My confession: The Rat Fink book I co-wrote with Ed Roth. IT'S FINKING TIME!

One of the hardest things I ever did was write this book with Ed Roth. He was so nuts! He made me make up a lot of his autobiography. Haha. He had a letter that I wrote him in nutso beatnik slang, that i wrote after meeting him in 1986 with Miriam Linna, Billy Miller, Andrea Kusten, etc.(see Miriam's recent postings here & on Facebook for info on that fateful day, Miriam wound up writing the intro to this book. I was pretty vocal that i wanted her to write the book but it was too late...), this letter was the blueprint for all writing of Fink stuff from that point on. He had called & asked me to write the comics he was publishing, but I couldn't get it together. So some years later in fine small town hick style, not realizing just how large a city Noo Yawk really iz, the Grand Finkster hisself jingled our ol' bud Pat Redding who was handling the krazy book deal-o in da big rotten apple & sez "Hey Pat! You live in New York, do ya know this cat named Howie Pyro?" (kinda slipped into the sorta lingo the book was scrawled in...). Miraculously she did & he said he wanted me to write it. He just happened to wind up on the phone with the one person in the publishing field in the biggest city on earth (or there abouts) who DID know me. Too weird. Or maybe not weird enough. Anyhooo this thing was WRITTEN, yeah, written with pencil/pen & paper! Waaay before computers, and i couldn't type. Still can't! It took forever & was beyond difficult. Big Daddy turned out to be pretty darned difficult as well. I loved him to death & don't wanna tarnish his rep (hahaha) but truth is he hated Rock N Roll & I seriously hadda fight to get it in the book. And other stuff too. And he insisted on mentioning his wife Bev literally about every other sentence, like a thousand times. (We counted cuz they had to pay me to remove her damned name & change it to "my wife" when she left him & he didn't want her name in it anymore! It had to be done by hand & i wanted to be paid ten cents or a quarter or some nonsense per name. Somewhere i have it written down...hahaha). I just found all the letters i got from Roth festooned with tons of drawings, on great stationery with cassette tapes and all kindsa good stuff. Luckily i had moved to LA in 2,000 and Roth was gonna be at the Rat Fink Reunion at Moon Eyes the following year & that same day I was just starting to reord the first Danzig record that I was on & I had to sneak out & see Ed. I just HAD to. I got in trouble, but Glenn understood, being a fan & big collector. This photo is from that meeting & Big Daddy died literally weeks after this & I just knew it was meant to be. I really am one lucky fink to have gotten to do all this stuff. See you all at the big LA Norton Records Benefit. I'll have lotsa krazy surprises in store for you fellow finks there!
Rat On!
Howie Pyro 3/26/13