New Band, New Look, Old Dream

The last time I saw Pepper Denny he was named Pepper Sweet. He was playing drums for Queeny Blast Pop, a glamour rock band that touted itself as “the last of the true Glamsters.” His blond hair was long and teased. His face was made up to resemble that of a China doll. He clopped along the Sunset Strip in ridiculous platform heels, wore androgynous tights and blouses.

This was almost five years ago. I had spent a full day with Pepper and his bandmates. They took me on a strange tour of nonconclusive meetings in dingy offices with the record industry’s lesser sharks, of raids on the apartments of suddenly ex-girlfriends to retrieve bedrolls and makeup kits, of nocturnal wanderings along the Strip in search of free passes.

Throughout, they talked yearningly about making it. The record contract. The MTV video. The stadium tour. Pepper was then 19 years old, more or less fresh out of Kingsburg High and filled with the youthful confidence that can confuse dreams for career plans. He had sworn off as harmful distractions day jobs, permanent residences and daily showers.

Last Thursday we met for lunch on Sunset Boulevard. We sat outside at Chin Chin, watching the Land Rovers and BMWs roll by, catching up. I barely recognized him. His hair was cut short and dyed black, albeit with blue tips. He was dressed in black polyester slacks and a white uniform shirt with an American flag sleeve patch and the logo “Fire Chief Protection.” The drummer was now a door-to-door salesman of fire extinguisher services. Queeny Blast Pop was no more.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “we really were the last of the glam bands.”

*

Los Angeles is filled with Pepper Dennys, with what he calls “the in-between people.” They come in many varieties--musicians, actors, writers, would-be impresarios. They are the limo drivers packing screenplays, the waiters with country ballads. Their head shots hang behind the counters at dry cleaners. Talented but not exactly discovered, they are one of the city’s most enduring cliches.

“Nobody pays any attention to the in-between people,” Pepper said. “Nobody wants to interview them. They can’t help anybody sell anything.” Nobody wants their opinions on world famine or the troubles in Tibet. Nobody wants to put their face on a magazine cover.

My interest in Pepper is partly personal. He is the son of an old friend. Beyond that, though, I subscribe to the minority view that Hollywood strugglers make better copy than the stars. I also suspect they have more fun. “The Beatles,” Pepper volunteered, warming to this theme, “said that before they got famous was the best time of their lives.”

No doubt this is a viewpoint aided by distance or hindsight. Pepper can hardly wait to relax in luxury and look back on those quaint, happy days of sleeping six musicians to a room in some rat-infested practice studio, of paying promoters for a chance to perform, instead of the other way around, of not having a telephone to call his own. All that aside, the music was pretty good.

“If we had known then,” he said of Queeny Blast Pop, “what we know now, we probably would have made it. We were closer than we thought.”

*

Instead, the band fell apart in the usual ways. Pepper drifted to Seattle, about a year too late. The city’s once-hot rock scene had been picked clean. All the good grunge bands were signed and gone, leaving behind many off-key impersonators in flannel shirts. He went to Colorado with a punk group that believed it had a solid record contract, but instead had only a crooked manager. When he realized his new bandmates were more interested in girlfriends than making it in music, he moved on.

“I was the only one with the dream,” he said. “I was the only one still saying, ‘I am going to be a rock star.’ I never pictured myself doing anything else.”

So he came back to Los Angeles and, lo, it seems he got lucky. He has been recruited into yet another group, the Newlydeads. They play techno-rock and actually have a CD in the stores. These musicians are a bit older than Pepper, with some significant professional pedigree. So who knows?

“All I would like,” Pepper said, “is to have somewhat of a bank account. I would like to go on a world tour once. I would like,” he smiled slyly, aware of the cliche, “to be on the cover of the Rolling Stone. So that when I am 40 years old, playing the Vegas bar scene, I can look back and say I did this. I did something.”

In the meantime, the drummer said, pushing aside his plate of fried rice, it was back to work. See, there are a million fire extinguishers in the naked city. . . .