Keeping an Unbowed Sense of Individuality

Ten years ago, I somehow got invited to a party for the metal band Slayer at the Magic Castle. I’ve actually been on the road with Slayer in Europe and have no small respect for its brand of bombast, but I didn’t know a single soul who would be at this party or what would happen. So of course I went.

The drive winds straight up a tall nob of Hollywood Hills right behind the Highland Gardens Hotel on Franklin where Janis Joplin died

At night, the Magic Castle’s interior is like the set from the old vampire soap opera “Dark Shadows,” all blood-toned woods and leaden velvet curtains and secret alcoves. Magicians in black capes and hats did tricks like a kind of undead dinner theater. It was packed. The poisonous flower of goth rock was in full bloom that year.

Being there alone, I became obsessed with trying all the nonsensical doors, some of which lead nowhere. One led into a small, velvet-lined theater that would seat maybe 100. It was empty except for one guy in a lot of bondage-rocker gear, sort of an off-the-shelf Marilyn Manson. We started talking. Because there was no smoking in the Magic Castle, he said, he’d eaten his stash of marijuana. I assumed he was sitting in the theater to chill out.

No, he said, he was hiding from his girlfriend, who was in the building somewhere making the scene in what he described as a “Vampirella” get-up.

He’d just realized he was going to dump her. Why, I asked, Vampirella sounded alright.

“When you’re in a relationship you can’t be the bent bow.” That’s a line you don’t forget. “You mean, like Nietzsche’s bent bow?”

Friedrich Nietzsche’s bent bow represented the man under pressure, the man forced under severe circumstances to outperform himself, the isolated man perfecting the will to become the Overman.

“Nietzsche’s the man,” he said. “The name of my band is going to be the Wicked Archer.”

I don’t know what happened to the wicked archer. But Los Angeles is probably full of people like him, believing their power is sapped not by loneliness but by social obligation. Some folks can’t take the clutter.