Game 54: Ruth and Marty Danzig - Bourbon Chicken
I’m instantly transported back to the Los Angeles of 1996 - 2005 when I hear Beck’s music. It’s not just that his early discography dominated local radio and soundtracked my adolescence. As a light skinned kid, the son of an artist and an actress, growing up off Hoover and Melrose, I felt a kinship to this whiteboy from Hoover and 9th who was raised in L.A. by musicians, artists, and Warhol superstars. When the lead single “Qué Onda Guero” off his 2005 album Guero referenced “Rampart boys with loaded rifles,” “abuelitas with plastic bags,” the “vegetable man in the vegetable van,” “Guatemalan soccer balls” at Griffith Park, Cap N’ Cork, and ceramics classes at LACC, I thought he had written this song just for me.
In SPIN’s December 1999 cover story on Beck, the musician takes the author on a tour of the many L.A. neighborhoods that made his (and my) childhood. At one point, they pass through Los Feliz, where Beck points out the one Craftsman home that doesn’t fit with all the other renovated houses:
“Everything’s going upscale around here,” Beck says, scanning the manicured lawns and homes. “Except for Glenn Danzig’s house.” The horror-rocker rocker lives in a quaintly sepulchral hacienda with a large pile of bricks out front. “He’s had that stack of bricks there for about eight years now,” Beck says. “I think it’s a statement.”
Glenn Danzig still owns that home. And although the infamous pile of bricks has decreased in quantity and moved to the corner of the yard, Danzig no longer lives there In 2005, the iconic frontman of The Misfits, Samhain, and his eponymous band abandoned his Los Feliz house and bought the former home of Lucille Ball in the West L.A. neighborhood of Cheviot Hills. He also abandoned several 4 foot statues of Taz and Marvin Martian, still-in-box action figures, books, open boxes of Count Chocula and Franken Berry, and a "Double Gargoyle Candle Dish." These items became public knowledge because Danzig finally put his house up for sale in 2014.
The dark prince of goth punk and bluesy goth rock missed out on selling his house just before the housing bubble burst in 2007. But enough years had passed in Los Angeles’ ludicrous real estate market for Danizg to try and make a profit off the 1907 home he bought in 1989 for only $275,000. When he put it up for sale in 2014, he asked for $1.2 million for the “as-is” house. The listing was up-front about it being a fixer-upper, stating that it was waiting for the “imagination and creative talents” of homeowners or real estate flippers ready to de-goth the home.
Even when Danzig lived there, the house played into the hunky prince of darkness persona he cultivated, but sometimes bristles at. In an L.A. Times article following the unexpected success of “Mother” five years after it was released on 1989’s Danzig, the singer invited a journalist into his home who described the incongruous mix of Looney Tunes toys inside the house’s darkly foreboding exterior. Several blogs I found referenced a now-deleted MTV News piece where Danzig blamed the pile of bricks in his yard on the 1994 Northridge Earthquake that destroyed his chimney. That would conflict with Beck’s claim of the bricks going back to 1991, but who are you going to trust? Beck or the proud owner of the bricks?
Even though finally moved the pile of 138 bricks to the side, which were so notorious that someone made a Twitter account for them, the house was taken eventually off the market. It still belongs to Danzig, though I doubt he’s been there in years. I walk or drive by it dozens of times every month and don’t blame people for not buying it. There’s a steady stream of cars and pedestrians walking by at all hours of the day. And if you have enough money to buy a $1.2 million house in Los Feliz, you could do a lot better than the one needing another $1.2 million in renovations.
But not every house comes with a built-in nickname.
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Bourbon Chicken
6 chicken breast halves, boned
Butter
Small can frozen orange juice
2 ounces bourbon
Slivered almonds
Salt and pepper to taste
Brown chicken breasts in butter. Add orange juice concentrate, salt and pepper, and cover pan. Cook for 30 minutes. Remove chicken to platter. Boil sauce down to half its original amount. When thickened, add bourbon. Meanwhile, toast slivered almonds with butter in 450 degree oven for 4-5 minutes. Sprinkle over chicken and pour sauce over all.
“Quick, simple, and fool-proof”
The frozen can of orange juice scared me. The only people I’ve ever seen someone consume the frozen can were my childhood next door neighbors, whose freezer was full of the entire fruit juice spectrum in can form. But my girlfriend’s mom made an excellent Thanksgiving turkey last year that was basted in orange juice, so I had high hopes going in that this would be a Goldstein and Gasol surprise.
It wasn’t. It was as middle of the road as you can get. I almost wish it tasted worse just so it would make more of an impression. But it was just chicken covered in a slightly sweet, slightly sticky orange-bourbon-butter sauce that got worse tasting as it lost heat. I still have two chicken breasts leftover for lunch tomorrow, but I will not be drenching them in sauce or buttered almonds.
