My night at THE MAB
by Frank Moore, November 9, 2005
From the book, Shut Up You Animals!!! A Remembrance of Dirk Dirksen, published by Last Gasp in 2020.
My night at THE MAB, eh? Truthfully my nights at THE MAB have all blurred together because I hold the record of performing the most in the historic dive, doing the early show between 1978 and 1981…first an over-the-edge comedy and then the popular cult show known as The Outrageous Beauty Revue [except in Dirk’s diseased mind which turned it into The Outrageous Beauty Pageant] every Saturday, and often on other nights as well! I was the guy in the wheelchair with all of those babes! Anyway, the first night I ventured into that den of punk insanity, the singer smashed his beer bottle onto the black brick wall behind the stage, glass shards ricocheted into the audience and right into the arm of one of the women who were with me. Now I have always thought Dirk gave me THE MAB as a creative theatrical lab because he was an artistic visionary. But it might just have been his way of avoiding being sued! Never know with Dirk! I never figured out his book-keeping method. A lot of bands thought he ripped them off. True, when there was a large audience, we got almost nothing. But when there was nobody in the audience, Dirk gave us fistfuls of cash. But you have to realize that Dirk had a strange mental condition. He thought that I was his brother for whom he has always harbored a painful jealousy because Mom obviously loved me more! He was always threatening to roll me in my wheelchair onto the freeway. But as I said, my MAB nights have all melted together. Like I remember a night when we only had a very small audience….only Frank Zappa, Robert Fripp, a reporter from Readers’ Digest, a pregnant woman, a television crew from That’s Incredible!, a European film company, and a teenaged punk eating spaghetti tripping on acid. After an act in which Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw Magazine, admitted he was a virgin, it was time for the finale…our “meat act”…nude dancing girls in cellophane and glitter…dry ice, strobe lights, me in horrific make-up singing sympathy for the devil…a vixen barely dressed in black with two bloody naked monsters lurching threatening in the audience attacking the pregnant woman, carrying her screaming onto the stage, ripping her guts and the unborn fetus out and eating them. This was when the television guy shut off his camera in disgust…and when the brain of the teenaged punk got expanded terminally. He would grow up to be Flea of The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Just another night of cultural subversion at The Mab!