Lydia Lunch: the Goth Don Rickles

Live Show Review

First off, my apologies that I haven’t posted in a month. I’ve been furiously working on a new manuscript—a memoir that you will definitely like. More details to come very soon!

This is the best pic I dared take during the performance. I didn’t want Lydia to see me dicking around with my phone while she was onstage.

I saw Lydia Lunch last night at The Philosophical Research Society, yet another venue in LA that I had no knowledge of previously but has a ton of great programming and events. It’s in Los Feliz in a location I drive past twice a week, and I’ve never noticed it. LA has too much cool stuff for most of it to gain traction—these lineups in a smaller town would make it the most popular subculture entertainment venue.

There was a spoken word scene in the 1980s that birthed out of the punk scene, and this is the world that shaped me artistically. The Mount Rushmore of this scene is Exene Cervenka, Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra, and Lydia Lunch. There were lots more involved, but those were the big four for sure. You can pick out any spoken word performer who came up after them and categorize them like astrological signs. Personally, I’m a Henry Rollins with a Lydia Lunch rising. Julia Vinograd, a staple of Bay Area Poetics, once (over 30 years ago now) called me a “Henry Rollins clone” as an insult but I wore it as a badge of pride from then on. It still makes me feel good.

After a short memoir piece from opener Zoe Hansen, Lydia took the stage, reading multiple pieces and requesting that we not “interrupt” with applause. As far as I could tell, it was all new writing. I didn’t record it so I will not quote any lines from it, and I don’t think quoting lines out of context from a live spoken word piece is a good idea anyway. Ever seen a standup comic’s joke in print? Without the timing and delivery, it loses too much of its original artistry. But I will tell you it lived up to expectations. It’s Lydia Lunch poetry, all right.

But the conversation with Ron Athey afterwords was the real gem. I love seeing Lydia talk candidly. She spits out ideas and opinions so much more quickly than in her writing, rambling from one topic to the next. She has a perspective and has already thought about the answer to any question you might ask, so what you get is a reply like a verbal prison shank.

Ron Athey is 61. When I got my first tattoo at 19, people were like “you’ll regret that when you’re 50” and “How do you think you’ll look at 60 with a bunch of tattoos?” Well, maybe I’ll look this good. God damn. And most of the naysayers look like sacks of hot garbage right now.

But one thing I hadn’t seen before was who she reminded me of: Don Fucking Rickles. Not the Don Rickles of standup records such as Hello Dummy!, but the Don Rickles who appeared on so many late-night talk shows.

What if Rickles had been in Richard Kern’s Fingered? What if Johnny had done performance art with Rozz Williams?

When Rickles got asked a question, he often answered back in insult form, often staring back at the audience, mugging for approval. Lydia did the same thing to Ron, shooting softball questions right back into his crotch. It was all done in the context of respect and mutual admiration, and the most effective barb was Lydia telling everyone how huge his dick was, which shut him down immediately.

In the ‘70s, I learned about the world of adults from talk shows and game shows. There were less famous people back then, but they got a wide societal scope. There was no reason for me to know who Paul Lynde was aside from Hollywood Squares, and there was no way a Rickles comedy record was going to be played in my house. But I was aware of this world that existed outside my hometown that was populated with a rotation of a few dozen Johnny Carson guests.

I wonder if this is what my subcultural heroes look like to Gen Z: a bunch of old weirdos that are supposedly famous, but they don’t know exactly why. All of us old folks were at the show because of what Lydia meant to us at one point in our lives and we want to see what she’s still doing. But what of the people who were walking in for the first time?

Well, here’s the thing: with the wide range of choices for entertainment, people who aren’t already into a thing won’t be watching it unless their romantic partner shows it to them. When there were three or four choices of what to watch on television, we usually watched something, regardless of what it was or for whom it was intended. If I had cartoons available on a streaming service, I never would have ventured to the Tonight Show. I started watching Late Night with David Letterman only because the station previously showed Star Trek reruns in that time slot, and I erroneously expected that to be on when I hit the power button.

Other things I liked in the last month

I read a book called Fuck America by Edgar Hilsenrath, which was a book about an urban fuckup. If you liked Bukowski’s Factotum, you’ll probably like this.

The Day of the Beast is streaming on Kanopy and Hoopla right now. It’s my Halloween pick along with 1977’s The Sentinel. TDotB is a weird Spanish film about Satan having his child born on Christmas, and The Sentinel is a haunted apartment building flick, probably greenlit to live in the wake of Rosemary’s Baby.

I listened to tons of Freddie Hubbard, a jazz horn player, whom you’ve probably heard from the sample on Us3’s “Cantaloupe.” The sample is from Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloup Island,” on which Hubbard plays the horn part. I usually listen to music without lyrics when I’m writing, and this was the main prompt for the month.