The e-mail said David was dead which led me to scanning all these pictures of people and things that are no longer there, so the story of my journey to New York City starts in a boarded up cave of a studio with David, hatching up conspiracies, accepting the monumental task of freaking out the world, the world of trying to keep up, where every word took on a new meaning, like a drunken sailer with a thesaurus, the constant lure of excellent stonedness, the door locked shut with a fucking two-by-four, trapped with a latter day Svengali, how the hell did I ever meet David Jove?
    Must have been a gallery opening or an LA Weekly party, just a random encounter, and I can't even begin to fathom who introduced us, "Michael Dare, David Jove. David, Michael's got a video column in the L.A. Weekly. Michael, David's a video maker. Haven't you ever heard of New Wave Theatre? David, you've got to show Michael some of your New Wave Theatres."

    David did better than that, giving me total access to the process, from taping six bands in a rented studio in one night, moving the lighting and camera to each band instead of just setting up the lights and letting the bands move on and off like it's normally done. David insisted it gave the show flavor, and he was right, because once he got all that footage into his 3/4 inch video editing cave, around the corner from Canters, a boarded up storefront you had to enter from the back, up all night on coke and pot and booze, cranking out insane music for the eyes, vastly entertaining, the brand new world of MTV exposing a new art form, the video, David proved that madmen in caves can put it out as good as the suits. I attended dozens of New Wave Theatre shoots and they were all spectacular parties leading to cutting edge TV, exposing dozens of the best of the LA underground to a national audience via the USA network.

    It was hosted by Peter Ivers who was deliberately obnoxious to the guests, an Ali G. twenty years ahead of his time. You had to KNOW Peter to know that he was playing a character as host, a Zen clown on Yoga. Wander backstage and you'd more than likely find Ivers on his head going ommmm. In front of the camera he basically became the mouthpiece for Jove, who would write him monologues about the nature of reality to introduce bands like the Dead Kennedys, who surely weren't expecting "What is the meaning of life?" to be one of the post-song interview questions. 

    But it was in the editing cave that David got insanely creative. Just straight cuts, no cross-fading or wipes, and hours of footage, taking hours, sometimes days on each individual song, making each individual edit the best it could be, taking off a frame here, putting back a frame there, sometimes taking hours to finalize one single fucking edit.
    Take, for instance, the starfield. Jove was fond of sticking one single frame of a starfield in random places, causing the unsuspecting viewer to subconsciously say to themselves "Did I just see the universe behind this band?" Hours of meditation upon the evils of substance abuse were necessary for each decision as to where the starfields would be placed. "Why did he stone me out to bore me to death?" was a frequent thought at Jove's place.

    There was no way to leave. Accepting a snerf of beagle from David Jove was the equivalent of signing a contract in blood stating that you now had to put up with David Jove for the next half hour, an endless tirade of cosmic futility and random juxtopositions, Gurdjieff and Scientology, the lives of the mystics and the nature of the universe, batted at you at 100 miles per hour, daring you to keep up with it. You had to be able to play verbal hardball with David, whose only goal was to get you to think REAL HARD about what you were going to say next because he might knock your brains out. He was the kind of guy who would take a swing at you, stopping short just before contact, and saying "You're lucky to be alive right now." Real sweet. Endless paranoia. Every knock at the door a major decision as to whether to start flushing or open up.
 

    A lot of the band members looked like they wanted to beat Peter up, which someone did one night, badly. Peter was killed in his downtown loft, and no one's sure who did it, though many blamed Jove, who was clearly violent and insane, though it made no sense to me. Sure he had means, opportunity, and a violent nature, but motive? Killing the host of his up and coming hit TV show would have made as much sense as Larry David killing Jerry Seinfeld. 

David Jove Reacts to Peter Iver's Murder

    Jove was brilliant and artistic and the closest thing to Charles Manson I've ever met loose in the street. A benign Charles Manson, where all the madness went into his art, unless he killed Peter Ivers, which I can now hypothesize without fear of retribution since they're both dead. There's a rumor that Peter was quitting the show which, oops, gives David motivation. David would have shot me if I came right out and said anything of the sort, and if he didn't, Peter's real killer is unlikely to come after me for naming David as the guy who might have done it, though every member of every band that ever appeared on New Wave Theatre is ALSO a suspect, which is why the official investigation probably didn't get very far. Imagine the detective having to sit and watch every episode of New Wave Theatre, then asking every member of every band where they were that bloody night. Maybe on CSI: Underground, but the LAPD? Not bloody likely.

    You never knew who you'd meet. The Hollies had the brilliant idea of hiring David Jove to make a video based upon their version of Stop in the Name of Love. David turned it into a moral tale of a fighter pilot on his way to drop the big one, thinking back on his life, and deciding to turn back. It turned Stop in the Name of Love into an unexpected anti-war statement, ending with dozens of shots of people just staring at the camera, looking at you as though the fate of the world depended upon your decision. 

    It was good enough to get David noticed, and dozens of rock stars visited the cave to check him out. Though no band ever hired him to make another video, he went on to direct The Top, hosted by Andy Kaufman in his last public appearance (which I wrote about here), and a feature film called I Married My Mom until he realized the title gave away the ending, so he changed it to Stranger than Love.

    The phone rang. It was David. "Hey, man, you gotta get over here, I got Jackson Brown over here with his girlfriend."
    "I'll be right there."
    David was giving Jackson Brown the Jove treatment, zooming him out, showing the same thing over and over, trying too hard to impress with his brilliance, while I hung out with Jackson's girlfriend, whom David didn't seem to realize was Daryl Hannah.

       One time I spelunked into David's cave only to meet a guy bigger and more obnoxious than David, very funny, just in from New York on a screenwriting job, Alex Gorby, reading through the L.A. Weekly, stumbling across a page that said BAD FOOD, with the headline Los Burritos of Hollywood Blvd. He started reading it out loud, cracking up constantly. If this scene had taken place in a movie, it would have been called a "cute meet" by those in the know. I wrote BAD FOOD. Sometimes you write an article to be entertaining or educational or merely paid, but it turns out you wrote it to meet someone. Alex and I became best of pals, leaving the cave for Cantor's to discuss the David Jove experience, both wired out of our skulls, both MUCH more rational than David. It's safe to say that if I hadn't written BAD FOOD, some of these pictures would never have been taken.

The Big Contest
 

Emulsional Problems