Seriously, even if the plot didn’t sound like a hoot, I would’ve been sold by the music ALONE.  It’s totally not the thing you’d expect to hear where the traditionally-gritty genre of urban fantasy is concerned, and I couldn’t stop grinning while watching the trailer.  In case YouTube’s having issues or your computer doesn’t like video, here’s a summary of what Slippery Souls is all about…

Libby Hood has hit a bad patch in life, and just when she thinks things can’t get any worse she’s killed in a car accident alongside her dog Rufus. During their transition to the afterlife’s Sunray Bay, Rufus somehow manages to absorb her soul – which, in turn, gives him human-like qualities and renders her soulless.

 

Accompanied by her, now talking, dog, Libby tries to unravel the mystery of her slippery soul, encountering many setbacks and dilemmas along the way. She has no idea why a group of monster slayers, headed by an ex-convict, are hunting her down, and when she teams up with rogue Peace & Order Maintenance Officer, Grim, she’s shocked to discover that there’s a mob of disgruntled vampires and a very angry mayor hot on their heels too.

 

Libby has never felt so unpopular, and begins to wonder whether it’s possible to die twice in one day…

Slippery Souls is only the first part of Rachael’s Sunray Bay series, and she’s already at work on the second book.  So if you’re looking for more unconventional urban fantasy that’ll make you grin — it’s got a TALKING DOG, for crying out loud! — grab a copy of Slippery Souls when it comes out this Saturday!

One of the films shown at the Festival was the one you see above, Bryan Wolford’s Whisper.  Bryan’s one of the masterminds of Drunken Zombie and is a diehard movie junkie — he lives and breathes films, and he doesn’t just talk about them on the multitude of podcasts he appears on.   He also makes them!

Bryan works a full-time job, too, so in between that and all things Drunken Zombie, he makes movies.  His films are put together with love, determination, and ingenuity, and there’s an authenticity to them I rarely feel when I go to the theatre anymore.  Honestly, I’ll take five minutes of a Bryan Wolford film over 120 of a Michael Bay film any day.

Though there’s certainly modern trappings to this story, the tale itself is timeless and would’ve worked just as well in 1911 as it did in 2011, and Bryan’s built a solid, enjoyable, and thoroughly entertaining film around it.  Running at about 23 minutes, it even FEELS like an episode of the Twilight Zone… all it needs is Drunken Zombie’s Uncle Randy lurking around with some Serling-style commentary.

Apparently I’m not the only one that thinks Whisper is the cat’s meow… it’s been nominated for a Rondo Hatton Award, whoo hoo!

Vote for Bryan... or Rondo's gonna come over to YOUR house with a big-ass hammer. (Borrowed from Rondo site)

The Rondos are a special kind of award in the horror genre, as they have NO connection to any commercial interests.  These awards are for the fans by the fans, and when you win a Rondo, it’s not because that’s what was supposed to happen… it’s because the fans (the lifeblood of any and all independent writers, filmmakers, and musicians) LOVE what you’ve done.  It’s a sweet, sweet bit of prestige and a true honor.

So let’s help out a fellow hard-working indie filmmaker get some richly-deserved recognition!  Watch Whisper above, and if you like it — I’m sure you will! — go on over to the Rondo Awards website and vote for it in the Best Short Film category.  Bryan’s a friend and supporter of the Hollywood Vampires — an ad for Unholy War plays before every DZ Double Feature, they’ve even had me on the podcast, and Bryan invited me to contribute short stories to the DARK anthology — so let’s help a genuinely good guy win one of those awesome-looking Rondo statues!

I’ve got my vote in… now it’s your turn, my friends.  Oh, and if you’re not familiar with the nominees in a particular category, you DON’T have to vote for one… just vote for the stuff you know about.  Be sure to vote by midnight on APRIL 1st 2012!

The Rondo Hatton Awards

Both myself and the Hollywood Vampires want to extend our most ghoulish, ghastly birthday wishes to a guy who’s been terrifying and delighting audiences since the 1960′s — HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALICE!

And to commemorate the occasion, here’s my personal favorite Alice Cooper clip, and is actually the first Alice performance I ever remember seeing.  When I was a wee lad sitting on the floor of the living room, watching The Muppet Show and playing with my toys, I had no friggin’ idea who Alice Cooper was or that one day I’d be jumping up and down in glee as he was about to hang himself on stage.  But I saw him mugging around with the Muppets and my first thought was, “This guy’s cool.”

Have a great birthday, Alice, and thanks for all the fun throughout the years!

(And in a fun bit of trivia, Alice Cooper was actually a member of a group of rockers known as the Hollywood Vampires in the 1970′s!  It was a social group and not a band, and the only way to get in was to out-drink the other members, which included the likes of Mickey Dolenz from the Monkees and Keith Moon from the Who.)

Looking at the video, it appears to differ from the one Stacey found in his garage, but just as there are numerous breeds of vampires — maybe there are numerous breeds of chupacabras? What I’m REALLY curious about is whether or not they got footage of the critter swearing and throwing things at them… that’s the kind of thing that usually doesn’t make the news, so we may not be getting the whole story here.

Chupacabra… or some other weird creature? Since the critter was set free after pictures and video was taken, it’s hard to say — though the animal-lover in me DOES appreciate they let him loose instead of trying to sell him to some science lab or something. Until the truth can definitively be known, all I have to say on the matter is…

ARRRGH! TO THE MOON!

When I was a wee lad in junior high — before I’d even THOUGHT about writing vampire tales — I used to get hollered at because I’d sit and write toilet monster stories when I should’ve been paying attention in class… my math teacher (who rode a bike to school because he got a DUI, ha ha!) used to be particularly snide about it. I never was able to pull off a toilet monster story that truly satisfied me, but Lee Hardcastle — creator of this film — totally did it… this is the toilet monster story I WISH I would’ve written. Short, brutal, and hilarious.

If you laughed at “The Thing In Stacey’s Garage” … you’re gonna laugh at this. ENJOY!

Of particular interest is one of the greatest Ministry songs ever written… “Every Day Is Halloween.”

For those of you who are only familiar with Psalm 69-era (or thereabouts) Ministry, this particular song may come as a bit of a shock to you… before becoming a screaming industrial metal institution, Ministry was actually a pretty solid 80′s electronic pop band. Most of their old songs have been completely forgotten or disowned, but 1984′s “Every Day Is Halloween” is still there — the song’s just too damned good to be swept away.

Uncle Al even recently redid the song (the “Evil Version”), which speeds up the song and gives it much more of a modern Ministry bite, but while it’s kind of interesting, it falls flat in the face of the original, which is approximately 77% of everything that was cool about the 80′s jammed into one 6 and a half minute masterpiece. Every time I hear this song, I find myself wondering what other gems we’ve been forever denied by Uncle Al’s preference for a more metal sound.

Granted, my all-time favorite Ministry song is “Khyber Pass,” but godDAMN, “Every Day Is Halloween” stands at an obscenely close second. And it just seems like the natural theme for a book about a bitchy wannabe goth girl’s journey towards becoming a formidable, vaguely-sociopathic vampiress.

So while Uncle Al himself hasn’t declared this song as the official theme of Pathway To Darkness, as far as I’m concerned, this is the song I want to come to mind when you think of PtD. If a movie’s ever done of the book, THIS is the song I want playing over the opening… it’s just PERFECT.

If you’ve never heard this fantastic song, sit back, give it a listen, and enjoy! And if you’ve heard it a million times (like I have), go ahead and listen anyway… this is one of those tunes I can listen to 10 times in a row and not get tired of it. Yeah, it’s THAT good.

But it’s little things like this that helped inspire some of the goings-on in the forthcoming “It’s A Wicked Night, Wade!” tale. Keen-eyed readers will note I have a tendency to thrown around terms like “good grief” and “blockhead” in the Hollywood Vampires tales, and it’s NOT random…

I’ve had a deep love for Charles Schulz’ charming — and sometimes surprisingly downtrodden — little world for my entire life, especially his work from the 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s, and to this day, if you give me a Peanuts collection, I’ll happily sit and read it cover-to-cover. It’s not as wild as Calvin & Hobbes or as utterly insane as The Far Side, but there’s a certain deep simplicity to it that always makes me happy.

So it was only natural that eventually a Hollywood Vampires story would be strongly influenced by Charles Schulz, and fans of both the Peanuts and the Hollywood Vampires will have a ball with the tale! And it’s not a profanity-laced parody like the uproarious Kimmie’s Kooky Kreeper Kaper, either — while writing certain aspects of the story, I made a conscious effort to stay as true to Mr. Schulz’ vision… though adding a bit of an edge at times.

I like to think that if Mr. Schulz were to read the parts of the tale inspired by his work, he probably wouldn’t punch me in the face afterwards, as it’s a loving — if a little screwy — homage to one of my favorite comic and cartoon series of all time.

Check it out for yourself on June 14th — “It’s A Wicked Night, Wade!” will be available right here, on Amazon, and Barnes & Noble!

“On A Wicked Night” comes from Danzig’s Deth Red Sabaoth album, which — for my money — is the best album the man’s released since 1994, and a great slice of sludgy, doomy, wailing rock ‘n roll, with a nice bit of the old blues atmosphere thrown in. Out of this collection of great songs — including the murky “Juju Bone” and soaring “Deth Red Moon” — “On A Wicked Night” stands as my favorite…

It’s got great hooks, evokes a shadowy autumnal atmosphere, and the lyrics paint a picture of a certain someone coming for a certain someone else… and you-know-what ensues. Listen to the music, listen to the lyrics, and you’ll get the feel of what you’re gonna get with “It’s A Wicked Night, Wade!” Or at least part of it… We’ll talk about the rest a little later!

But all in all, it’s a killer song from a badass album — if you haven’t picked up Deth Red Sabaoth yet, I HIGHLY recommend it. A great piece of work from that formerly-skinny little punk from Lodi, New Jersey.

And hey, it helped inspire a wild ‘n wacky Halloween story starring Wade, so one can’t go wrong there, eh?

But even abysmally fucked-up as he was, Johnny could still play, write, and sing like nobody’s business, and put out a lot of great music in his post-Dolls career… his L.A.M.F. album with the Heartbreakers being a MUST-LISTEN! I’m also rather fond of the work he did with Patti Palladin on the Copycats album, where the two of them did classic rock ‘n roll oldies — certainly not as brash and nuts as the stuff he did with the Dolls or the Heartbreakers, but it shows off Johnny’s genuine, timeless talent beautifully.

But with as many bad habits as he had, it eventually caught up with Johnny in 1991. I’ll let the piece from Wikipedia relate the tale to you…

*****

Many rumors surround Thunders’ death at the St. Peter House in New Orleans, Louisiana in April 1991. He apparently died of drug-related causes, but it has been speculated that it was the result of foul play. According to the autobiography Poison Heart: Surviving the Ramones, Dee Dee Ramone took a call in New York the next day from Stevie Klasson, Johnny’s rhythm guitar player. “They told me that Johnny had gotten mixed up with some bastards… who ripped him off for his methadone supply. They had given him LSD and then murdered him. He had gotten a pretty large supply of methadone in England, so he could travel and stay away from those creeps – the drug dealers, Thunders imitators, and losers like that.”

What is known for certain is that Johnny’s room (no. 37) was ransacked and most of his possessions were missing (passport, makeup, clothes). Rigor mortis had set in with his body positioned in an unnatural state, described by eyewitnesses as “like a pretzel”, underneath a coffee table. Friends and acquaintances acknowledge he had not been using heroin for some time, relying on his methadone prescriptions. The police did not open a criminal investigation.

Singer Willy DeVille, who lived next door to the hotel in which Thunders died, described his death this way:

I don’t know how the word got out that I lived next door, but all of a sudden the phone started ringing and ringing. Rolling Stone was calling, the Village Voice called, his family called, and then his guitar player called. I felt bad for all of them. It was a tragic end, and I mean, he went out in a blaze of glory, ha ha ha, so I thought I might as well make it look real good, you know, out of respect, so I just told everybody that when Johnny died he was laying down on the floor with his guitar in his hands. I made that up. When he came out of the St. Peter’s Guest House, rigor mortis had set in to such an extent that his body was in a U shape. When you’re laying on the floor in a fetal position, doubled over – well, when the body bag came out, it was in a U. It was pretty awful.”

An autopsy was conducted by the New Orleans coroner, but served only to compound the mysteries. According to Thunders’ biographer Nina Antonia as posted on the Jungle Records web site, the level of drugs found in his system was not fatal. And according to the book “Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music Babylon” by Pamela Des Barres who interviewed Thunders’ sister Marion, the autopsy confirmed evidence of advanced leukemia, which would explain the decline in Thunders’ appearance in the final year of his life. This also sheds light on the interview in Lech Kowalski’s documentary “Born To Lose: The Last Rock and Roll Movie”, where Thunders’ sister Mary-Ann’s husband says, “Only Johnny knew how sick he really was.”

In a 1994 Melody Maker interview Thunders’ manager Mick Webster described the efforts of his family, “We keep asking the New Orleans police to re-investigate, but they haven’t been particularly friendly. They seemed to think that this was just another junkie who had wandered into town and died. They simply weren’t interested.” Marion claims that the original police report is largely missing and Webster further explains that the Coroner who conducted the autopsy was fired for falsifying a report in another case.

Thunders was survived by his ex-wife Julie and four children:sons John, Vito, and Dino; and daughter Jamie Genzale.

*****

No matter how he played it, Johnny was screwed. Here was a guy with so much potential, and such an obscene amount of talent that he could do more fucked-up than most guys could sober. A truly shitty end to a bright star.

For years, I wondered what might have happened if Johnny had survived New Orleans — leukemia aside — and while listening to “Gimme Danger” off the Stooges Raw Power album, a story began to form… this story.

Considering the shape Johnny’s life took, I didn’t expect his hypothetical survival to be any happier than his death — minus the leukemia, if he’d survived New Orleans, his life would’ve likely turned out something like what you’ll read below in the tale of Davey Danger, former guitarist for the New York glam band Electric Thunder. I want to think Johnny would’ve turned his life around and done something grand, but…

The die was cast, and it just seemed like Johnny had too much of an appetite for self-destruction to pull a Danny Trejo and turn into something amazing. I love the work of Johnny Thunders — his music is hands-down some of the best I’ve ever heard, and pretty much every guitarist in the 80′s was built on the Johnny Thunders mold. Without him, the 80′s glam rock we love so much wouldn’t have existed. But godDAMN — Johnny was a fucking mess.

Not only did Johnny provide the prototype for the 80′s glam guitarist, but he also contributed heavily towards that of the heroin-addled fuck-up rocker, too. Things just weren’t gonna work out for him once he’d started down that road, I’m afraid — and that’s where Davey Danger’s at as “Gimme Danger” begins.

But one thing Davey’s got working for him that Johnny wouldn’t have is… Clarisse.

Read on.

The heroin didn’t work anymore. The coke had stopped working sometime in the 90’s. And this cosmic rust stuff wasn’t doing shit for me, either.

I sat behind the wheel of my old convertible, staring out at the hazy, smog-choked Los Angeles sunset, vaguely feeling as though I should be pissed off the cosmic rust wasn’t worth the trouble I’d gone through to get it. But I wasn’t pissed. I hadn’t been pissed in a long time. Hadn’t been much of anything in years, just a fucking loser.

Should’ve died in New Orleans fifteen years ago, when I’m pretty sure I was supposed to. It would’ve been a stupid, pointless death, but after having a decade and a half to think about it, a stupid, pointless death was probably better than a stupid, pointless life.

At least it was quicker.

With my faintly shaking hand, I untied the rubber hose from around my arm and tossed it onto the floor next to the needle I’d used to shoot the cosmic rust into one of the few good veins I had left. So that was that. A couple of guys had gotten killed so I could ultimately achieve nothing. Oh well. Fuck ‘em. They were assholes, anyway, the kind of bottom-feeders I used to make fun of, back in the 70’s.

I leaned back in my seat and put my hand on the ignition, half-thinking about going somewhere, but I didn’t really have anywhere to go. My little shithole apartment off the Strip? Let the rats have it… they liked it more than I did. This sprawling, empty old parking lot was just fine. At least I could watch the sun set.

I let my hand fall off the ignition and land back on the seat, where it quietly trembled, so slightly you barely noticed, but big enough to take away the last thing I’d had. One of my little souvenirs from cheating death in New Orleans.

I watched the sun slowly descend, listening to the cars and people distantly pass by here and there, but not really noticing. I was out of step with the world – it just flowed around me like a big rock in the middle of a river. Maybe the cosmic rust would eventually kick in and show me something. Maybe it wouldn’t. As I sat in the summer heat, I decided it didn’t matter one way or another.

* * *

Click-click-click-click-click-click.

The sun had slipped beneath the horizon, and overhead, a few brave stars fought against the perpetual orange haze of L.A.’s light pollution. It was a futile gesture –nobody really noticed them anyway.

I blinked my eyes a few times as I realized I’d lost an hour or so there. Had the cosmic rust worked?

Click-click-click-click-click-click.

I picked back over what had been going on in my head since the last time I’d noticed anything, and figured out it hadn’t. I’d shot myself up with an elephant-sized dose of what was supposed to be one of the most potent new drugs out there, and I’d just dozed off for a little while. It hadn’t even messed with my dreams, if you could call them that. No… they weren’t dreams. I didn’t dream any more. All I ever got was a few ugly memories, which I’d rather just forget.

Click-click-click-click-click-click.

I used to wake up screaming and crying, but that had stopped years back down the road. I wished it hadn’t.

“You shouldn’t take things without paying for them.”

I glanced over to my left and saw a skinny kid with a mohawk and mesh shirt standing next to my car, watching me from behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses; my reflection looked bored. The kid kept clicking his front teeth as he watched me, and the only time he stopped was when he talked – a clicker.
Just like crackheads tended to itch after they’d gotten deep enough into the cesspool, rust-heads started to click once they’d hit the point of no return. Kid was probably connected to the guys I’d gotten the cosmic rust off of.

“Yeah, I probably shouldn’t,” I replied.

He seemed momentarily confused – he must have been expecting a bit more from me. Tough shit.

The kid held up a nine millimeter, the rate of his teeth-clicking increasing as he leaned forward in what was supposed to be a menacing manner – but there was just enough inexperienced caution present that I could tell he was new to this.

“You shouldn’t kill people when you take things without paying for them, either.”

“Yeah, I probably shouldn’t,” I said. “But they were in my way. They wanted me to pay, and I didn’t have the money.” I shrugged. “Had to be done.”

The kid stood and clicked for about half a minute, thinking things over. I was pretty sure he was mostly thinking about how much he wanted to get back to whatever toilet he called home and hit the rust again. From the way he was clicking, he had a pretty good habit going – probably why he was doing somebody else’s dirty work. Or at least making a poor attempt at doing somebody else’s dirty work.

I tried to help him out.

“So… what are we going to do here?” I asked. “You gonna shoot me, blow out my knees, knock me around, what?”

That caught him up short. I could feel his stare intensify – his assuredly large, light-sensitive eyes getting just a bit wider as he tried to figure me out. He shouldn’t have put the effort into it – I was pretty simple when you got right down to it.

“Huh?” he intoned.

“Somebody sent you here to teach me a lesson, or collect from me, or kill me,” I said, “Since I iced a couple of shitbag dealers so I could try out the new wonder drug all the kids are talking about. You going to get on with it, or just stand there and click all night? I’ve got all the time in the world, but you’ve probably got at least a couple of things you’d rather be doing right now.”

The kid stared at me for a while longer. “Huh?”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my knife. I flicked it open and held it up, and the kid took a half-step back. “Would this help you make up your mind?” I asked.

After another half-minute of clicking, the kid lowered the nine millimeter and shook his head. He didn’t have the slightest idea of what to do. They never did.

I closed the knife and put it back in my pocket, and then settled back into my original position, closing my eyes. “Let me know when you’ve figured out what you’re going to do, all right?”

“This is messed-up, man,” he finally muttered. His feet scraped on the weedy, cracked asphalt of the old parking lot – he was turning to walk away, which is what always happened. I knew from long experience that even if I chased after him, he’d just take off running and never once use that gun, consequences when he returned empty-handed be damned.

Then something different happened.

A loud, sharp crack filled the steamy air. It wasn’t the kind of crack that came from a gun being fired, either. It was the crack of bone.

I opened my eyes and turned in the direction of the clicker, and I was surprised for the first time in years.

* * *

The little stranger let go of the clicker’s head, which had been rotated around 180 degrees – he was looking directly at me even with his back turned – and he slumped to the ground in a boneless heap. A few soft clicks came from the heap, but they quickly faded away to nothing. Her gaze moved towards me, and we looked at one another for several seconds.

Even as recognition flared in her bright sapphire eyes, I felt a similar flicker register in the back of my brain. We’d never met, but we knew each other.

Her fiery hair was long and slightly wavy from the summer humidity, and she was dressed in torn denim jeans, biker boots, and a tight Death Angel tanktop that showed off her lush curves without making her look cheap. A blue metal pentagram was set into a black choker around her neck – it glinted faintly in the dimness of the parking lot, where most of the lights had been long busted out.

The last time I’d seen this woman had been several years back, when I’d gone to one of her shows and watched her play the guitar and sing heavy metal, rock ‘n roll, and the blues with equal skill on all fronts, supported by one of the better backing bands I’d seen in my time.

Her name was Venus d’Morte, and as I’d watched her play through her set, I’d realized I was looking at a fantastic talent, one pure and free of corruption, and the music she played was strong, true, and powerful. If she’d wanted to, she could have become one of the greatest performers in the world, but instead she stayed here in Los Angeles, playing to smaller crowds and turning down all offers to go on to bigger and better things. She played because she loved to and because she wanted to – the joy she radiated onstage was so infectious it had been the last time I’d really felt anything.

I’d fucking hated her.

Once she’d finished her set – to the deafening roar of the crowd – I’d left the club and had proceeded to get so fucked up I still couldn’t remember what had gone on in the three days following… the last time that I’d been able to achieve that level of fucked-up-ness. I’d stopped going to clubs after that, and I hadn’t seen her since.

Now here she was, not ten feet from me, having snapped the neck of the clicker that had decided he wasn’t going to kill me.

As I looked at her, I realized there was something about her I hadn’t noticed before. She seemed to stand out in the semi-shadows of the parking lot, as though she were more real than everything else. I squinted my eyes, not sure what to make of it.

“You’re pretty far gone,” she said, noticing my scrutiny. “When you get past a certain point, there are things you can see that others don’t notice.”

“Things like you?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“And what kind of thing are you?”

“The kind of thing that’s supposed to exist only in stories.” Her voice was soft and velvety, with an underlying strength to it.

“What, a musician that does it for the hell of it instead of money?”

“You used to be that kind of thing.”

I snorted. “You got that wrong.”

When I blinked, she was gone, which gave me my second surprise of the evening.

“I saw you at CBGB’s in 1976 with Electric Thunder and then there again in 1979 on your own. You weren’t thinking about money either time.”

I jumped and then turned to the passenger seat, where she was comfortably reclined, gazing at me intently, a little smile on her red lips. The surprise quickly faded, and I returned her gaze coolly.

“You’re full of shit,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” she asked, though she knew full well what it was.

“That was 30 years ago.”

“So?”

I gestured at her. “You can’t be more than 25, maybe, maybe 30, and that’s pushing it.”

“You sure of that?”

“I’m not stupid, kid.”

“I’m not saying you are,” she replied, not unkindly. “But you’ve got to remember I’m the kind of thing that’s supposed to exist only in stories.”

“You don’t say,” I murmured, turning away from her to look out over the city, wreathed in its gaudy whore’s dress of perpetual light. After a few moments, she spoke up.

“Am I bothering you? I can go away.”

“No. No!” I snapped back towards her more quickly than I’d intended, with more force in my voice than I’d wanted. As I stared at her, I realized that my heart was beating very, very fast. I didn’t want her to go, not at all.

She nodded amicably. “All right. I’ll stay.” She smiled demurely and said nothing more.

After several moments of my mind scrambling around, trying to think of something to say, which it definitely wasn’t used to, I finally asked, “So… what’d you kill that guy for?”

A shadow flickered across her flawless features, and she scowled slightly. “I hate clickers.”

“I don’t like them much, either.”

Her eyes narrowed. “They make rust out of peoples’ blood, right?”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

“So you know what one of the main ingredients of cosmic rust is, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “Everybody says it’s vampire blood.”

She ground her teeth slightly. “Yeah.”

“That’s a bunch of shit, though.”

She shook her head. “Nope.”

“Oh.” My mind did a little arithmetic that had nothing to do with numbers, making my heart skip. “Then you’re…”

She smiled.

I blinked.

“So,” she said, “What’s the great Davey Danger doing sitting out in an empty parking lot on the bad side of town on a Friday night?”

I found I was a hesitant to answer, and for some reason that felt important. “I was trying some cosmic rust. I wanted to see what it was like,” I softly replied. She nodded, seeming to take no offense.

“So how was it?”

“It wasn’t.”

Her slim eyebrows rose. “No?”

She leaned forward and looked at me very closely – I felt, for just a moment, how different she really was. But then the feeling was gone. I found myself leaning closer to her, as though trying to chase down that feeling and reclaim it.

“No,” she said again, this time as a statement instead of a question – she sounded almost sad. “It wasn’t, was it? None of it is. Any of it.”

Now my eyebrows rose. “You know?”

“I can smell it on you – I can even see it, now,” she said quietly. “It’s all over you.” She paused. “That’s why the clicker didn’t kill you, why he didn’t do anything. Even he could tell.”

She reached out and put her hand against my heart. Even through my shirt, even in the heat of the summer night, I could feel the warmth of her hand, and I shivered deep inside, wanting.

“Your heart’s beating, but you’re dead. You have been for a long time, haven’t you?” Her voice was scarcely above a whisper, and the note of sadness was stronger.

All I could do was nod as I stared into her eyes, searching for… something.

“You can’t kill what’s already dead, can you? Everybody knows that, even if it’s not a conscious thing.” She started to pull her hand away, but my own hand snapped up and covered hers, holding it in place.

The hand that made her guitar sing like no other was soft and very warm, but I could feel the power in it, safely kept in check. Her hands could wreak terrible things if they wanted to, or if they had to. Beneath her hand, my heart beat loud as thunder.

“What happened?” she asked.

To this day, I still wasn’t entirely sure of what had gone down in New Orleans. I know I’d gotten in with some real bastards, and I know things had gotten ugly. I’d survived, but I’d gotten hurt – really bad.

Bad enough that even when I’d healed, I’d never play guitar again. Bad enough that my ex-wife had told me – while I was still in the hospital and could barely move – that she wasn’t going to let our three boys be anywhere near a father that could get involved in things like that. She’d told me she was taking the boys and going away, far away from me, and if I cared about my sons as much as I’d always said I did, I wouldn’t come looking for them, so they wouldn’t get tainted with the madness my life had become.

I’d fucked myself up, and I’d be damned if I fucked my boys up, who’d never done anything but love me. So I’d stayed away.

With my music gone, my family gone, and everything else I’d ever cared about gone, I’d just drifted for 15 years, figuring I’d eventually get killed by drugs, booze, bad guys, or a combination of the three. It had never happened, and I’d stopped caring, stopped feeling, stopped doing anything of any kind of significance, years ago. She was right – my heart was beating, but I’d been a long time dead.

The great Davey Danger, wildman of Electric Thunder and unpredictable punk rocker in his own right after Electric Thunder imploded, the man who personified danger in all its forms, the man who might’ve given it all up to become a good father but was too stupid to take the chance when he’d had it, had become a corpse nobody had gotten around to burying yet. Didn’t seem like anybody wanted to, not that it mattered.

Nothing did, not any more.

“Does it really matter?” I asked her, my voice distant.

She sighed. “I guess it doesn’t. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.”

I laughed a small, bitter laugh. “Yeah. You could say that.”

We sat wordlessly, my heart thundering beneath her hand, though she didn’t say anything about it. She’d look at me for a time, and then turn away, her eyes gazing out over the city before returning to me.

Every time her eyes came back, I felt a little thrill of relief, and though I didn’t understand it, I welcomed it anyway. It felt good. Hell, it just felt.

So while she sat there, looking at me, looking at the city, and looking at me again, I held onto her hand almost desperately, needing her, needing her danger… and what it could mean for me.

To find out what happens next, pick up “Gimme Danger” either in the Hollywood Vampires store, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble!

See ya ’round, Johnny — and thanks.

And it’s friggin’ AWESOME!

This ranks up there with Alice Cooper’s appearance on the Muppet Show in terms of sheer entertainment value from a “rocker” who definitely doesn’t take himself too seriously… as you’ll often see in Hollywood Vampires tales, the dark and otherworldly isn’t all that removed from the fun and silly.

So…

It’s Friday, you’re ready for the weekend, and here you’ve got a seven and a half-minute cartoon clip of silliness set to the beat of a very entertaining and clever little song about a brain-eating monster from outer space. For gawd’s sake… PLAY IT!