We're The Pits, or Punk Comes to LA

THREE YEARS AFTER my group Christopher Milk -- signed to Warner Bros. and produced, rather poorly, by a famous English producer -- agreed that we'd delighted audiences long enough, I played some new songs for an A&R guy at a publishing company, the sort who wore a silver coke spoon in his chest hair and started every other sentence with the word hey, as though to remind the listener how wonderfully candid he was being. He did a bit of this and a bit of that on the side, including some promoting, and said if I put a group together, he could guarantee a lucrative Canadian tour.