Bash Compactor: Welcome to Hatesville

I've heard lots of crazy shit about industrial noise musician Boyd Rice, who performs under the name Non. He’s a recluse who lives underground in a bunker in Colorado and supposedly has no girlfriends, pets, computer or cell phone.

“Boyd Rice is a black pimp,” Charles Manson once said about Rice, a noted prankster who presented former First Lady Betty Ford with a skinned sheep’s head on a silver platter. He also pretended to have an extensive Barbie doll collection, but later admitted to lying. Well I’m sorry, but Rice seemed pretty damned amiable and friendly at (Le) Poisson Rouge the other night where Iconoclast, a new documentary about his life, was previewed and where he was performing. He even smiled when I took his picture.

We were sitting in the lounge area with the film’s director Larry Wessel, a portly, turquoise-caftaned gent in his sixties who lives in Los Angeles, and his looker of a Swedish wife, Tora. “Anyone have a pen?” he asked, wanting to autograph the black-and-white film posters. I gave him my Sharpie. Cavorting with the couple was their pal, the wild and crazy fashion designer Mari Gustafson, a friend of Rice’s from Denver. “Back in ’92, we used to hang out on 13th Street in Denver at the happy hour at Pegasus—you could get two beers and bar food for $5 and Boyd was usually holding court in a booth.”

In the DJ booth, New York Dolls’ David Johansen was playing sweet soul music, Rice’s favorite, and Gustafson got up to dance on the leather banquettes.

Finally Wessel started to show the preview of Iconoclast, but all of a sudden the film froze. “A 7-foot-tall, humorless, bald bouncer turned off my mic and booted me off,” he told us later. But industrial noise shows tend to cause that sort of reaction by security.

The world premiere of the four-hour film will be in Wessel’s home base, Los Angeles, Aug. 17. After the preview finally finished playing, we wandered about chatting up the merch people and schmoozing with some of the guests. A couple of hours later, I was wondering when the show would start. “When do you think Boyd will go on,” I whined. The flick was supposed to start at 10:30 and we were still sitting around schmoozing at 1 a.m. “These shows always go on late. And Boyd usually doesn’t play too long,” one of my friends said. But there are only so many G&Ts you can have on an empty stomach, so we ran out for a quick bite at Mamoun’s.

Stuffed, we strolled back into the club to find Rice playing an acoustic set. It seems like he wouldn’t be playing some of those electronic fan favorites like “Pearls Before Swine.” Was he really a racist misogynist like some claim, I asked Gustafson. “He renounced racism and the skinhead movement years ago,” she told me. “He’s one of the greatest gentlemen you could ever meet.”