Free Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon Page B

started suffering from seizures. At eighteen I felt too young to be living with the constant fear of someone having a seizure and me sitting there helplessly, not knowing what to do. That, and my leaving for college, contributed to our breakup.
    I became involved, again, with Danny and I moved to Venice with a couple of friends. Postmodern architecture was the thing then, and parts of Venice were all funky wood construction, with oddball angles and unexpected windows of wood and corrugated sheet metal intertwined alongside the little indigenous cottages intended for weekend use by Hollywood actors and drifters. In the midseventies Venice was also a rough, scary place. One street would be fine but a block away was a potential drug war zone. I lived on one of the rotten streets. On the day we were unpacking stuff from my ’68 VW Bug, a deranged-lookingguy approached us holding a long butcher knife. His movements were so slow and balletic he could only have been high, and we circled around him before tearing into the house and locking the door. Another night when I wasn’t home, someone drove down the street firing gunshots into all the houses on our side of the street.
    Guillermo, my landlord, was an Argentinian who was also a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He lived next door, which meant there was always a party atmosphere. At the time I was friends with a guy named Richie O’Connell and Richie’s good friend Bruce Berry, who was somehow related to Jan Berry of the sixties rock duo Jan and Dean. Whenever Guillermo and Bruce came home from touring, a bunch of us would go carousing until dawn. One night, we went to Jan’s house high in the hills, a cheesy contemporary glass box on a tacky hilltop in a would-be neighborhood, surrounded by nothing. Cocaine was prevalent, heroin more under-the-table, but I wasn’t into that stuff. I do remember being there one morning at around eight A.M. watching a topless girl float through the living room playing a violin.
    Later Bruce started working just for David Crosby. When he told everybody he knew that someone had jacked David’s car and stolen his Stratocaster, we all knew it was Bruce and that he had sold David’s guitar to get heroin. In the early nineties, when Sonic Youth went on tour with Neil Young, I realized that Neil’s song “Tonight’s the Night,” about a roadie who had overdosed, was written for that same Bruce Berry. He had died in 1973.
    That would all come later. When I lived in Venice, Richard, Bruce, and I would stay up all night driving around the Hollywood Hills, dropping in at the houses of unlikely people, like Hal Blaine, the famous studio drummer who’d worked with Elvis, the Beach Boys, and Steely Dan. Another night a bunch of friends and I went up to Arthur Janov’s house. Janov was the creator of the primal scream, a therapy technique that was supposed to return you to your birth trauma experience and release you by encouraging screaming and other vocal disinhibitions. The Janovs lived in one of those houses way up high on MulhollandDrive. The place wasn’t as creepy as the famous Body Double house but it was close—a coldly beautiful, empty, modern house with a huge wraparound-window view of downtown L.A. I didn’t know their daughter, Ellen, well; she was a friend of a friend. She was deeply troubled, and also a junkie, though I wasn’t aware of that at the time. Rumor had it she hung out with the Rolling Stones, who were friends of her parents. As the night went on, all my friends vanished into one or another of the cold rooms, and I remember waiting there by myself until the next morning, until they were all ready to leave. A few months later, Ellen died in a house fire.
    It is said that Joni Mitchell’s guitar playing on Song to a Seagull made Jimmy Page cry. I wonder if like so many of those English musicians who grew up in the fog and the bleakness, Jimmy Page was in