B (Bugbee)

L (Lloyd)

aM (and Meehan)

pic by Correy Harris. Pics of B & L by David Persoff

hear "Angel's Flight" (music: Bugbee. words: DNL) © 1980 by Bugbee/Lloyd

Like cowboys leaping from the roof of a saloon into the saddles of horses that have already wandered off to greener pastures, BLaM leapt through thin air onto the nothing they thought was the emerging LA new wave scene.

I remember chatting with Richard D'Andrea, bassist for the Know after a show at Golden West College one night. "The LA scene is about to happen big," let's have him say. His words were to that effect and who then could have correctly countered: "It's already happened. It was a dud."?

There was still plenty of heavy talent yet to be recognized if not exploited. I counted BLaM as part of that talent. Like most of the bands at the end of the 70s, BLaM could be seen and heard at such glory holes as Madame Wong's in Chinatown and Santa Monica (both upstairs and down), Club 88, the Castle Peak Inn...

An acronym for Bugbee, Lloyd, and Meehan, BLaM lived in LA together on Manhattan and 6th in a once-beatiful old house full of red carpet, mirrors, wood paneling, and two girlfriends (neither of them mine). Built around 1902, BLaM House (as we called it) had once been quite magnificent. By the time we got to it, it had long since fallen into disrepair. Bugbee and Meehan (whom I shall now call John and Pat) converted its small basement into a rehearsal space and though we should have played more, we played enough to get good.

Pat Meehan was a power drummer, all splinters and hemoglobin. He had met Keith Moon one night on the beach at Malibu shortly before the latter's untimely severance. Somehow the power, the spirt of Moon transmogrified into Meehan, making the latter one of LA's more spectacular drummers. The singer/guitarist (myself) little knew that behind him the drummer was traveling a ritual Via Dolorosa at every performance. Pat felt it meet and right to put himself through this endurance of stamina and pain.

Not that I wasn't sweating it. I became the Nutty Professor of the band: executing Townshendental windmills while bellowing fairly literate lyrics which Meehan's father had told me would get me "nowhere in the roll and rock business. Put down your iron guitar, David" he said one night, "and listen to this." 'This' was the Clancy Brothers singing 'Rosin the Bow.' The old bear crooned along with the scratchy old LP:

I hear that old tyrant approaching.
That cruel remorseless old foe.
So I lift up my glass in his honor.
Take a drink with old Rosin the Bow.

Tempting as it was, it was not yet time to put down the iron guitar. Instead I sang (bellowed):

People say us teenagers do not believe in God.
Untrue 'cuz God told us Himself He's tired of the facade.
Your pearls of pious wisdom were not destined to be mine.
Jesus told you not to cast your pearls before swine.
I used to wish I'd gone into seclusion as a monk.
Today I'm quite content to be a dharma punk.*

*copyright 1976 by David Nigel Lloyd

BLaM at Club 88

Pat and I had known each other for many years. We had gone to high school together. We had been members of the same church gang. When I returned to LA in 1975, I became his brother-in-law for nearly three years. It took us four years to find the right bass player: John Bugbee.

Bugbee was the hippest and coolest of BLaM. With a matching jacket and amplifier, he had the best clothes and best record collection and was the only one of us who knew (a) what new wave rock was really all about and (b) that we weren't it. Instead of trying to up our NEW-W Q, however, John encouraged just the opposite. He insisted on adding my song "How First I Saw Venus" to our repertoire, a song which I had felt just wasn't New Wave. It turned out to be one of our best pieces. He also had a sadistically dadaistic streak in him: He loved that loping-along riff which underpins the old cowboy song, "Happy Trails." He would play that figure as a sort of mindless ostinato. It swelled into this five minute BLaM jam which, twice, by accident happened in front of real audiences. When John's expression was not deadpan, it revealed a cosmic laughter.

As a bassist, John was an extremely frustrated guitar player. He played through a Fender twin reverb guitar amp plugged into a bass cabinet. He would pull out the overdrive feedback knob and produce great earthy howls which was how he began our cover of The Animals' "When I Was Young." John's sound was mean nasty and vigorous. I just thought he couldn't afford a real bass amp. In retrospect, I think of him as one of the best players on the scene.

John taught me how to mute my strings with my right palm. It's an old trick, but I still use this technique when playing acoustically. I wrote words to two of John's songs. These became the songs: "Angel's Flight" and "The Only Surfer Girl in Town."

At first we were a four piece called Wild Oscare. Our fourth member was Neal Warner,* an underground comic book artist and also an animator. The four piece sound was more mild than wild and so, with the name change, we proceeded without Neal. It took seveal months to fill the musical gap he left, however.

But by 1980, we were a very good band. Our late friend Phil Kemp used to act as our booking agent and, from time to time, recorded us with his Teac reel to reel four-track recorder. These recordings were of limited success. One day we recorded four songs at Mixdoctor's 8-track recording studio. Listening to the playback, I realized that BLaM sounded exactly as I wanted a rock band to sound. If only we had had the dollars and sense to record more songs.

Then, just as we'd finally discovered ourselves artistically, we did what so many bands in similar circumstances did: we broke up. But not before film maker Bill Ohanesian shot a documentary on both our demise and our farewell performance. It's coming to a theater ... probably not very close to you at all and ...sooner than later.

*After Neal left Wild Oscare, he started a hilarious band called Womanizer. After the demise of BLaM, Pat would become their drummer. They became the Tooners as in cartooners and often performed my song "Machine Gun Danny." You can see and hear their cartoon version by clicking on the link below.

The Tooners sing DNL's "Machine Gun Danny"

Bill reads: "I want my shirt. (He want's

his shirt.) It was a present from my brother Bert." Bert Lloyd? [pic by David Persoff]

Pat, John, DNL

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