Fact #83923

THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILISATION by Johnny Black, originally published in Classic Rock magazine

Quite possibly the most desirable, hysterically entertaining and hard to find rock documentary of all time, The Decline Of Western Civilisation Part 2, helped create the mystique and mythology of the mid-80s Sunset Strip scene. That scene now largely revolves around Guns N’Roses, Aerosmith and Alice Cooper, all of whom feature prominently in the movie, but its most memorable moments and unforgettable utterances came from the era’s young hopefuls who never quite scaled the heights of which they dreamed. Three decades on, the members of W.A.S.P, Faster Pussycat, London and Odin are still making music, still dreaming the dream and still unrepentant, despite having never reaped the rewards that they were utterly convinced would soon be theirs.

These are their stories, in their own words.

PENELOPE SPHEERIS, MOVIE DIRECTOR
As a child, Penelope Spheeris criss-crossed the American hinterlands with her father’s carnival troupe before earning her Master Of Fine Arts degree in Theatre Arts from UCLA. Her unique world-view, part-carny kid part-Hollywood auteur, made her the ideal director to helm the three DOWC documentaries that established her name, as well as directing major Hollywood features Wayne’s World, The Beverly Hillbillies, Suburbia and more.

I was born in New Orleans, and it’s true, I did grow up travelling with my father’s carnival, so I was used to being around unusual people.

Psychologists will tell you that your personality is formed by the time you're five or six, so I guess that’s why I gravitate towards outcasts. My family background was chaotic, so when I saw the punk thing happening in clubs, I felt very at home with it, which helped when I was making the first Decline movie.

After I had got my degree I did all kinds of work to get experience, including producing sketches for Saturday Night Live, which of course is where the characters of Wayne and Garth in Wayne’s World first appeared.

And I’ve always loved music. In fact, my younger brother Jimmie Spheeris was a singer-songwriter with just an absolutely beautiful voice.

The second Decline movie came about because I saw the punk scene dying, the clubs shutting down, and a whole new scene growing. I remember driving down Sunset Strip in my car, seeing all these strangely-dressed people spilling out onto the sidewalk. With punk, all the girls had looked like boys but with metal the boys all looked like girls. I just knew I had to make another film, about these people.

The first Decline had been made for about $100,000 with money from a couple of guys who thought I was going to make a porn movie for them, but the second one I was able to get some money from Miles Copeland (manager of The Police, owner of IRS Records). That one cost $500,000.

Attempts were made to get me to include more of the mainstream, successful bands, but that wasn’t really what interested me.

I found guys like Chris Holmes of W.A.S.P. fascinating. I wasn’t sure, at the end of Chris’s interview, that I even had an interview but, you know, it wasn’t me that gave him the vodka.

I was also determined to get people like Dave Mustaine of Megadeth into the film, because those guys were different, kinda deeper than the others.

There were certain things we had to manipulate. The sequence with Ozzy, that’s not really his house. And we faked the spilling of the orange juice. But Ozzy’s one of the funniest people alive. You just point a camera at him and off he goes.

In a way, you can look at Decline 2 as the research and then Wayne’s World as the final product. Mike Myers is incredibly talented but he was also unbelievably difficult to work with.

After Wayne’s World, I got trapped into making more of the same. I tried to get to direct movies that I had written or other subjects that I wanted to adapt, but I couldn't make them happen. All I was allowed to do was more comedy.

Four years ago, I told my daughter Anna, that I wanted her to come and work for me, but she said, "Only if you do the 'Decline' box set first." She hung around the LA music scene, she was very familiar with the clubs and the people, and so she knew there was an audience, a huge appetite, out there for those films.

My first reaction was, "Oh my God, I can't handle it." but in the end we went ahead with Anna in control. We found all the complete original interviews, additional live performances, re-edited them, cleaned up the film, added commentaries … and that’s what’s coming out.

CHRIS HOLMES, GUITARIST, W.A.S.P.
Born in Glendale, California, Holmes’ musical tastes were formed after his family moved to Pasadena, where he was consumed by the music of Black Sabbath, Johnny Winter and Humble Pie. After developing his guitar chops in a string of all-but forgotten bands, Holmes hooked up with Blackie Lawless in W.A.S.P., but found himself virtually defined by his appearance in Decline 2, during which he mugged, hammed and drank his way through an interview perched precariously on a lilo in a swimming pool, watched by his evidently bemused mother. Despite being plagued by alcohol problems, he has continued to make music, and now lives with his wife/manager Catherine in France, where he performs and records with his band Mean Man.

I grew up around Eddie Van Halen when he was still playin’ parties and stuff, so he’s a huge influence. I don’t play like the guy but just bein’ around him, he taught me a lot - how to treat other musicians, and stuff. Not to treat people like assholes.

I played with Blackie Lawless in a band called Sister, way before W.A.S.P.. I wrote a stuff then, like Love Machine, that later came out as W.A.S.P. but I found out years later that I was written down on every bit of publishing as not a songwriter. I was written down as a session player. I’ve never gotten a penny from any of it.

You want to know the truth? I was never happy in W.A.S.P. (Long sigh) I had the thumb on me, controlling me, always threatenin’ me to be thrown out or this or that and, on top of it, the person was jealous of me bein’ me. I never realised that until the last day I ever saw him, when he told me that right to my face.

Now, when I see people in young bands I tell them not to trust each other. When you do a record deal, don’t trust anybody, especially, your best friend. If money comes in the situation it changes everything. I go, 'The closest person to you, there’s a chance he might screw you over.' They look at me like I’m nuts, but I’ve been doin' it a long time. I know.

When Penelope asked me to be in the Decline movie, I went, "Why don’t you ask Blackie?" She goes, "Well, he wants money. I don’t have the budget." So I agreed to do the interview. It was supposed to be on the Sunday but Penelope called me Saturday morning, and goes, 'Can you film it today, Chris?’

I go, "I been up for three days, partying since I got home from London." And she goes, "Well, do you mind?" And I go, "No." And right when I was goin’ out the door, my mom pulled up. I said, "Mom, I gotta do this interview." Well, she didn’t have anything else to do so she just came along. We did it in Miles Copeland’s swimming pool.

I’m lucky, my dad and mom are still goin’. I’d never written my mom a letter and the other day I was sittin’ here thinkin’, because my parents were separated when I was two, and in the letter I said, "Mom, I’m sure you’ve always wondered in the back of your mind if you brought us kids up right." Then I just wrote, "After getting to 55, I’ve realised I had the best upbringing of anybody I know. I wouldn’t have changed it for nothin’ in the world. I love you, Chris."

The pinnacle of my career in W.A.S.P. would be The Headless Children (fourth album, 1989). That’s one of the proudest things I’ve done, because I played most of all the guitar. Even though my name’s not on the writing, a lot of it was me, y’know, writing, just spontaneous how things come out.

And the Headless Children tour was one of the good ones. There was so much trouble on the tour, y’know. After that album was done I was like, "If this thing doesn’t work, I’m blamin’ you Chris," because the heavy guitar sound on the album that I like to play with - I was gonna get blamed for it. But that would be the peak of what I did. Uh, you know, the management, I got … uh … you know, just the lying to of all the people.

Really, though, I haven’t been drinking since 1996. I went on an aversion therapy program to quit drinkin’. It’s not the taste that turns me off, it’s what it does to you. If I was still drinkin’ I’d be dead now. I guarantee you that.

STEVIE RACHELLE, SINGER, TUFF
Born and raised in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, vocalist Stevie Rachelle bore little resemblance to your typical Sunset Strip glam-rocker before an audition with Tuff drew him out west and into the metal maelstrom. Tuff was never able to translate their major live success into serious record sales, but Rachelle’s can-do attitude enabled him to move ahead, creating the pioneering Metal Sludge website, which is still in operation today.

I’m 49 years old, never been a smoker, never been drunk. I’ve never rode a motorcycle or done one single line of cocaine. I was more interested in spending time in the gym, more a jock than a rocker.

Being a skateboarder I was into punk and new wave, like 999, The Specials, Devo. But then I saw Motley Crue on the Shout At The Devil tour and Van Halen on the 1984 tour. That’s when I became enveloped by the idea of becoming a rock singer.

My hair started getting longer, I wore leather pants, bracelets, eyeliner and all that, but I liked a good night’s sleep and drinking orange juice at breakfast. My vice was women.

I played in bands in Wisconsin, but then I saw a flyer for Tuff, with pictures of them all except for one empty square in the middle, where it said, 'Wanted - Lead Singer/Frontman'. They were looking for a David Lee Roth, Vince Neil type, which I was.

So three days later, June 26, 1987, I quit my job and bought a one-way ticket for $109 from Chicago to LA-X. Within a couple of days I auditioned, got the job and six weeks later we opened up for Warrant at The Roxy. That was our first show together. Being on stage in Tuff was a licence to kill, as far as getting girls.

By the time Penelope interviewed us for Decline we were one of the hottest bands on the Strip. She put us in the movie and it absolutely put us on the map.
If you went out on the Strip on a Saturday night in those days to The Rainbow, The Roxy, Gazzari’s, it was like a madhouse. There was as much going on in the street as there was inside the clubs.

Penelope was out on the Strip with her camera crew, and she walked up to us and started interviewing us and then got our contact information. She knew we had something, so she interviewed us for the movie.

People really remember the movie, especially Chris Holmes drinking the vodka in the pool, and the guy from Odin sitting in the hot tub saying that if he didn’t get as big as Robert Plant he was gonna kill himself. Of course, he’s still not as big as Robert Plant, but he hasn’t killed himself yet.

We got invited to the red carpet screening at the Cinema Dome on Sunset Boulevard and everybody was there. Penelope sat with Gene during the screening and he kept asking her, every time I appeared on the screen, what my name was. Afterward, on the red carpet, Penelope came up to me and said, "Stevie, Gene Simmons is interested in your band." I wasn’t a huge Kiss fan, but I knew Gene was a very powerful man.

So, sometime later we went to a show, and everybody was excited because Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons were in the building. So me and Mike were walking towards them to introduce ourselves, and I got about ten feet away from Gene Simmons and he pointed at me and said, "You’re Stevie Rachelle from Tuff." Of course, I was excited that he knew me but I held my composure and said, "Yeah, you’re right, I am."

So that was my first meeting with Gene, and then there was talk over the years that Simmons Records wanted to sign us, but we didn’t want to sign with him. Maybe that was arrogance, but the bands he produced never got very far, so we were not keen.


The pinnacle for Tuff was getting onto the MTV Countdown, we were the No3 video with I Hate Kissing You Goodbye in September ’91, but right around then Nirvana released Smells Like Teen Spirit. Suddenly there was grunge bands, like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam on the MTV Countdown, in the magazines, on the radio. So just as we were beginning to make an impact, they came along and we had no chance.

We’d had a ten year run but by 1995 we were playing to forty people some nights. I remember a show in Ohio, we played for free, and two people came. The promoter said we didn’t have to play, so we just hung out and played basketball.

At the end of 1995 the band came to an end. I did a solo album, but I couldn’t even get it reviewed. I was starting to hear about this stuff called the internet. "A website? What’s that?" Nobody knew. But I noticed that Metal Edge was listing contact details for artists by e-mail. I remember Nikki Sixx’s e-mail address was in there.

So I came up with this idea for a website called Metal Sludge where we would make fun of the 80s, a very affectionate piss-take. In the first week we had twenty people look at it and a year or two later were were getting 25,000 a day. It’s still active today.

I now have two children, I still do twenty to thirty shows a year with Tuff, and I play with a band out of Germany called Shameless. I keep myself active.


JEFF DUNCAN, GUITARIST, ODIN
Growing up in Pasadena, California, Jeff Duncan started a band while he was in seventh grade. After several membership changes, that band became Odin, heavily influenced by the NWOBHM. Seven years of club-level success and acclaimed singles wasn’t enough to earn them an album deal, and they were already disintegrating by the time they made their notorious hot tub appearance in Decline 2. Duncan had moved on to Armored Saint before the movie was released. Today, he lives in Las Vegas, from where as well as continuing with the now veteran Armored Saint, he runs his own band, DC4, with three albums to their credit.

Odin always had the look, like all the bands did back then, but I was always a metal guy, it was always about Sabbath and Priest - just classic metal.

Musically, though, it got to where the singer (Randy O) wanted to do something more like Motley Crue, and we kinda went along with it. Odin became more of a California-influenced band which wasn’t really what I wanted to do.

From what I remember, Penelope Spheeris contacted our manager at the time. She was lookin’ for bands that were staples on the LA music scene and Odin certainly was that.

We were filmed in a hot tub and, as far as how we were and what we did, how we lived, it was pretty accurate - party all the time. We participated in all of that stuff that was going on. We were young and stupid but, no, we didn’t always hang out in a hot tub.

I said I’d end up on Skid Row if we didn’t make it, but what people remember is that our singer (Randy O) said he’d kill himself if he didn’t get as big as Springsteen, but that was the mindset of the time - I’m gonna do this no matter what. And we were very young. I was only 22 when the band broke up. We were just doing the same things and having the same attitude as everybody else did, but we just happened to get put in a movie.

The film didn’t contribute to the end of the band. We were already falling apart and I attended the premiere as a member of Armored Saint.

When Armored Saint came around, I was very happy to take their offer. I was able to go back into what I really loved in the first place, which was good, classic heavy metal music.

We’re still together, just released our ninth album, Win Hands Down, and we’ve been touring with Saxon for most of this summer, including an upcoming visit to England.

A couple of years ago I moved out to Las Vegas. It’s cheaper to live in Vegas and there’s lots of work out here, and a great club scene, with places like Vamp’d, which is kind of the hub for rock bands in Vegas, and also The Hard Rock and other places.

I also have my own band, DC4. We’ve done three albums and we’re doing another one at the end of the year.

We did do an Odin re-union in 2003, played a Monsters Of Rock Cruise ship, and a bunch of other gigs, but I don’t think we’d do that again. I certainly don’t wanna do it unless it’s the full original band, and Randy O doesn’t seem interested - but never say never.

LIZZIE GREY, GUITARIST, LONDON.
Born in Los Angeles, Lizzie Grey was once plain Stephen Perry, an unhappy kid in a dysfunctional family. He credits rock music as the one thing that made his youth bearable. Not counting several failed high school garage bands, he first made an impact playing guitar with Blackie Lawless and Nikki Sixx in Sister, before forming London with Sixx when Lawless moved on to W.A.S.P. Although never hitting the heights as a band, individual members of London went on to greater things. Sixx founded Motley Crue, guitarist Izzy Stradlin joined Guns N’Roses, and drummer Fred Coury ended up in Cinderella. After London, Grey formed the glam-pop combo Ultra Pop and, despite serious health issues, continues to perform with his newest project, Spiders And Snakes, which recently released a new album, Year Of The Snake.

I was a huge fan of Mott The Hoople, The Sweet, those kinds of glam rock metal bands were totally perfect for me. At first I was just a fan, and then I realised I could do it too.

I met Blackie Lawless when we both used to hang out at The Starwood. He’d be there dressed in black, tryin’ to look spooky. I really wanted to get a real band together so one day I went up and said, "Do you really play music or are you just dressed up?" He said, "Yeah, man, I’m lookin’ for a guitar player." And I said, "Well, I’m a guitar player."

That was Sister, kind of a shock-rock thing, with me, Blackie and Nikki Sixx. When Blackie told Nikki he wasn’t a good enough bassist for the band, I told Blackie, "If he’s out, I’m out too." So that was when, in 1978, Nikki and me formed London. We chose the name because we loved so many English bands.

At one point we actually got Nigel Benjamin from Mott in our band. Nigel was a brilliant songwriter, a talented singer and a real pain in the butt. He had some serious emotional problems. Just like Blackie, he never took us seriously. We were playing in front of 2000 to 3000 people a night, at The Starwood or The Troubadour of wherever and he just kept saying all the talent in the band was nothing compared to everything he’d ever done. And he would also talk bad about Overend Watts and all the guys in Mott. I used to say, "Well. who do you like?"

We became like a launching pad for rock stars. In the Decline movie, that was what I call London 2, with Nadir D’Priest as our vocalist. That was difficult because Nadir was hungry to have one of those heavy metal record deals, but chasing deals by trying to prove how metal you are wasn’t where I wanted to be at.

In retrospect, everybody talks about it real fondly, but at the time bands were fightin’ like cats and dogs, busy steppin’ on one another. That went on into the 90s, when suddenly along came the guys from Seattle. Grunge absolutely ended it for London. We were already oddballs, even within the scene, because I was so 70s-influenced.

I left London to do my own band, Ultra Pop, which was more Marc Bolan-influenced, and that has kind of evolved into my current band, Spiders And Snakes, where we’ve really embraced our seventies roots.

I still play a lot with Spiders And Snakes, but I have a medical condition, Parkinson’s, which makes it hard to control your muscles. I can’t play guitar any more, so now I’m the singer.

Some days I can’t get to rehearsals. I want to go but my brain can’t tell my body to move. I’ll get stuck in the hallway because I can’t get my legs to move.

You end up wanting to scream. I get dizziness, I get the shakes in my hands. Now I can’t wash a dish, can’t button my shirt. I’m not cryin’ about it, though, because the bottom line is I can still get on the stage and when that first chord hits, man, I’m alive again.

NADIR D’PRIEST, SINGER, LONDON
Born Nadir Munoz in Mexicali, Mexico, D’Priest found his vocation after migrating up to Los Angeles and hearing the song Sweet Leaf on Black Sabbath’s 1971 album Master Of Reality. Living in Orange County, he paid his dues in bands including Thunderbolt and Vertigo before joining London as its front man in 1985, eventually taking over the running of the band when Lizzie Grey quit in 1988. Convoluted business shenanigans resulted in the band being re-branded as D’Priest in 1990, and Nadir has since pursued other endeavours including overseeing The Rolling Stones’ 1995 Voodoo Lounge CD-rom and releasing a 1998 solo album in Spanish. Nevertheless, he continues to function sporadically under the London banner.


I first saw London in 1979. I’m in some of the early live pictures, right up the front watching them. I used to have to stand in line around the block to get in, because they were a big live act. This was way before Guns N’Roses or any of those other people.

In the mid-80s a lot of other bands saw us as a threat because we had such great ideas. Like, we had a seven-foot-high drum riser with a girl dancing underneath it, but it caused all kinds of problems. When we supported Poison in 1986 in San Diego, they did not want the riser, they wanted it down. One of the security guards started trying to get his hands on me but our manager happened to have a nice, compact 9mm pistol, pulled it out and told this guy to back the the fuck off. That was just one situation, we had several.

We were pretty massive when we appeared in the Decline movie. It showed exactly what was going on in our lives. Under that chair in the movie, there was blow and weed and all that shit, and we’d been partyin’ it up and havin’ a great time. Sure, the film gave London a huge push.

I remember hanging out with Penelope at the Cat Club in New York for the release party. I believe I was smokin’ hash outside the Cat Club, with fuckin’ Dave Mustaine and there was all these bodyguards around and I didn’t know who they were with and it turned out to be Malcolm Forbes (multi-millionaire publisher of Forbes Magazine). The movie got so much publicity that it couldn’t have hurt anybody’s careers. It got your face out there and you got to be seen.

I carried London on even after Lizzie left. I don’t know what I was thinkin’. I think about it quite often because people say I’m beating a dead horse, and I certainly didn’t know what I was takin’ on, but it’s been my baby since then.

I got us a deal with Noise Records - it was offered to me in the back of a rent-a-car at Donington Festival - but they said the name had been around for so long, we should call it D’Priest, and they were going to go with that. Of course, I had to tell the band and they were not very happy about that.

Then, in the early 90s, I got this job, via my friend Bruce Kirkland who had a multi-media company called Second Vision. IBM had approached the Rolling Stones and said, "We’ll give you guys $2m if you let us do the title (Voodoo Lounge CD-Rom). You get $2m to make it and we’ll handle everything else." But The Stones go, "No, we want this long-haired guy and his team to handle our shit." So then I had an amazin’ time hangin’ out with Ronnie and the boys.

We stopped London/D’Priest in 1992 after our manager deserted us. Our bus was confiscated, all our gear, all our shit, we were left in a hotel with our rooms already due. All we had was a bag of weed, two bottles of booze and our guitar player’s credit card.

Now we’re back again. We’re doing gigs, we recorded a live album last year, and played some shows in Germany and Switzerland. We’ll shortly be recording tracks for the next London album.

TAIME DOWNE, SINGER, FASTER PUSSYCAT
Known to his ma and pa as Gustave Molvik, Taime Downe spent his early years in Seattle. After moving to L.A., he worked for the clothing store Retail Slut before forming Faster Pussycat in 1985, which quickly scored a deal with Elektra Records, releasing three albums between 1987 and 1992. Downe was also instrumental, along with deejay Riki Rachtman, in starting The Cathouse, the club which became the heart of the LA glam-metal scene. Overtaken by grunge, Faster Pussycat split in 1993, leaving Downe to dabble briefly with Chicago-based Industrial Rock commune Pigface before forming The Newlydeads. A new version of Faster Pussycat emerged in 2001, but things soured in 2006 when former Pussycat guitarist Brent Muscat began touring with yet another version of the band. Today, Downe is back in control of the name and tours with some success.


When Faster Pussycat started, Motley and Ratt had already taken off, and newer bands like Poison were playing the Strip. There was us, Guns N’Roses, Seahags, Jetboy, and we were all good friends. Axl and Izzy were at our very first show. I remember lookin’ out and thinking 'Who the fuck is this dude dancin' in the middle of the floor?' Of course it was fuckin' Axl.

So, about this time, I was room-mates with a deejay, Riki Rachtman, and we started up our own little rock club, The Cathouse, mainly because we wanted to have a party every night but we didn’t want to clean up afterwards.

So we got all our friends to come, and they bring their friends and it started to snowball. A couple of the Brat Pack actor kids were also friends and that brought in other elements. After a few weeks the club was packed.

Penelope Spheeris was friends of friends, and we ended up shooting our section at The Cathouse. We already had our deal with Elektra, and we’d just finished doing the first album but it hadn’t been released yet when we did the interview. I’m sure that movie did enhance our career. It was accurate, that was our shit.

By the time Cathouse was up and running, we were off, constantly touring, Elektra kept us on the road. They treated us really good, but I’d been shoved into the industry for the first eight years of my adult life, and then the Grunge thing happened. A lot of these guys were my buddies from growing up in Seattle, so I was just pleased to see them getting success. I went to school with the guys from Alice In Chains, so when I would go back home at Christmas, I would hang out with those guys.

When it happened, I didn’t think grunge would kill our shit, but It did pretty much. The record companies dropped all of our shit, crazy hair and make up kind of went away. Faster Pussycat broke up in 1993, because the whole scene had changed, but I already had what I had done, and I couldn’t see any point in sitting round writing the same thing again. That’s why I went to Chicago and played with the guys in Pigface. It was good to make a change and, because it was not my band, I really enjoyed being able to kick back a bit and be more carefree.

I came back from Chicago after the Pigface thing and started doing The Newlydeads with some friends here in LA, and then in 2000 I started The Pretty Ugly club, which was very successful for five or six years, like The Cathouse had been. It was a whole new scene.

Then, just as Newlydeads was starting to take off, we got offered a new record deal for Faster. We toured with LA Guns in 2001. Now we tour at least three months out of every year. We’re constantly working. We’ll be doing that big Cathouse Live show at Irvine Meadows that Riki is puttin’ together. I still talk to him a lot. This summer we’re going to ride our motorbikes down to Florida together.