Rock City : Hard Rockers Have Developed a Distinct Community and Culture on the Streets of Hollywood.

Three young women, girls really, spot the heavy metal star in the parking lot of a Sunset Strip nightclub and clamber over a low concrete wall to say hello.

Overhead, billboards stake out a place in the fame firmament for their film and music stars. Along the sidewalks, aspiring rockers in black leather and studs call out like carny barkers to potential fans; on the street, a limousine, maybe three times as long as the standard stretch, carves a path through the Porsches and jacked-up 4x4 pickups like a parody of California car consciousness.

C. C. La Ville, guitarist for the heavy metal band Poison, takes it all in and smiles.

“Give me a word that sums up the Strip scene,” he tells the girls hovering around him.

“Sleazy!” a beautiful young woman with a very tan stomach calls out.

“Hot!” an admittedly drunk 14-year old shouts.

“Exciting!”

“Hot Bods!”

“Long Haired Guys!”

“Sex!”

Gazing past his admirers, La Ville scans the nightly grunion run of rockers on the streets and sidewalk below.

“It’s not a bad life,” he says, looking as happy and healthy as a Norman Rockwell businessman surveying a bustling Midwestern Main Street. “The boulevard of broken dreams. This is the new Hollywood and Vine, man.”

“Did I mention ‘sex?’ ” one of the women asks.

Southern California is not so much a melting pot as a patchwork of peoples and cultures. Immigrants arrive from all over, quietly carving new communities from old neighborhoods: Armenians in Glendale, Vietnamese in Westminster. And for almost three generations, another immigrant community has been evolving in and around Hollywood, edging out wanna-be film stars as the predominant cultural group.

Lately, the migration of refugees flocking to Hollywood from mainstream America has turned into something of an exodus. Inspired by MTV images of hard rock heroes and a heavy dose of Norman Vincent Peale, more rockers and roadies and groupies than ever are arriving.

Although it has yet to receive the sociological scrutiny of Little Tokyo or Chinatown, the hard rock pockets radiating out from Hollywood and Sunset boulevards have evolved into a distinctive community, complete with its own dialect, attire, attitudes, rock star accessory marts, guitar and drum supermarkets, nightclubs, restaurants, tattoo parlors, specialty schools, and a job market every bit as competitive and conformist as Wall Street.

Maybe its time for the pop-anthropology tour bus to put Rock City on its route. Hop on.

For the entire two years that Tony Altman spent loading lawn mowers in a Swainsboro, Ga. (pop. 7,602) factory, he thought of one thing--the moment he would pack his guitar and head for Hollywood.

“It was the reason I woke up in the morning,” he says.

Trevor Nicholls, has never worked. But as he sat doodling guitar riffs in his mother’s Winchester, Ore. (pop. 1,900) home, he heard the same hard-rock Siren’s wail.

In March, the two arrived at the Musician’s Institute in Hollywood, joining 1,200 other people from Japan, Iceland, Zimbabwe, France, Kentucky, New York and Van Nuys who pay $6,000 a year to study guitar, bass, percussion or vocals at the institute.

The institute teaches a range of musical styles, but the predominant genre is reflected by classes such as the “whammy bar seminar,” and defined by the shorthand phrase: “high hair, tight pants.”

Like the aspiring doctors who swarm around UCLA medical center dangling stethoscopes, institute rockers--hair bouffed up and pants tight as sausage wrappers--spread out in the surrounding neighborhood, practicing guitar riffs at bus stops and flailing the air with drumsticks in coffee shops.

Nicholls and Altman, both 21, have yet to bond into the standard Hollywood family unit and form a band, but after meeting at the institute they did become roommates. So each afternoon, after classes, they sling their electric guitars over their shoulders and head home along Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame.

One afternoon, as they step over the brass and concrete stars of Ritchie Valens, Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby, Ray Charles and Elvis Presley, Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City,” blasts from a store like the soundtrack to a bad movie. But the way these guys trudge, with their long hair dangling, rather than strut with it swishing in the sunlight, the way they avoid eye contact, rather than cockily calling out rock witticisms, clearly labels them as “new arrivals.” Deeply tanned California girls brush by without even noticing.

“I feel kind of silly,” says Nicholls. “Some people look at me like I’m trying to look cool.”

Since they arrived in Hollywood in March for a year’s study at the Musicians Institute, they’ve been out of this part of Hollywood only once, and that was to visit another student in Glendale. Neither has a car and they can’t afford to go to the rock clubs further down the Strip. They can’t afford much.

“I’ve learned new and exciting ways to eat Top Ramen,” Nicholls calls out, from the tiny kitchen of the small apartment they share in a ‘30s-vintage building next to the Hollywood Celebrity Hotel.

“It’s worth it, though,” Altman says. “Better than being stuck in a little town doing something you don’t want to do.”

Like every rocker who arrives in town, Altman has heard the street estimates of the nightmare odds, ranging from “There are 1,000 bands here, literally” to “Oh, at least 10,000” to “50,000, maybe?” to “millions and millions.” By any estimate, there are enough bands that many, if not most clubs, make the musicians pay to play.

But Altman can’t see himself being tempted into the Hollywood fame fixation.

“There are a lot easier ways to become famous than by playing guitar,” he says. “If I just wanted to be famous, I’d have picked one of those. I just want to be able to play what I hear in my head.”

Check the classifieds in Rock City News, one of several publications dedicated to the Southern California hard rock community, and the prerequisites of the scene become apparent: “Drummer needed . . . outlaw image a must” one reads. Another says: “Must have hair, desire, equipment, oh yeah, and look ultra cool.”

Shawn Crosby, 24, has all that and more.

He has a hand-tooled red, black and white leather jacket with a big 69 on the back. He has sunglasses cocked up on his head. He has the logo of his band “Orphan”--a cartoon rat, emerging from a sewer--tattooed on his arm. He has an artist friend who paints sets for the band, including the eight-foot, gun-toting woman in blue lingerie that decorates Orphan’s rehearsal room.

“On stage, we have a really cool dry-ice fog machine,” he says. The band also has a good review in a recent issue of the industry publication “Hard Report.”

“Oh, and you can put down that I own a Harley Davidson, too,” he adds.

Orphan rents one of 40 rehearsal rooms in an old movie industry building on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue. The building’s facade is decorated with plaster reliefs of naked men and women cavorting before cameras in the Golden Age of Film; the ground floor is occupied by a discount store whose windows display tapestries of Jesus and Elvis.

At night, the place throbs with the sound of bands rehearsing and carousing. Even in the afternoon, though, music seeps from under the heavy doors.

In a small room down the labyrinth of dark corridors, Amy Wichmann, 25, plays a guitar improvisation while Martie Colbl, 27, thumps along expertly on bass.

Shreds of light filter through the black-painted windows. The walls, padded with Fiberglass and covered with purple cloth, sport ceiling-to-floor graffiti. Wichmann and Colbl’s only contribution, they say, was to add a bathing suit to another band’s artistic touch: a large drawing of a nude woman in a provocative pose.

“These guys are soooo stupid,” Wichmann says of her male hard rock colleagues.

Wichmann has a degree in journalism from Cal State Northridge, and earns her living as a “graphics artist at The Weekly.” Pause. “Actually, I paste up the classifieds and 976-ads,” she says with a grin.

But rock is the driving force of her life. “My dad’s always trying to get me fixed up with a lawyer or a doctor. He says, ‘Why can’t you meet someone who makes at least $30,000 a year?’ But I couldn’t go out with someone who didn’t know who the New York Dolls were. . . .”

As Wichmann talks, there’s a knock on the door. A young woman, dressed in obligatory black, politely asks, “Do you know where the Outlaws of Excess practice?”

The Outlaws, apparently, no longer rehearse here. But a moment later, down the hall, the woman finds herself surrounded by The Gangsters of Love.

Gangsters of Love guitarist Mykel Sane and Zach Daniels, both 20, got their first shot at fame a few weeks ago, when a national music magazine mentioned them, albeit anonymously. They thought the article would be about struggling rock stars. Instead, it focused on heroin use in the Hollywood music scene.

Both Sane and Daniels know of musicians who use smack, they say, but they are quick to add that neither of them have used it.

“All my life I’ve wanted to be in a magazine, and now I am and I can’t even call my mom and tell her about it,” Daniels says gloomily, as the two sit sipping sodas at the Hollywood Billiards’ bar, in the basement of the building where the band lives and rehearses in a single stuffy room.

Daniels is wearing a black T-shirt that reveals tattoos on either arm. He doesn’t need to say that the building in which he lives lacks shower facilities.

Sane’s head is covered with a bandanna decorated with skulls. His ear and nose are festooned with earrings. His arms are tattooed, his fingernails dyed black, and his black armless T-shirt bears the words of dead Sex Pistols star Sid Vicious: “Undermine their pompous authority, reject their moral standards, make anarchy and disorder your trademark . . . don’t let them take you alive.” Sid’s picture has faded and peeled from the black cloth.

Sane got kicked out of high school in his senior year. Daniels quit. “We didn’t fit in,” Daniels says--in school or the small Arizona town of Peoria, where “all the cowboys and jocks want to kick your ass.”

Not that the two fit in so well in this seedy part of Hollywood, where Latino gangs and rock-cocaine dealers still predominate.

By opening the painted window of their studio, they can see the Griffith Park Observatory. But there’s more action on the streets below, Daniels says. “It’s better than TV: Guys chasing each other, breaking bottles on each other’s heads. . . . I saw someone get stabbed.”

Daniels gets depressed, he says, especially “when you’re hungry and you need a shower, and you’re kind of lonely.”

“Then you jam and it makes you feel better,” Sane finishes.

“I’ve always wanted to be famous, more than anything,” Daniels says, as an interview with Jerry Lewis blares from a television hanging over the bar. “I don’t know why.”

And if it doesn’t happen?

“It will,” Sane says.

“If you ever think for a moment that it won’t happen . . .” Daniels says.

“Then it shouldn’t happen,” Sane finishes.

On a Friday night at Art to the Bone on Hollywood Boulevard, Daniel Jeffrey Nicholson, who plays sax with a band called the Mimes, sips a Budweiser as a tattoo pen buzzes at his arm like an electric hornet, making improvements on his 11th tattoo.

Outside the shop, a cluster of people have gathered around Sammy Davis Jr.’s star.

The day Davis died, shop co-owner Lou Salinas airbrushed a large image of The Candy Man and put the canvas in the window. Then he set out a long scroll, which fans have since filled with emotional tributes and adorned with flowers and candles--an eerie shine to an intergenerational cult of celebrity.

At 3 in the morning, the “rock ‘n’ roll Denny’s” on Hollywood Boulevard is packed--bands and groupies filling the booths, while a crowd decked out in enough black leather to clothe a herd of steers waits for seats, still fired up with energy from the nightly carnival on Sunset and the pulse of the smaller clubs scattered on side streets throughout the area.

On the Strip, the scene is similar from Gazzarri’s to the Roxy to the Rainbow to the Whiskey A Go Go: Young men with tattoos grimace as they pound drums and play screeching guitar solos. An audience of young men and women watch, dance around a bit, shout, flirt, drink, giggle, act cool, have fun.

For about three months now, the Los Angeles County Sherriff’s Department has swarmed along the Strip on weekends, mainly just to keep people moving along.

An ambulance just hauled off a young woman who appeared to have overdosed on drugs; a man fell off a roof and got stuck between two buildings; another guy was hauled out of his convertible and off to jail for brandishing a 9-millimeter handgun. Scanning the passing parade, Sgt. Cliff Morden pronounced it a normal Friday night.

“Of the thousands or tens of thousands of bands I’ve had play here, the vast majority went into oblivion,” Bill Gazzarri, the self-proclaimed “godfather of rock ‘n’ roll” says in his gravelly voice, as he stands in the parking lot of his namesake club. “I’ve had bands where their parents put them through medical school and law school and they gave it up for a guitar. That’s their passion. No other business gives you that kind of fame and fortune . . . there’s not one movie star today that can fill the forum. Not one!”

Down the street a few blocks, a young woman in a black leather miniskirt shouts over her shoulder: “This is why I left Washington! Getting hassled by the cops!”

A young man with his hair tied back in a blue bandanna, his facial features accentuated with rouge and eye-liner, shouts after her: “Pick up your snail trail, you fat tub . . . “

The young man shouting looks familiar.

In fact, Tony Riedell looks just as he did when he appeared as a confident bass player for the unknown band, World War III, in Penelope Spherisis’ 1987 documentary, “The Decline of Western Civilization, the Metal Years.”

In the film, Riedell was asked what he would do if he didn’t make it in rock. “There is no choice for me,” he said. “I’ll die trying.”

The film, he says now, “was the biggest embarrassment of my life.”

As Riedell talks, a white Rolls-Royce stops in traffic, and a white-haired man who appears to be in his 60s beckons a member of Riedell’s group, a young woman in a black miniskirt, who has made a point of showing that she does not wear underclothing. The man can plainly be heard inviting her to a cocaine party. She says she doesn’t use cocaine. So he drives up the street. A few yards away from two deputies, he stops again and lures two other young women over to his car’s window.

“I was always the class clown,” Riedell says, paying no attention to what is a decidedly normal occurance on the Strip. “I always stood out. I always wanted attention . . . I always wanted to be noticed.”

But as band after band either fizzled or broke up so that individual members could join more successful groups--he grew disenchanted.

“The pain of putting so much energy into something and having it fall apart time after time . . .” he says, his voice trailing off.

Just over a year ago, Riedell overdosed on cocaine. Pointing to a young man beside him, he says: “He took me to the hospital. I was in a coma for three days.”

Since then, Riedell has weened himself from drugs and the harder aspects of the hard rock life, he says.

Then, realizing a small inconsistency, he adds: “Yes I’m down here, and yes I’m drunk. But I also have a job (as a film industry set painter) and I make $22.28 an hour.”

Hearing himself say that, however, triggers mixed emotions. The day job means that he doesn’t have to live so close to the edge, leeching off the doting young women who flock to the Hollywood rock scene in search of long-haired guitar gods.

But “my career as a set painter doesn’t mean anything to me,” he says.

Worse still, he feels that his lack of desperation has taken away his competitive edge.

“Some of the guys on the Strip want (success) more now,” he says, nodding toward the young men aggressively passing out flyers for their bands up and down the Strip. “My drive has been dampered.”

At this, his 18-year-old friend, who introduces himself as “just a (expletive) roadie,” comes to his defense.

“This boy, he’s come from the lowest pit, and he’s going to work his way to the top; I have a lot of faith in him,” he says. Grasping Riedell’s shoulders, he adds what may be the unofficial Rock City motto: “He’s going to make it!”