Poskanzer.PA@PARC-MAXC.ARPA (03/09/84)
From: Jef Poskanzer <Poskanzer.PA@PARC-MAXC.ARPA>
(From the San Francisco Chronicle, 06mar84, page 40. Reproduced without
permission.)
Jabba The Hutt's Favorite Singer
by Peter Stack
I should have figured that Jabba the Hutt in "Return of the Jedi"
was punk. But then I only met Annie Arbogast the other night. She's a
punk rocker whose voice can crush dachshunds. She wrote and sang
Jabba's favorite tune, "Lapti Nek," a sort of weird hit.
Arbogast's swirly blonde hair almost stabbed out my eyes when I met
her the other night at Berkeley Square, a dumpy nightclub on University
Avenue.
The place was a zoo of people wearing spikes, black leather and
white-face. Annie was performing with her four-piece band called Smear.
It was louder than a train wreck, and punkers with hair gelled into
wrought-iron heaps and machetes for earrings were slam dancing.
I wanted to be in South City at the truckers' brawl, but I'd made
this date to meet Arbogast, 23, on account of her "Lapti Nek" fame. It
seems she's riding it to a kind of career.
In the movie, the tune is performed by alien vocalist Sy Snootles,
the character with slurpy lips at the end of an elephant's trunk.
Snootles is the main warbler in Jabba's court, a place to avoid unless
you've got a submachine gun for a dance partner.
Annie Arbogast got the "Jedi" gig by being in the right place at the
right time - a Hollywood type of story played out in San Rafael. At
Lucasfilm Ltd., where she's a computer technician, she was standing in a
cafeteria line when a honcho working on "Jedi" noticed her gun belt of
thirty-ought-six bullets and her dog collar bracelets. He asked her who
she was, and she said she was a rock singer.
One thing led to another, and Arbogast was given the chore of
creating "Lapti Nek" for Sy Snootles. She made up the "Huttese" lyrics
by spilling pieces of Scrabble and Perquacky on her kitchen table in
East Oakland, and picking them up at random.
"They wanted a sound that was a cross between Captain Crunch and
Olive Oyl and a parrot stuck in an elephant's trunk. I figured I could
handle that," Annie told me.
"Now the song's very big. They made a video of it for MTV," she
said. What she's earned has enabled her to buy a new Toyota.
Arbogast's steam-enging singing voice is one thing. When she talks
she's shy like a farm girl, blushing and self-conscious. At our meeting
in a cold backroom at Berkeley Square she was wearing her rock and roll
costume - a metal junkyard over a mini-dress that would raise eyebrows
even in the Tenderloin.
"I'm not really a punker," she said, a little blush in her painted
eyes. She tore the filter off a Winston and lit it like a sailor in the
wind.
"I been with this band Smear for seven months now. I don't know
what you call our misic, exactly. Somebody said it was modern rock, or
acid power pop. I don't really want to be a computer tech all my life.
I think my future's in music.
"I write lyrics all the time. I get these ideas, and I write 'em
down. I got into poetry after I got kicked out of St. Leo's in Oakland
in seventh grade. Then I went to Maybeck, the alternative high school.
It's for people that have adjustment troubles. But they encourage you
to learn poets."
She got into computer technology following a brief career as a stage
hand for various local bands.
"I was fascinated with wiring stuff, so I finally went to Merritt
College and took electronics courses. I got my job at Lucasfilm when I
met this guy who works there, at a science fiction convention. It was
weird. I sent them a resume, and a year later they called me."
Arbogast's rock and roll lyrics aren't exactly Byronic. But her
songs have a certain jagged appeal, as if you were staring at a
jackhammer blade.
"Nude Boy" is one of her favorite creations, "Sad Bitches" another,
and a skewed, half-yelled thing the calls "Twisted." One titled "Burden
of Proof" she wrote while on jury duty in Alameda County Superior Court.
"I voted to send a guy up the river. The judge kept talking about
burden of proof, and it kept running through my mind," she said.
Arbogast and her band, which plays so loud it sometimes buries her
singing, don't have a big following yet. Mostly they do opening acts at
punk clubs, and their friends show up. They opened the other night for
Fade to Black and Necropolis of Love.
About midnight, I slipped out a side door of the club, and looked
back once at the dancers bashing each other. As I drove towards the Bay
Bridge, I thought to myself: There are people in the world who make
Jabba the Hutt look normal.