I was just sitting around in a fucking room.”īehind that blank façade was Glass’ former bandmate Claudio Palmieri, better known by his stage name, Ethan Kath. Since I was mysterious, you could imagine anything you want, like I could be off doing so many romantic things. But that is totally false, and in a lot of ways, it imprisoned me into a role of what I thought would be acceptable. “At the time, I thought that being personable and direct in music was cheesy, and speaking in metaphors and having things be thematically confusing was cool. “That whole idea is a complete illusion,” Glass tells me later on. Even this many years later, it’s a bit of a trip to be eating tortilla chips in a pink-lit Mexican restaurant with one of the most mysterious rockstars in recent memory, a woman whose aloof cool once seemed impenetrable. This blunt-force style transcended language barriers, and audiences from Russia to China to South Korea hung onto her every wail. Her lyrics back then arrived mostly in primal screams, buried deep enough in death-glitch to be barely intelligible. In Crystal Castles, Glass was immediately recognizable and yet completely unknowable, a shockingly visceral presence onstage but out of reach everywhere else. Still, the 29-year-old hasn’t done too many interviews in her decade-plus career, which began as half of the doomy Toronto synth-punk duo Crystal Castles and continued, as of 2014, as simply Alice Glass. In conversation, she is strikingly eloquent, her low voice persistently nervous and profoundly Canadian, her accent still intact despite the fact that she’s lived in L.A. But even with three hours of death ephemera behind us, Glass seems somehow less anxious than she did upon first meeting. The only plausible follow-up to all of this is margaritas. Nowadays, you end up listening to shit like this!” He then presses play on Rihanna’s “SOS,” and Glass and I exchange sidelong glances-I wonder what Brian would think of something like Glass’ song “ Stillbirth ,” a bruised industrial ballad with pleas that slice through the noise: “I want to start again.” Shortly, we pull up to the residential side street where, in 2009, Rihanna screamed that Chris Brown was trying to kill her. “When I was 16 years old, if you wanted to become famous, you started a band in your garage, and you gave it a really cool name like Strawberry Alarm Clock or Moby Grape or Buffalo Springfield. “I believe the biggest problem with you kids is your music!” he yelps to nobody in particular. We pass the pay phone outside the Viper Room, where Joaquin Phoenix called 911 as his brother River died on the sidewalk El Coyote, the restaurant where Sharon Tate ate chile rellenos before being murdered by the Manson family the Landmark Motor Hotel, where Janis Joplin overdosed in Room 105 (Brian’s stayed there twice on his birthday).Īlong with his endless macabre facts, Brian has some thoughts on kids these days. We visit Marilyn Monroe’s crypt, its marble turned pink from lipstick kisses, where Hugh Hefner’s corpse has parked itself a few feet away. She’s a low, fast talker, with the energy of someone perpetually scanning the room for the nearest escape route. The front half of her hair is dyed an icy blonde with the back half jet black, making it look as though she’s hooded beneath a goth cloak. Glass is easily the most knowledgeable passenger when it comes to gruesome trivia lately she’s been really into the Black Dahlia, the posthumous nickname for the victim of L.A.’s most infamous unsolved murder. Its host, a wise, silver-haired eccentric named Brian, says he spends at least half an hour in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery each day, letting the burial grounds speak to him. So naturally the first item on the agenda is a trip to the grisly museum followed by a three-hour bus tour of Hollywood death and tragedy. Since most of Glass’ life these days involves stewing in her basement, she wants to do something fun during the couple of days we spend together in Los Angeles. Contrary to urban legend, Glass whispers, Mansfield was not beheaded on impact, but scalped.
Alice Glass and I behold it in silence in the musty back room of Hollywood’s Dearly Departed Museum. The Buick Electra in which the blonde bombshell, her lover, her driver, and two of her pet Chihuahuas were instantly killed in a 1967 highway crash was once blue and is now a rusted, vague shade of green. The roof of Jayne Mansfield’s death car is ripped back in a way that feels almost too casual, like a half-eaten candy bar wrapper made of metal.
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