I remember spending a night at Rodney Bingenheimer’s (Rodney on the KROQ fame) funky apartment in the dirtiest section of Hollywood. Us silly girls swarmed around him as he served up new music that we had never heard before. Listening to X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage, Up Yours” for the first time sent electricity through my body. How come everyone wasn’t listening to this, I wondered. Rodney introduced us to songs that spoke to us, and he had us in a musical trance. The thing was, his passion was the music and being around him opened us up to so much more than we ever heard on the radio. Still, he was a guy with needs, and we could have been lured in because we were young and stupid. He led us to his place and god knows what could have happened.
We did things like that almost nightly. We went wherever the scene took us. It didn’t matter if it was the filthiest parts of downtown L.A. or some guy’s apartment.
~ Brenda Perlin

Artwork by Atila Sikora