I loved the Bonzo Dog Band, especially Vivian Stanshall, when I was in high school. I'd discovered them, probably like other American kids, in a second-generation film copy of the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" BBC television program which was being shown in the U.S in 1968, probably illegally. I wasn't the world's biggest Beatles fan, but when a friend suggested we go to a midnight screening of the show in Pasadena, I went along. Anything to get out of the suburbs and do something different.
When I was 14, everybody loved the Beatles. I felt compelled not to follow the crowd. My favorite band was the Mothers of Invention. Most of the time I listened to 78s anyway. (I didn't pay much attention to rock 'n roll; that was kid stuff.) That night, I enjoyed "Magical Mystery Tour", but it wasn't a religious experience. Or so I thought until the scene in the program where the Beatles and the other male tourists from the bus went into a strip club. Onstage were the Bonzo Dog Band performing what I would later learn was their classic sendup of '50s American Elvisoid cheese-pop, "Death Cab for Cutie", while a dyed-brunette stripper ground through her moves.
Suddenly the Beatles were totally forgotten. My eyes were glued to the Bonzos, not that I knew who they were. Their lead singer and frontman was a campy but strangely virile, moustachioed blonde presence in a double breasted suit and fedora. You hardly noticed any of the other musicians; he dominated the song, the scene, and in the end, for me anyway, the entire "Magical Mystery Tour." For months I retained a lingering afterimage of the song's lubricious conclusion, in which the stripper yanked off her feather boa and threw it around Stanshall's neck, then flung herself into his arms...not John Lennon's, who had been seen pointedly leering from the front row in various cutaway shots...nor those of Paul, George, or Ringo. In art as in myth, it was the best man who won.
I soon found out who the Bonzos were, and began buying their albums, which were being released in the U.S. I was drawn at first to the fact that they played, at least early on, a lot of hot jazz, music with which I was familiar from my hoard of 78s. No other groups popular in the late 1960s were performing that sort of moldy-fig material. It was so unhip! Then, as I acquired more of their records, I became absolutely nutty about their surreal combination of music (as it turned out, they attacked every style under the sun) and rare humor. Vivian Stanshall's voice and presence seemed to be the driving force behind their sound and their philosophy: he was a Dada chameleon for whom performing seemed to represent a series of mad, inspired absurdist gestures. Oscar Wilde always seemed to be about to step onstage and intone, "One of us has got to go." The other band members (they were all former art students, which explained a lot) contributed greatly to the surreal stew, but in the end the Bonzo Dog Band was really the Vivian Stanshall Show...covered in sequins and smelling of vindaloo.
I managed to see the band when they played the Hollywood Palladium in 1969, a momentous occasion by all accounts. To get there I drove my "new" 1948 De Soto coupe (just purchased for $25 from my English teacher) from Manhattan Beach to the venue. I had only just started to drive and didn't have a learner's permit yet, but this was a show I couldn't miss. It turned out to be the last time the Bonzos, and Stanshall, performed in America.
The ride to Hollywood was bumpy. As I was later to learn, I needed glasses. The car's fluid drive transmission was malfunctioning. It handled like a truck anyway. It's a wonder I didn't kill myself or anybody else, and even more singular that I didn't attract the notice of the LAPD, but I managed to get there and back, and I was infinitely rewarded for my pains by being able to witness what was easily the best. most creative and exhilarating "rock" show I ever attended. I already wanted to be a musician, but after that night my fate was irrevocably sealed. Which was fortunate, because when I got home early the next morning, I was promptly grounded for six months. Writing and recording songs would give me something to do.
Flash forward to 1973. I was 19 and living in London. Before leaving L.A., a friend and fellow musician, the mysterious Blotto Zackaar (where is he now?), had given me a slip of paper with Vivian Stanshall's home address on it. He claimed he'd run into Stanshall in a Hollywood supermarket on the night of the Palladium gig in 1969, and after hanging out for awhile, doing strange things to the vegetables, Stanshall had scribbled down his address in London and casually invited Blotto to drop by for "balls, or highballs" sometime. There was a phone number on the piece of paper, but when I called it, it was disconnected.
The Bonzos had split up in the early '70s, after reforming briefly in 1972 to record a contractually-obligated last album ("Let's Make Up and Be Friendly").Former Bonzo member Neil Innes had gone on to become an early member of Monty Python (a troupe which readily acknowledged its debt to the Bonzos). Today Innes continues to record and perform in a quirky style redolent of his Bonzo Dog days. Following the band's dissolution, Stanshall recorded a couple of solo projects, did some BBC radio programs, and had apparently been paying the bills by using his golden voice for voiceovers.
It would be great to be able to say that I went to the address and knocked, and Vivian Stanshall promptly answered wearing a silk dressing gown (and probably a pair of gigantic pink rubber ears), holding a brandy snifter in one elegant hand, while the strains of a languid fox trot or throbbing African drumming emanated from the morning-glory horn of a Victrola in the parlor beyond. But I didn't, and he didn't. The "Ginger Geezer" biography has filled in some chronological gaps for me, and I now know that by the time I got to London, Stanshall was already on a downhill slide; after splitting up with his first wife (on account of alcoholism, madness...the usual artistic bones of contention) he finally took up residence on a leaky boat, apparently a former submarine chaser, on the Thames. Who knows how long he'd been waiting for his ship to come in?
I never got to meet him. I stayed in London a little less than a year, and haven't been back to England since. Stanshall, tragically, died in 1995 in a fire in his flat on Muswell Hill, London; the blaze was started by a lamp which set fire to a stack of videotapes by the side of his bed, and the blaze rapidly consumed everything in the room as Stanshall lay snoring in a drunken stupor. Friends expressed the opinion that it was a sort of Viking funeral, and that the burned-out Stanshall had wanted to go out that way. Personally, I was saddened that such a genius had to make his exit to such sad music...but then again, it was an absurdly grand ending to a grandly absurd life.
I'm sorry I didn't know Vivian Stanshall, although it's probably just as well I didn't. At any rate, I will be forever grateful to him, and to the Bonzos, for helping me escape the crushing mundanity of L.A. suburbia and my dreary teenage angst, and for throwing open the portals of the absurd, the fantastic, and the hilarious for me. Peace to his ashes!
