Circa 1987 my friend Kaz decides to make a parody of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, dubbing it Pee-Pee’s Flophouse. Inverting everything cute, colorful and wholesome about the source material, he casts me as Pee-Pee Vermin and most of our Hoboken and WFMU friends and colleagues as analogs of the various Pee-Wee characters. Working from an actual script and shooting with a borrowed video camera (and no microphones but the one atop), we spend days in various Hudson County locations (a condemned building, the same cemetery used in the Sopranos years later, someone’s Hoboken apartment, the backroom at Maxwell’s, etc.) utilizing hand-built props and costumes and doing it all on a guerrilla shoestring . When it’s all edited together we hardly know what to make of it except HOLY SHIT, WE MADE A MOVIE! Somewhere there’s a screening, the only one Pee-Pee’s Flophouse will ever get. Anyone who has a copy sticks it on a shelf and forgets about it. Kaz moves on to greener (or should I say yellower?) pastures as a big muckety-muck on SpongeBob Squarepants.
In the intervening years Pee-Pee’s Flophouse has been seen by almost no-one outside the cast. Years ago, our friend Dan across the street, a video producer by trade, digitized my sole VHS copy and declared it “Hilarious!” It was a revelation to me to see it again, especially in light of those in the video who are now gone (William Berger and Jennifer Lynds). When I asked Kaz recently if I could take a crack at restoring Pee-Pee’s Flophouse he said “Yeah, sure. But it’s WAY too long.” I told him I’d cut it down to size and run it past him first. But it’s a monumental task due to the horribly distorted audio (the video can be cleaned up a bit but there’s not much to be done about the audio). I don’t know if it’s only my copy with shitty sound (sometimes, over-modulation occurs during dubbing) but I’ve asked the only person who may have an original (and it’s not Kaz) and he lost it long ago.
The segment of Pee-Pee’s Flophouse I’m presenting here – the Drug Trip – had a separate soundtrack recording in stereo by me down at WFMU. Kaz wanted something trippy and gloomy behind the “tone poem” he wrote, so I lifted a Black Sabbath riff, enlisting the then-members of Adrenalin O.D. – Paul Richard & Bruce George Wingate (Guitars), Keith Hartel (Bass) and Dave Scott (Drums) – to join me (I’m on wigged out lead guitar) on a 17-minute journey into Pee-Pee’s mind. AOD appears in the final sequence on stage at Maxwell’s where one by one I usurp their instruments.
Someday soon I hope to work on the rest of Pee-Pee’s Flophouse and get it out there. It’s a true time capsule of a time and a place long gone. For now, the Drug Trip will have to do.
