Love - That's All He Needs

If it wasn't for the fact that he was Courtney Love's first husband, Falling James might be just another aging punk transvestite running for president. The media would probably ignore his campaign, the same way mainstream music critics have allowed the nine excellent releases by his band, the Leaving Trains, to fall through their collective cracks.

But now, after laboring ceaselessly for the past 16 years in the pitiless bowels of L.A.'s youth culture, James may finally be in the right place at the right time. With a new Hole album in the works, and a conspiracy theory alleging that Courtney had something to do with Kurt's death gaining ground on the lunatic fringe, the paparazzi should soon be giving her surviving ex his proverbial 15.

You might assume that with a Leaving Trains record coming out next fall, James' presidential bid is really a publicity campaign. You'd be wrong. James' political activism actually has a history: he ran in '88 and '92. "I needed a job and figured why not start at the top?" is his deadpan explanation. The '88 bid "was supposed to be a one-off joke, but I found to my embarrassment that I got depressed when I lost. I realized that I had hoped there would be this sort of chain-letter reaction to my campaign - friends would tell friends and there'd be a last minute surge at the polls.

"I ran again because I wanted to be the token liberal extremist among all the right-wing types. Now I'm running because my pride won't let me lose."

On some level, James sees his campaign as a way out of punk's current cul de sac. "Punks today are conservative," the candidate declares hotly. "They're all dying to settle down and get into dead jazz. The irony is that they're the 'No Love' generation and they breed more than the hippies did."

Recovering his cool, he continues in more measured sociological terms. "Every youth movement turns conservative. The distinguishing thing about punk was that it didn't take the Clash 20 years to turn into the Rolling Stones - it took them three years. Most of the punk icons just gave up and endorsed whatever products came their way.

"Why get kids' blood boiling about revolution if you are not going to name a place and time?" he goes on. "Now I am naming a place and a time."

Unfortunately, there isn't much follow-up, James' campaign, like so much of the subculture that spawned it, is long on attitude and short on substance. His platform, evidently culled from a few back issues of Maximum rocknroll, is summed up by the slogan "Back To Greenland, Gringo!" That is, James promises that if elected he'll give the country back to the Indians, abolish the monetary system and declare the "mandatory work" system illegal. He says that he's given a lot of thought to the problem and figures that with those measures we all can proceed to live "in a pot-smoking, hedonistic paradise." Why Greenland? "On the map, Greenland looks like a big, empty place, " he explains reasonably, "and I'm sure that Denmark wouldn't mind us being there."

Voters may not be troubled by James' hazy grasp of political theory; an informed worldview has never seemed to be a prerequisite for high office. The question of fitness has really always boiled down to a matter of character, and it's here that this candidate really proves his mettle. A long-time cross-dresser, James points to his fashion sense as one of his strong points. "Since Americans don't seem ready to elect a woman, they can at least elect somebody who dresses like one," he says.

He's also ready to deal with the troublesome issue of a first lady: he promises that any woman who goes out with him will not only get to be first lady, but vice president as well. He calls this "cutting out the middle-man." With refreshing candor, he's quick to point out that getting laid played a big part in his decision to run for office. He confesses that it's tough getting a date when you're a hetero transvestite.

Like so many other public-minded men, much of James' program was formed in the harsh crucible of poverty. Even though he intends to abolish the monetary system immediately after his inauguration, he wants to be paid his presidential salary in advance so he could be rich for one day.

"I'm sick of groveling and being unable to go out with the women I want to go out with merely because of my social status," he complains. "As an avid reader of the personal ads, I've come to realize that many women out there are looking for single and rich rebels, and that's a hard combination to pull off."

James connects his personal despair with his political program in other ways. "There is a caste system in the music scene. I have found that the most popular people in the underground turn out to be trust-fund children. People who can afford to sit at home all day and experiment with drugs can obviously get further ahead in their consciousness than somebody who has to be on the job all day and can only drop acid after work. I advocate the trust-fund lifestyle for everyone - I think everyone should have that shot."

Courtney Love and Falling James were married for two years, 1989-1990, but only actually lived together for eight months. "I thought I was marrying the female Johnny Rotten," he says, "and that was a political goof. Instead I got this right-wing Phyllis Diller."

They met at a Hollywood club and were hitched a week later. "It was a very intense week," he allows.

He describes her as a homophobic conservative. "We used to have these idiotic conversations where she would claim that people got into punk rock and homosexuality for the same reason - to piss off their parents. She would also say that me and other knee-jerk liberals don't know what we're talking about, because she had slept with generals at this army base in Alaska and they had a lot of secret information which proved that the wars they got us into were really for our own good."

He says that initially he underestimated his new spouse. "I was in awe of her, but I still thought she was this condescending stripper telling me how to make it in show business. It turned out she was this demented person who really did have all these connections in the music industry, and who really did know what she was talking about."

He calls her "Conan the Barbarian when it comes to her career," which opens the way to asking him about those conspiracy theories. Noting that clearly he has no inside information, James speculates, "Did Kurt kill himself or did somebody kill him? I can see him getting into some ridiculous argument with her and getting so fed up that he ran into the house and blew his head off rather spontaneously. Most people would want to kill themselves just waking up to her.

"The other scenario, which is scarier and more cold-blooded, is that there was a profit motive for knocking him off. I can also see that happening, because Courtney is a violent person who, even in the midst of our anonymous, crummy, poverty-stricken little marriage, threatened to have me beaten up for $200 when I didn't do what she wanted. I was so scared of her I caved in immediately. In those days, she was just this junkie stripper and prostitute, but give somebody like that a couple million and you can't overestimate how dangerous they might be."

Asked if he still fears Courtney, he says, "Yeah, I'm scared of her."

In fact, he claims that several years back, when Kurt was still alive- he says he can't recall the exact date - he talked to two British authors working on a book about Nirvana, and was later harassed about it by private detectives on Courtney's payroll. He says they questioned neighbors and friends, and finally paid him a visit at his day job. "It was like a really bad Mannix episode. They said things like, "Your seem like a really nice guy. We wouldn't want anything to happen to you."

James speculates that the episode demonstrates Love's deep concern for her punk-rock credibility. And yet, he goes on, "I don't know a lot of happy facts to ensure her enshrinement as the queen of our punk-rock prom. I question the accuracy of calling her punk rock or underground. She doesn't even like the music - unless you think that Leonard Cohen and Fleetwood Mac are punk rock. I can point out, however, that what's going on with her is more malevolent than just being a fuck-up, and that instead of spending the profits from the punk scene on drugs and video games she spends it on intimidating people who knew her before she was famous."

James seems to think he's a marked man one way or another. He figures that if Courtney doesn't make an example out of him, then reactionary political forces are bound to assassinate him before he can win his election and give America back to the Indians. He says his life is a kind of punk-rock Death Race 2000.

But he does have his optimistic moments. He promises that the forthcoming Leaving Trains release, Smoke Follows Beauty, will be a mixture of pop, punk, metal and psychedelic songs that will undoubtedly make him a star.

Still, as he awaits his hour of destiny, you can tell that he's unsure whether it's Dame Fortune or just the Bitch Reaper who'll have her way with him.