A Stray Cat Struts by Slim Jim Phantom Page B

on a few cases, taking nips from my bottle while keeping an eye and ear on what was going on. He was screaming at the manager to get the satellites back and wasn’t having it when he was told that to do that would be impossible. A few of the technical people from the festival were brought in to try to explain it. It wouldn’t have mattered who the band was; once that moment passed, that was that. I guess there must have been more stuff going on in their dressing room, because they looked a bit out of sync and distracted onstage that night.
    I, however, enjoyed the rest of the night. We all watched from the side of the stage and walked around the grounds a little. I drove home with Britt and Nicholai and stayed in my own bed. It was truly a special, magical twenty-four hours in my life and career.
    The next day was another day on the road for us. We had a couple of other big outdoor shows in California as the opening act for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. These were big shows too but not quite the magnitude of the U.S. Festival. We were taking a helicopter again; we were old pros at it by now. A car picked me up; we stopped at the hotel to pick up the others and went to the airport. I got out and went into the lobby. I saw Joe sitting there by himself among a bunch of luggage. He said that they hadn’t had so much fun the night before. I told him he should hang around for a few days and goof off in LA. I said we’d be back the next day and we could hang out. He told me that he had to get back to London “like my ass was on fire.” I asked him why, and he told me, “To vote.” There was a national election the next day in England, and he wanted to cast his vote against Thatcher. That cat really walked the walk on this one. He was flying all the way back to London from LA to cast a vote in an election that would result in a 99 percent victory for the bad guys, but he went anyway, to have his voice heard. That’s dedication.
    The next few days, I’m sure, were good times. The whole week of the U.S. Festival was good times. I do wish someone had offered me stock in Apple instead of the money we were paid, which I’ve definitely blown by now.

 
    7
    The Killer
    The first time I ever met the Killer was in Beverly Hills in 1983. The scene of the encounter was at the old Beverly Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard. I’d been to see him play before at the Palomino, another legendary venue that was an authentic juke joint in North Hollywood on Lankershim Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. As the crow flies, it wasn’t that far from the Sunset Strip, but by that time, it was a different universe. Every country music artist from the 1960s through the 1980s played there. I saw many shows there featuring the original 1950s rockabilly stars, including Wanda Jackson, Carl Perkins, and bawdy rockabilly queen Janis Martin, who called me up onstage, where she was smoking a lipstick-stained, superlong cigarette and drinking a light beer, to announce me to the audience. By then, I was pretty much immune to any public embarrassment. I had already fallen off the drums and down enough staircases in nightclubs and had said enough stupid things in interviews to be thick skinned enough to take a little ribbing onstage from an old gal. In this instance, though, I did feel the back of my neck getting hot when she pulled a makeup pencil out of her handbag and wrote her hotel name and room number on a napkin. All of this was happening while I was standing on her stage with the band sitting behind me waiting to do the next number. I’ll bet I still have that napkin somewhere in a box in deep storage.
    â€œDrugstore Rock and Roll” was an early favorite record. We covered it back in the four-sets-a-night club gigs on Long Island, and we all thought Janis was smoking hot in the picture on the back of her album. The picture was from 1956, and she looked like Elly May Clampett. We didn’t have