“Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark”: https://amzn.to/33Quj7d

She’s a rock chick!

The first, and in truth maybe the only, time I saw Elvira’s TV program was back in 1981, she had just gone on the air, and this woman I’d spent the night with turned it on and testified. I didn’t take it too seriously, I didn’t even own a TV, and this kind of programming was taboo in my house growing up, cheesy movies on television during the day. Watching TV during the day was illegal in my house. Soap operas? Old movies? My mother would freak out and insist we go outside, assuming we were home to begin with, not at the JCC for Biddy basketball or the swim team. Everybody competed, didn’t matter if you weren’t good. Which was sometimes obvious, like in swimming, Michael Jacob was seconds faster than everybody else.

But the non-Jews… They’d talk about lazing on the couch, watching the tripe. There was barely a free moment in my growing up.

Now I have some vivid memories of that relatively brief relationship, not all good, but seeing Elvira was one of them. Not that I expected her to go anywhere. These off-network TV hosts never did. At best they were regional stars.

But when I saw Cassandra Peterson’s book on the Libby app…

That’s her real name. Once she got traction, we learned this. And that in truth her hair was far from black. And didn’t I hear that she ultimately came out as a lesbian? Maybe I’m confusing her with somebody else. But you know how when they hype these books they always focus on the supposedly salacious moments.

So I’d run out of worthwhile things to read. And I found this area of the Libby app that allowed you to borrow desirable books immediately, but just for a week. And not only did I find Elvira’s, but Dave Grohl’s and Colin Jost’s. So I took them all. I used to live a block from the library. This was de rigueur. I’d take home seven or nine books, and skim them all but really only read one.

I started with Grohl’s. I wish he’d go away for a while. But he’s anything but a traditional rock star. He’s nice and far from dangerous, whereas the performers of the sixties and seventies… The intro was interesting, with Dave in the bowels of Madison Square Garden with two classic rockers, one all pumped, in a tight t-shirt, with plastic surgery and hair dye, the other old and grizzled. Dave decides right then and there he’s going to do nothing to his appearance, he’s not going to fix his teeth chipped on microphones, he’s going to age, if not gracefully, realistically. But then I couldn’t read anymore. I know too much about Dave already.

As for Colin Jost’s… I only made it about a page and a half. I realized I probably heard all the juicy parts in his extended Howard Stern interview. Traveling to Manhattan for school, going to Harvard and being initially rejected by the Lampoon. And despite living with a movie star, Jost is normal and likable, but did I really want to spend the time?

No. So then I cracked Cassandra Peterson’s book and immediately got hooked.

The story starts with her on her honeymoon. Her friend called to tell her to return to L.A. for a gig that was perfect for her, i.e. Elvira. And unlike in seemingly every memoir, Peterson does not come back. But when she ultimately does it turns out they still haven’t filled the role, she goes in and immediately gets the job. It’s her sense of humor. Everybody else took it seriously.

And it’s Peterson’s sense of humor that carries the book.

My Kindle opened to it. I was planning to move on. I’d finally gotten some books worth reading. But she was talking about go-go dancing, and…I just couldn’t put it down. I would have stayed up all night reading it if I hadn’t had an appointment this morning. Ditto on writing this last night. But ultimately I believed I should finish the book first. I haven’t. I’m only 23% in. But I can’t hold back.

So she has a hardscrabble background, well, her parents did, but when she was young the family moved from Kansas to Colorado Springs and… Her parents stayed together and strived, an anomaly in these stories, and Cassandra now called “Soni,” her name was pronounced with a soft “a,” not a hard one, was living the life of a suburban on the edge of the wild, even riding a horse, and then her boobs arrived, and they were big.

And then she went boy crazy.

Well, really musician crazy. She became a local groupie.

Now talking about boobs and using the pejorative “groupie,” the word police are gonna come after me. But those are Peterson’s words. Funny how she’s honest, but there are so many men sticking up for women who don’t feel that way. Yes, if I write anything that can be perceived as sexist, I hear from the men much more than the women. Kind of like Latinx. I don’t know a single Latino, and I know many, I live in Southern California, who thinks this is a reasonable descriptor. But the white people, looking to be proper, have foisted this moniker upon them. Crazy.

So the boobs arrive, and like I said they were big, actually they helped cement Peterson in her ultimate career, and music was everything so she and her buddy decided to chase down musicians. They found out what hotel they were staying at. Knocked on doors. They needed to get closer to the music. And if you weren’t a musician, they weren’t interested.

So Soni and her buddy find the Yardbirds in the local hotel. And it’s not long before Jimmy Page has her back in his room and as they get close to doing the do, she exclaims she’s a virgin and runs out into the hall, wearing just her bra above her waist.

You see Soni is living the life of the wild fast girl, but she’s a good girl underneath.

She gives Eric Burdon a ride back to his hotel, and he wants what he believes is promised, and she runs out again, but this time realizes she left her car keys behind and has to return and…

Then there’s the time she’s in a backstage trailer with Jimi Hendrix. The last time the Experience performed together. They’re having an honest conversation, he kisses her on the lips and gives her his phone number, telling her to call after the show. Which she does, but he’s so messed up on drugs he doesn’t make sense on the phone, never mind another girl picking up the handset after the ring.

This was par for the course back in the sixties and seventies.

That is not how it is today.

Maybe this ran through grunge. But then the groupie paradigm died.

You’ve got to understand, back in the sixties and seventies, music was EVERYTHING! And if you were an attractive woman, looking to make headway, the doors were open.

But it wasn’t only at rock concerts. And with musicians. This was rampant throughout America. Girls reached puberty and went boy crazy and their Depression-era parents didn’t know how to handle it, if they were even aware of it. And the goal was to go on your adventures and do your best not to be caught. And don’t forget, when you’re a teenager you have no fear.

But all that’s been killed by the internet. And social media. And smartphone cameras.

That’s one of the reasons the boys became musicians. To get laid, after all they couldn’t talk to these girls. And they really weren’t interested in talking, they wanted sex, and in most cases they got it. Hell, Grand Funk Railroad even wrote their best song about it, with the dearly departed Sweet Connie’s act in the opening verse. And she was in LITTLE ROCK! At that point, long before Bill Clinton’s ascendance, Little Rock was seen as a backwater, most people had no idea where Arkansas was, never mind Little Rock, but the music message even made it there. And even in Omaha, as the song said.

Yes, the music was everywhere. And there was a distinct dividing line. Our parents were clueless. And they were not interested, our music was crap. And don’t equate this with rap, the belief that every generation listens to music their parents hate is just plain wrong. There’s always been music. But with electric guitars, and amplifiers, and jet travel, and transistor radios, and the baby boom, the stage was set for those who could now pay their dues to spread their sound. We all glommed on. We had nothing else to do, other than to watch dud TV. We were glued to the Top Forty countdown, and then FM. We spent all of our allowance on records. And the musicians? They didn’t want to become brands, they were anti-establishment, they didn’t do anything that didn’t feel right, selling out was anathema. Furthermore, the musicians were rich! And ultimately behaved however they wanted, destroyed hotel rooms…there were no billionaires.

It was exciting. The ultimate goal was to get backstage. Forget that it’s usually boring, we all wanted ACCESS! We just had to get closer, to these gods. Who made this MUSIC!

Yes, the music came first.

And Cassandra Peterson had access.

Meanwhile, she was dancing in clubs as an underage teenager. Living a life so deep and rich, despite being far from the beaten path. It wasn’t like today, where life is hard, where you have to start a career right after college, where you have to go to college, you could exist on a minimum wage, and live quite nicely on not much beyond that.

So ultimately Peterson becomes a member of the Groundlings, forget college, and when she’s just about to give up, at age 30, she gets the Elvira gig.

I haven’t gotten to that part of the book yet. I mean after she becomes Elvira. But I just can’t get over how Peterson nails the sixties. Which have been forgotten by all those who weren’t there, and believe me, everybody who was remembers, no matter how many drugs they took.

But today, the hoi polloi are influencers trying to build a business, and the musical stars put merch above music, never mind with so much information available they’ve been pulled down from their pedestals. Sure, prepubescent people still pledge fealty and adore “musicians,” but back in the sixties there were twentysomethings who were just that dedicated to the music and its makers. In truth, the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. And this was years before every famous musician testified about doing it with the Lord’s help. Hell, no one in their right mind would watch the Grammy telecast, that was for out of touch old people.

Today the world is much smaller. Nowhere is off the grid, not even the summit of Mt. Everest. We’re all connected, light has been shined into every nook and cranny. Mystery is history. And everyone is striving for an audience and a hit. A hit? That was the last thing on the mind of these artists. It was about honest expression, and that’s what resonated. And hype didn’t sell these records, but word of mouth. Most people bought “Are You Experienced” without ever hearing the music on the radio. At a time when free-form underground FM was only in San Francisco and New York anyway. But when they were at their friend’s house, and they heard that opening riff of “Purple Haze” coming out of the speakers, they needed to have their own copy.

We were all music crazy. And the straight world didn’t catch on until years later. 400,000 at Woodstock? This was stunning to the older generation, you mean the music meant that much to these people?

It absolutely did.

And over years the rules became codified, the business was tightened up. Led Zeppelin instituted the 90/10 split. Labels did their best to cross hits over to AM, and then promoted them on the now ubiquitous FM. And although the entire empire collapsed because of cynical manipulation in 1979, MTV revived the power, by pushing the envelope. Which lasted at least through the time the first veejays were canned.

But then the music television outlet had non-music programming. And although grunge killed the hair bands and their lowest common denominator ballads, rock died thereafter, it became about uber-expensive videos, authenticity was out the window. Hip-hop blew up, based on its truth, and then…

Well, you probably know the rest.

But before that, it was radically different. And if you want to know how it was, read Cassandra Peterson’s book, she delineates it perfectly!