ABUSE
Kansas punk history
interview by Jack Partain
(August 2024)
Researching the early days of punk rock in Kansas is sort of like researching the Dark Ages. Everyone knows it happened, but no one is quite sure how. There are few, if any, physical documents that exist that can confirm whatever there is that constitutes a fact (and even those are less than reliable, both the facts and the documents). None of the original venues that hosted the early shows exist anymore. No one saved fliers. And the memories of nearly everyone involved have been clouded from years of exposure to the normal things that make memories fade: neglect, alcohol abuse, mental illness, the monotony of daily life, and, perhaps most importantly, the simple act of believing that because the rest of the world doesn't seem to care about what happens in the fly-over states, that it wasn't important.
But that doesn't mean that the stories are not important. They are. And it doesn't mean that they are not entertaining. They are. And it certainly doesn't mean that they shouldn't be documented. They should. One of the few facts that everyone who knows anything about punk rock in Kansas can agree on is that Abuse was almost certainly one of the first bands in the area to play whatever it is we call "punk rock" today. Abuse was a trio made up of Clay Galbraith (bass & vocals), Chris Garner (guitar), and Willie McNeil (drums), which was formed in 1979 in a living room of a house in Topeka, KS sometime around 1979. They played many shows throughout the area at a time when the venues were dominated by long hairs in bell bottoms and Aerosmith shirts playing "Smoke on the Water" over and over again. Galbraith would go on to spend the majority of his life playing in bands of various genres throughout the area but it is his time in Abuse for which he is most remembered.
PSF: Alright, man, so tell me your story, start from the beginning.
CG: From the beginning? Ok, how far back?
PSF: From day one. Where were you born?
CG: I was born in Los Angeles, California. Gardena, actually, which is in Los Angeles county, in 1958. My father... was a gangster. He and his buddies ran an illegal gambling ring. He was not the lead dude in it, but his buddies were, and that's what he did for a living. It was legal at that time to have card games in houses in Gardena, but it wasn't like Las Vegas where everything was legal. He was always traveling and wasn't home a lot. When he was, he would spend a lot of time at the Los Angeles Forum and the Hollywood Raceway Park betting on horses. He especially liked betting on the surrey races, which are those horses with the little carts and a driver behind them. I asked him once how he could make money betting on that stuff and he said, "well, son, we just always know who is going to win."
Eventually, we moved to Kansas because my mom didn't approve of what was going on in Gardena. But my dad continued to be an outlaw. After World War Two Kansas was sort of wide open. Remember, prohibition was repealed nationally in 1933 but it stayed on the books in Kansas until 19 fucking 48. But after that Kansas was crazy. We moved to Topeka and there was a military base there at the time and, you know, what happens when the government builds a military base? Bars, whore houses, gambling places, they all pop up all around the base. And nobody cared what you did as long as you weren't hurting anyone so even in the Sixties and early Seventies, Kansas was cool. All these guys came back from beating Hitler and, what? We're gonna tell 'em they can't do what they want? When I was a kid Kansas, and especially Topeka, which is the capital, was cool, man.
However, my dad, he always told me, "Clay, you can't tell anyone what I do for a living." He wasn't mobbed up, and we aren't Italian. He was not in the Mafia. I asked him about it once, and he told me that the connected guys would come to their card games and gamble but, no, he was not in the Mafia. Once in the mid to late 1960s after we had moved to Kansas, he must have had a big hit and made some money because we went on a vacation. We drove out to California and went to Disneyland and everything. On the way there we stopped in Goodland, this tiny little town in western Kansas, middle of fucking nowhere. My dad goes into this mechanics shop. It was like a fix-it place. There was someone working on a car, someone's fixing a refrigerator, someone's fixing a television. Stuff like that. My dad is in there for a little bit and he comes out with this box. And I ask him, you know, dad what's in the box? And he shows me. It's a case of dice. He had a whole set up for shooting craps on him. So, I ask him how much it cost and he told me five hundred bucks. And we head on down the road. A little while later, I'm hanging out with my buddies at the house, playing Monopoly or something like that, just hanging out. And I wanted to show off so I say to my buddies, "hey guys, you know how much a case of dice cost?" And my dad heard me. He called me over to him and said "Clay, we don't talk about that stuff," and told me to keep my mouth shut.
PSF: Wow, I, uh, honestly didn't expect that to be your backstory.
CG: My sophomore year of high school we moved to Las Vegas. My dad was still involved in all of his illegal gambling stuff but things had sort of changed in Kansas because some asshole state attorney general had pledged to clean everything up. This was mid-1970s. My dad got a legit job as a card dealer at the Sahara casino. He later became a pit boss at the Riviera. He got us comped into so many shows and concerts. I saw Elvis. I wasn't 21 so I had be sneaked in. Got to see B.B. King that way, watched the show from the soundboard. Never did get to see Sinatra. My Mom made us go to church. We were Catholic. In Vegas our church was located right off the strip. It accepted poker chips in the collection plate and even took credit cards.
PSF: Poker chips in the collection plate. That's funny.
CG: Vegas was wild, man, really cool. But it was a bad place for me to be because I fell right into the criminal element. I was always this close to going to jail. I went to Las Vegas Valley High School. Now remember, I was born in Los Angeles, but I came up in Topeka, Kansas. I had gone to Highland Park High School in Topeka the year before. I show up in Vegas and I'm wearing cowboy boots, jeans, and a t-shirt. That's how I dressed. So, I get to Vegas, a big high school, walk in... and it's nothing but dudes dressed like John fucking Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Everyone has feathered hair, they're all dressed like they're going to the disco. It's just a bunch of platform shoes wearing jerks. And I was like... "man, I just can't hang. I can't do it with these kids." So, I started hanging out with the black kids.
And then I started selling dope. There is an air force base near Vegas so there were always drugs coming through, probably through the base. I knew these guys that lived near me in an apartment, and they had the connect. They had Thai sticks, hash oil, and some pretty good Columbian weed. I would deliver to the west side of town, that's what they called it, which was not my side of town. One day, me and two friends drive over to the West side to make a delivery at what we were told was an apartment complex but turned out to be a burned-out building. So, we pull up there and it was just like in a movie. This fucking mile-long, all black, Fleetwood Cadillac pulls up and parks in front of us. I'm like "OK... what is this? And really slowly, I mean dramatically slowly, a door opens, and this huge, hulk of a man casually gets out, straightens his suit, turns, and walks up to my window. He leans over and says: "Are you Clay?"
I said yeah, "uh, yeah, I'm Clay." He leans in closer and says: "I want to let you in on something. This is my territory. And you're stepping on my toes. This is your one warning. And you don't get a second. Got it?" I said, "yep, absolutely. I got it." Then he gets in his car and drives off. And the guys I'm with start talking shit, going "oh man, that's Jojo, fuck Jojo!" And turn to them and say, "I didn't hear you guys saying fuck Jojo when he was here, did I?" From then on, I decided to do my business on my side of town.
There was this place called Paradise Park. It was the kind of place where you could off a pound of weed in fifteen minutes if you were either slick enough or stupid enough to try it. And I was stupid enough. One day, me and a buddy and another kid drove up there with our weed all bagged up, ready to go. You'd usually see the same people there, but this day it didn't look right, things felt off. So, I decided to leave. A couple of blocks down the road we're smoking a joint, driving along, and I look over and I lock eyes directly with a fucking cop. I mean he's staring right at me as I am taking a drag from the joint. So, I stay calm, and I tell everyone in the car: "Ok, don't everybody turn and look but there's a cop right there on Sahara, and he's already seen me smoking this joint. So, we are getting pulled over." I continue: "If you have anything on you, get rid of it, eat it, do what you gotta do." I had a 1964 Mercury Comet. My dad gave it to me. It had this little heater vent on the side and I tell my buddy to jam the half pound of weed we're carrying up in there and he does. I don't know how he gets it up there, but he gets it up there.
PSF: I'm guessing this doesn't end well.
CG: Well, you know, Las Vegas cops are a motherfucker, man. You can see why. Those guys gotta deal with tourists and just all sorts of trash, people at the end of their rope who are just desperate and done. All sorts of nonsense. And we're talking about the 1970's. It's like in New Orleans. Those cops just deal with so much bullshit day in and day out, you can't blame them for being pissed all the time. So, they are tough. And I get it, I really do. So, we turn the corner in the car and the cop lights us up immediately. He knows what's going on. I mean, he saw me with the joint to my lips! So, we pull over and he comes up to the car. "Where's the weed at," he asks. "I ain't got any weed," I respond. And he goes, "man, I saw you smoking it, where is it at!" I just go, "you didn't see me smoking weed." So, he takes us out of the car. This guy is giving me a rash of shit. And he starts searching the car. He's tearing through the car and he keeps getting closer to where the dope is stashed, and I get more and more nervous. But he never even opened the little heater vent! He keeps getting madder and madder that he can't find it, just giving me shit, yelling and screaming. Finally, he pulled my ashtray out and pulled out some residue, ashes, and shit, stuff that was already burned. And turns to me and he goes "HA! I got you now!" And I took my last chance, turned around and put my hands behind my back and said, "well then put the cuffs on me and take me to see a judge cuz I want to see the look on his face when you hand him a bag of fucking ashes!" He did end up letting us go but told us not to come back to that area of town again.
PSF: What happened after that?
CG: We left, but... we had another run-in with the law that night. We drove out to one of our favorite drinking spots, this place by the airport underneath a flight path. We would sit there and watch planes land and take off and drink beer. It wasn't our spot- lots of people went there. We are all underage, of course. So, we're sitting out there, we scored some beer by hanging outside the store and paying someone to buy it for us. We're sitting there and, what do you know, a cop comes by. He announces on his speaker that if we don't want to get hauled downtown, we have to pick up all of the beer bottles in the area. Not just ours, mind you, but all of them. We filled my trunk and backseat with hundreds of bottles before he let us go.
PSF: Wow. That's quite the story. So, tell me about Abuse.
CG: Okay, so I had moved back to Topeka after high school. There used to be a steakhouse in Topeka called The Old Way Station. I was going to college at Washburn University and I needed a job so I applied for a job there. I had never waited tables in my life, but I lied and told them I was from Vegas, that I had waited tables at Caeser's Palace and the Riviera. I thought, they're never gonna call those places anyway so what does it matter? And even if they do so what? I didn't give a shit about waiting tables and wasn't very good at it. But while working there, I met a guy named Chris Garner, and found out that he played guitar. So, I asked him to come over and play with me. Man, we played all fucking night, full fucking volume. Just jamming, riffing, and playing leads back and forth off of each other. Pissed the neighbors off. They came over and complained and we just turned it up. This was 1978 or 1979. Right then and there we decided that it was excellent, and that we were going to be rock stars together. No fucking question. It worked so well. I said we need a drummer and a bass player, and, as it turned out, Chris knew a drummer, Willie McNeil, and a bass player, originally Jamie McCoy who would be in The Iguanas. And they agreed to join.
At that time, we were doing covers. I thought we chose some cool stuff. We did Johnny Winter songs, Queen, Spirit, stuff like that. We played a couple of shows. Maybe we only did one. There was a place called DeNicks at 6th and Clay in Topeka. It was an old drug store, not there anymore.
And then The Smart Pills arrived in town. They were a punk band that formed in Ohio, I think, Cleveland, I could be wrong about that maybe, but they had moved to New York City, or maybe they formed there. I don't know. Anyway, The Smart Pills were active in the early days of punk in New York. They were there when everything was going down. They played CBGB's, they played Max's Kansas City, all of that. And one of the members was from Topeka. For some reason, they came back to town for about a year before they split for Los Angeles and while they were here, they played a bunch of shows.
At this time, I'm in Abuse, and we still had long hair and bell bottoms. We see the Smart Pills posters around town for their shows, they had slicked back hair and straight legged jeans and we're like "what the fuck is this?" We thought it was a joke. A couple of weeks later my brother asks if I want to go to see them and I'm like "really?" And he says, "yeah, man, you should go see them." I'm still unconvinced and he says, "yeah, dude, you really should go." So, I went. It was at the Off the Wall Hall in Lawrence, KS, which later became kinda famous as The Bottleneck. I went, watched the show, and I was like, 'oh fuck." I realize this is what I need to be doing. I went to band practice the next week and told my band, "guys, you're not gonna believe this, but you remember that band The Smart Pills, those guys we were laughing at? Well, I saw them last week and, uh, I want to do a band like that. I don't want to do what we are doing anymore." I told them I wanted to what The Smart Pills were doing. Not their music, you know, but how they were doing it. The most important thing was that they were playing their own stuff. They had a few covers, but it was mostly their own stuff. And if they did covers, they weren't doing any of the shit we were doing and they were doing their own versions of them. It was basic, hard edged, had a real nice beat, and it was original and different. They had a real nice groove going. Plus, there were chicks all over the place.
PSF: How did the band respond?
CG: Everyone was a little hesitant. But I told them, "sorry, man, I don't want to do this band anymore. I want to do something different." I said "there's another show next weekend, let's go." So, we do. And afterwards, me and Chris decided we had to form a different band, that we needed to do something different. After the show, Chris Garner agrees with me. He said, "okay, we gotta start a different band."
PSF: So, you decided to start doing your own stuff. That was really the motivation?
CG: Well, you know, it was punk rock, and a lot of things were punk rock at that time. One year in the late 1970s, I don't remember the year, my brother gave me Elvis Costello's My Aim is True for Christmas. And I loved it. Now, is that considered punk rock today? I don't know. Maybe some think it is, maybe some don't. But back then it was, especially in a place like Kansas. Later that year my brother took me to see him in Kansas City with The Attractions. Great fucking show. I remember at one point, he was like sparkling on stage and I couldn't figure out why. It was because people were throwing ice from their drinks at him. We can have a discussion about what is and what isn't punk rock but I don't see the point. I mean, looking back on it, it's just rock and roll, man. And really good rock and roll. I'm not saying that we formed with the idea to be a "punk rock" band, but at that point, I don't know if any band was doing that expressly or intentionally. We just didn't want to be like everyone else. So, we did something different. Like I said, it was cool. It was original.
PSF: Yeah, I see your point. I mean, in a lot of ways just choosing to reject playing the music that was on the radio, or to try and copy it and play your own music is the most punk rock thing you could have done.
CG: When I got the Costello record, I was still mainly listening to good old rock and roll, Zeppelin, the Stones, The Beatles, all of that. If I never hear "Stairway to Heaven" again, that would be okay.
PSF: I'm the same way with "Stairway." That and Pearl Jam's "Jeremy"- great songs, don't ever need to hear them again. So, tell me about how Abuse moved forward.
CG: Well, the Smart Pills left town not long after they arrived, around a year or so. We had become friends with them. They used to practice at this place in downtown Topeka that was right above a jewelry store, Briman's Jewelers. Abuse was going and we needed a place to practice. So, when The Smart Pills split, we went and asked about renting the spot that they had used to practice. The owner immediately said: "Fuck no. Absolutely not. I will never rent to a rock band again. I had to replace the floor in that place because of all of the parties those guys were having."
At the time, Chris and I were living in these apartments, an old brick place. Downtown, of course. It's still there. I came home from work one day and fell asleep on the couch and when I wake up, I'm covered in this shit, this foam crap. Chris and Jamie McCoy, who was later in the Topeka band The Iguanas but was our original bass player, had sprayed a fire extinguisher all over me and the apartment while I was asleep. The next day I'm at work and I get a call from the dude who owns the place asking about all of the foam stuff around the place. Especially the stuff that is leaking from under our door. I tell him that someone had sprayed the fire extinguishers under our door. He didn't buy it, kicked us out of the place. Okay, whatever.
We did find a great place to practice at the Domme Dance Studio, a dance instruction place downtown. The owner believed in helping out young artists, and he had been an old dance partner with an aunt of mine in competitions and stuff, and he let us use his back room. It had a freight elevator so it made things easy and he let us use it for free. It was perfect.
Chris and I ended up moving into an apartment above a coffee shop downtown, and we called our place The Coffee Cup. It was a one-bedroom apartment, no air conditioning. It was $80 a month. We took it, and we stayed there and would play that Sid Vicious record Sid Sings constantly at full blast. And the Sex Pistols. And The Clash. There was an old man who lived in the other apartment there and he was constantly telling us to turn it down. We would, but it would go back up a few minutes later. And then he got sick of us and moved out. So, we rented both apartments. We had two apartments for $160 a month. And we started practicing there. And we would practice almost every night. We practiced constantly. It was what we wanted to do, just play music. And that's what we did. And people would end up coming over and it would always end up being a packed house. It was like putting on a show every single night. People would come by and hang out and bring food and beer and weed. And the important thing is that girls would come by.
For us, look I'm just gonna be honest here. We were kids. Some guys start a band because they want to get their art out into the world. They want to share important stuff about their feelings or about politics or philosophy, or whatever. And that's cool. I get it. But, man, that was not us. Or at least not me. For me, I started a band to meet girls. That's it. Meeting women was primary. Money was always secondary to us. Girls were first, then a lot further down the list of priorities was money. Then booze and drugs. That's the way we did it.
PSF: Did it work?
CG: Hell yeah it did! A few years ago, I ran into a guy from a band that we played with back in the day, they were formed around the same time but they were more, I don't know, successful, I guess you'd call it, than we were in the long run. We got to bullshitting about old times and I asked him about all the clubs he used to play. He started naming off all of the places he and his band played, which was impressive. They played CBGB's, First Avenue, they played everywhere. Toured a bunch, put out records, all that stuff. I was impressed, I really was. But after he got done, I asked him: "Did you ever get laid on any of those tours?" He thought for a minute, and said: "Well, no, not really." And I asked him: "Well, then why the hell did you do it?"
PSF: Did you have trouble finding places to play?
CG: Okay, so when we started, we were friends with all of the other musicians in town, and we would run into them out at night at bars and stuff. And they were all doing the same stuff we were originally doing. Aerosmith covers, shit like that. But there were a lot of bands at the time. They'd ask us what was going on with our band and we just told them that we had decided that we were going to try to do our own thing. We said that we had decided to write our own stuff and play mostly original music. All of them, and I mean all of them, told us, flat out: "if you're gonna do your own material, no one is going to come and see you. No one is gonna show up." But I'll tell ya, when we did get the band together and started playing gigs, we were fucking packing the places.
PSF: Really? Where were you playing?
CG: Everywhere. There were a lot of places to play, and we played all of them. In Topeka, there was this one place called Tony's Tank 'em Up, a very unlikely spot for a punk rock band. But we would get as many or more people than the other bands. I think it was more of a spectacle than anything but who cares, we took advantage of it. Before shows, Chris would always say, "when we get up there, don't just fucking stand there and play. Dance around, move, it's your world tonight, everybody else is just living in it." And that's what we would do. And it worked.
There were lots of places to play. The Forbes Theater was there, an old movie theater on a closed military base. College Hill had a lot of bars. There were places where bands were playing all the time. There were no other punk rock bands in the area at the time. We would play and we were trying to play something different, and people did come out to see it.
PSF: How were the crowds?
CG: Like I said, I think it was more of a spectacle than anything. The crowds were good, always big. And we always headlined. We didn't open.
PSF: And these were all paying gigs?
CG: Yes. We always got paid and we always made good money. We always got paid. I'm sure we got ripped off. I'm sure we never got a true 80/20 split in Topeka or most places. We played Lawrence, played Off the Wall Hall, played the Lawrence Opera House which is Liberty Hall today. One day, we got a call from a new place in Kansas City called The Downliner. They wanted us to come up there and play their opening nights. Two shows. It was in the basement of a country and western bar on Troost, I think, 47th and Troost. It was a fucking dump, man, a dump. But it was great. Those are my favorite places to play. I love playing real, you know, venues, where there's a stage and every one really knows what they're doing. But, man, I love playing some hole in the wall that's barely hanging on.
PSF: I know, I went to a new venue last night here in Topeka in an old stone building and saw a hardcore show and it was really, really loud. The floor felt like it was about to cave in, and there were chips of paint falling off of the ceiling on the crowd. It was perfect.
CG: Dude, we had to move stuff out of The Downliner, when we got there. It had been used for storage for who knows how many years. We had to move a bunch of boxes and stuff out before we played. It was just a concrete room. They didn't even have a bar. When we got there, we set up two fifty-gallon metal barrels and placed a big piece of wood across them, and that was the bar.
To my memory, it was the first punk rock bar in Kansas City, and we played the first two nights. It was wall-to-wall people. There were so many people there, you couldn't even move. And we, as a band, man, we could do nothing wrong. Everything worked. People were packed in and they went nuts. And we played all night. Back then you didn't just play one set and leave like today, you played two or three sets. We made around $700 bucks a night that weekend. Maybe a little less. Let's just say we made $1000 bucks for the weekend in 1980 money (author's note: according to an online inflation calculator that is a little over $3,800). How much of that money do you think we came home with? None! Not one red cent. We spent all of it. We had rent to pay and bills to pay, but we spent every dime of it at fancy restaurants and nice hotels, bought booze, drugs, and everything right away. It was fucking great. We rolled back into town with nothing.
PSF: I would have done the same thing!
CG: Well, playing shows back then, it was like everywhere else. You know, in between songs you'd hear the one girl in the crowd scream out 'wooo party!' or something like that for no reason. That girl, she's still out there, you know, in every bar, at every show. She goes to all the shows. You love her, she's important, looks wonderful, dances her heart out there on the dance floor, she's great... but she ain't really listening.
PSF: Yeah, I know. I married her, actually.
CG: Yeah! Well good for her! But she's still out there. And then you always have the "play some Skynyrd!" guy. The "play some Zepplin!" guy. In Topeka it was always, and I mean always, "play some Nugent!" He was at all the shows.
PSF: Well, he's a staple all around the country. "Play ''Free Bird'." It's always hilarious.
CG: I know, you're glad they're there. Keep coming out, keep paying the cover charge. One night at the Lawrence Opera House, we had two of those guys. Lawrence was always pretty cool, you had good crowds, and this night the Opera House was packed. But these two guys come up to the stage in between songs and scream at us, "play some fuckin' Skynyrd!" And Chris Garner, our guitarist, he comes walking up and I love the guy but, man, he can't beat up his sister in real life. But you put a guitar on him and he is tough as fucking nails. Chris walks up and says "The fuck does this dick want?"
The Skynyrd guy is not happy at that point. He gets really mad and says: "Alright," then sticks his finger out and goes: "Imma kick your ass, then Imma kick your ass, and then imma kick your ass," and points at all three of us individually. We, of course, say "well, do it then motherfucker, come on." Then we launch into the next song. We had a sound man / enforcer /roadie named Tim who is up in the balcony running sound. And Tim loved to fight. We were playing a Chuck Berry song, I think, and I noticed that the Skynyrd guy, he's doing it, he's actually walking up the stairs to come on stage. I nod over at Tim and he comes racing down the stairs. He hides behind this wall, just waiting for the guy. And when the guy gets onstage, Tim just nails him in the face with a punch and he goes flying. They beat the hell out of this poor guy, and his friend, and then use his head to open the door to the street before tossing him onto the sidewalk. I've always wondered if he was hearing "Free Bird" as he was flying through the air onto the sidewalk.
PSF: Did Abuse tour?
CG: We played in Oklahoma, Missouri, and a time or two in Lincoln, Nebraska, in what seemed like a frat house, if I remember. But no, we didn't really play much outside of our home area. We did end up being noticed by Bill Rich, the guy who originally started doing shows at The Outhouse, the famous Lawrence DIY venue. We didn't play there because we existed a couple of years before it opened. But Bill published a zine called Talk Talk and one issue he included a flexi disc of us in an issue. We were the first. Recorded three songs for it. It was later re-released.
PSF: How did the songwriting go?
CG: Chris wrote all of the songs. He was the songwriter for the band. He is a very, very intelligent guy. If he didn't have a guitar in his hands, he was reading a book. I don't know how it happened. There was this girl named Becky Boone, a college student that I had dated. And I really liked her. I mean, I really liked her. I met her at an Iggy Pop show in Lawrence at the Opera House. Abuse, we were there, and we were all pissed that we weren't opening the show. But really, we were never in consideration for it. Anyway, Chris and I are standing on our seats because Iggy is about to come out, and we're all excited. I mean, it's Iggy. Then, out of the corner of my eye I see this girl bouncing around the crowd. And she is cute, man, I mean, really cute. She bounces right up next me, jumps up into the seat next to me, puts her arms around me and goes: "you're cute!" Or "hot," or whatever adjective she used, I don't remember, but she expressed her admiration. And then, she just bounces away into the crowd. And I didn't see her the rest of the night. But I kept looking for her, and I didn't forget her. A couple of weeks later, I see her coming out of a bar on College Hill in Topeka and I go: "Hey, you're the girl from the Iggy show!" And we hung out that night, started dating. She was my first real punk rock girlfriend.
When she got out of college, she moved to Denver, and one day she called me and asked me to drive out there and visit her. I was like, drive? I didn't have a car or any money! So, I grabbed a pillowcase, threw a pair of jeans and a t-shirt in it and hitchhiked to Denver. When I got back, Chris had all of these songs written. And they were great. That's how it would happen.
PSF: So, what happened to the band?
CG: Well, we moved to Hollywood to become rock stars. And it didn't really work out. We lived in the Go-Go's old apartment. Lita Ford lived there after The Runaways and we would pass each other in the halls a bunch. It was a shithole apartment complex, really run down. Alan from The Smart Pills had moved back to Topeka and sort of joined Abuse, changed things around a lot, and convinced us to move to LA. It wasn't quite the same as Abuse and it became clear that we weren't going to be Abuse anymore when we got there. But no one paid attention to us in LA. It was around 1982. We got shows. The coolest place we played was The Lingerie. We didn't get involved in the punk scene, but we weren't really a punk band at that point. There was just so much going on out there.
I drove there, and when I arrived, I had twenty-five cents to my name after I paid rent for our apartment. I had a car that was barely running. So, the first thing I did was go out and look for a job. I walked into CBS studios thinking: this is it; this is where I need to work. I walk in and the receptionist says "are you here to apply for a job?" I said, "yes," and she immediately said "we don't need any help." So, I walked out.
I parked my car on a block a little bit away and just started walking into businesses asking for a job. I walked for blocks and blocks and blocks. Went into McDonald's, started filling out the application and walked out. Then a few blocks later I walked into a flower shop. And there is a guy sitting behind the counter. I asked him if they needed any help and he said "no." But we got to talking. He asked what I was doing in LA. I told him: why do you think? To get a job in show business! He laughed and told me to come back the next day, said they'd find something for me.
His name was Conrad. And it turned out he was the owner. I worked there for two years and never saw him sit at that counter again. It was like poetry, that he was sitting there at that weird moment in my life. We delivered flowers all over LA. We went to television sets like Cheers, I went to the Playboy Mansion several times, all over the place. Conrad didn't pay much, but he was generous in other ways. We'd go out to lunch at restaurants. Never fast food, always sit-down decent restaurants. The first time I went, he asked me what I wanted to drink, and I said, "I don't know, a Coke." And Conrad said, "no, what do you want to drink." He asked: "you drink alcohol, right?" I said, "Yeah. I I'll have a bottle of Budweiser." He ordered us each two Michelob's and told me to slam the first and sip the second. At another lunch, we went to a place that couldn't seat all of us at one table and me and three guys ended up at a second table and we started drinking. I mean shots, beers, everything. When the bill came, Conrad came up to us pissed as hell and said that our bar tab for our four-person table was more than the other table that had fifteen people at it. I responded: "Conrad, you told us to order whatever we wanted!" I'll never forget his response. He said, "Clay, I'm not mad about the price, but can you idiots still work?" Remember, it was just lunch. I told him "fuck yeah, we're fine," and we left and got back to work.
