I ever studied mime. I didn’t even really know what the word meant, but for some arbitrary reason I went to the class, which was taught by a guy named Richmond Shepard. It sparked my interest in learning how to tell stories physically.

  As a lead singer, I’d already been doing that in my own way. I always wanted to incorporate more and more movement into the songs. So I started writing sketches for the class, and doing my own rebellious, politically-incorrect pieces. From that point on, I started immersing myself in the world of mime.

  It wasn’t long before Marcel Marceau came along to Los Angeles to perform. I went and met him, showed him some of my mime work at this art gallery where he was promoting his book. And he invited me to come to Paris, and study mime with him there. At that moment, I thought, Okay — something just fell in my lap. Now I’m going to leave everybody and everything I know, at nineteen years old, and go to Paris. This made no real sense on a rational level, but it felt like this was the place I needed to go next.

  I had no money. I was still living on the last of the money I’d saved from music gigs. So I got the one and only “normal” job I ever had — working at a warehouse, packing up pharmaceuticals and vitamins. In about six or seven months, I had to earn as much money as I could for Paris. While I was there, there was this huge drug bust and a lot of my fellow workers got thrown out. Suddenly I was in line to be foreman. I’m earning three times as much as I was earning initially, and it seemed to everyone else that I was going to become a company man. But all I was doing was quietly saving as much as I could so that, come September, I had money for the plane and hopefully enough money to live on for a year in Paris.

  Did you have a specific amount that you wanted to make?

  Not exactly. Just as much as I could earn in that time frame. I figured out the budget I had to be on when I got to Paris. The school — by today’s standards, it’s hard to believe — cost about $75 a month. And I went from nine in the morning until six at night, five days a week. $75 a month isn’t much, but when you aren’t making any money and you have to pay the rent, plus airfare…

  I found that the one area I could compromise on was eating. I ate carrots, oatmeal, apples…whatever was the simplest, cheapest food I could get away with. I think I dropped down to about 130 pounds, but I was fine, I was healthy, I was doing all this physical stuff every day to stay in shape. It was like a new chapter of my life beginning in 1970-1971.

  1. Maurice “Navarre” McLoughlin was part of the first graduating class at USC, in 1949.

  2. Dorothy Stratten was murdered in 1980 by her estranged husband. The crime became the basis for two screen adaptations, the 1981 TV movie Death of a Centerfold and the 1983 feature film Star 80.

  3. Peter Lorre died on March 23, 1964.

  4. The Monterey Pop International Music Festival was the first widely-promoted and heavily-attended rock festival. It took place from June 16 to June 18, 1967, in Monterey, California, and featured career-making performances by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding. The festival marked the beginning of the “Summer of Love,” and served as a template for the Woodstock Festival two years later.

  5. Aftermath was the first Rolling Stones album to be recorded entirely in the United States. The album was released in the summer of 1966. It was followed by Between the Buttons, which was released in early 1967.

  6. The Altamont Speedway Free Festival was held on December 6, 1969, in northern California. Promoted as “Woodstock West,” the event turned dark when a young man was killed by a member of the Hell’s Angels. The Angels had allegedly been hired to provide security for The Rolling Stones.

  7. On August 8, 1969, followers of a cult founded by Charles Manson killed five people at a private residence in the hills above Los Angeles. One night later, cult members killed two more victims at a home in the Los Feliz section of L.A. Manson dubbed the attacks “helter skelter,” after a song by The Beatles.

  MGM back lot in 1938 (with arrow pointing to the McLoughlin house). Photo credit: Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives

  Tom with best friend Ron Nachtwey and his kid brother Donald, visiting Frankenstein’s Monster at the Movie Land Wax Museum.

  “Navarre, The Man from Mars.”

  Ethel McLoughlin.

  George Krzyzweski, Steve Goldstein, Tom McLoughlin and Don Silverman are TNT, 1967.

  The May Wines play Pandora’s Box on the Sunset Strip — November 12, 1966.

  Part II: Comedy and Horror

  Marcel Marceau’s School of M
ime / Mr. Hulot / Convincing Woody Allen that he’s funny / Goofing off with Dick Van Dyke / Studying with the stars at Sherwood Oaks / Meeting Frank Capra / Playing the mutant bear / The second fastest gun in the universe / Psychic vampires / A personal ghost story

  Here you are starting your second adult life at the age of nineteen…Did you go straight to Paris?

  First I flew into London and, right away, I felt like I had lived there in another lifetime. I looked out the window and thought, I’m home. I belong here. Maybe it was because I had watched so many Universal horror movies and Sherlock Holmes movies that it seemed so familiar. All I know is that it felt incredibly comforting — which was good because, inside, I was freaking out. I had just left everybody and everything I knew, and I was going to a country where I didn’t speak a word of the native language. I had spent no time preparing to speak French. I was too stubborn. I thought, I’ll pantomime my way through things. I had no idea what I was in for.

  You went to Paris to study mime under Marcel Marceau. What exactly is the curriculum for mime school?