got all the sound stock we needed out of bins at Warner Bros. The bins were filled with beautiful rolls of mag that had been thrown away. Al and I had taken the back seat out of the Volkswagen and we got away with hundreds of rolls of used sound stock. You can reuse sound stock if you put it in a degausser, and Al would do this. I didn’t want to go near this thing, because it’s a huge magnet, and you feed the stock into the degausser and you have to turn it a certain way, and you’re rearranging the molecules, and then you bring it out a certain way and it’s clean.
Nobody was using the stables at the AFI, so I set up there and had a pretty-good-size studio for four years. Some people from the school came down the first night of shooting and they never came down again. I was so lucky—it was like I’d died and gone to heaven. During that first year the only people there were the actors, Doreen Small, Catherine Coulson, Herb Cardwell, then Fred when he took over from Herb, and me. Al was there when we shot location sound, but other than that nobody else was there. Ever. Over a four-year period there were a few weekends when extra people showed up to help, but day in and day out that was the crew. Right there. That’s it.
Doreen Small was integral to Eraserhead and she did great work. I never made anybody go have their chart done, though. People say things like, “David made me learn TM,” but you can’t force people to do things like that. It’s got to come from their desire to do it.
Alan Splet is the one who told me about this guy James Farrell, who lived in a little house in Silver Lake where you’d park on a patch of dirt. So I go see James and he’s an astrologer but he’s also a psychic, and this guy was something else. He was a very special psychic and gave magical readings. You’d get there and say hello to his wife, then she’d leave and he’d give a reading. I had no money, but I was able to see him many times because he was very reasonable—in those days everything was reasonable.
Many years later, sometime during Dune, I wanted to talk to him and now he’s living in an apartment building in Century City. He opens the door and he looks different, he’s almost floating, and he says, “David, I’ve gone totally gay!” He was so happy being gay, just no problem, and I say fine, and then he gave me a reading. I asked him about these girls that I was seeing and he said, “David, they all know each other.” Meaning that girls, they’ve got the surface, but there’s part of them that knows much more, and it made sense to me the way he said it. Girls are more advanced in many ways because they’re mothers, and this mothering thing is so important. Maharishi said the mother is ten times more important than the father for children. If women ran the world, I think peace would be way closer.
Five years or so after that reading, I’m talking with Mark Frost in a booth in Du-par’s on Ventura Boulevard. People are coming and going and at one point somebody walked by with a woman and I glimpsed some guy’s pants, a kind of orangey-pink sweater, and a little bit of a brownish-pink head. So I’m talking to Mark and then the coins started dropping. I turned around, and just then he turned around, and I said, “James?” And he said, “David?” I went over and talked to him, and there was something strange about him. His skin had sort of a red-orange hue to it, then later I heard that James died of AIDS. He was a brilliant astrologer and an incredible psychic and a really good person.
I played Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Tristan und Isolde in the food room at the stables, and Jack and I would listen to it at sunset as it got dark before we started shooting. I played it really loud, and I also played Vladimir Horowitz’s Moonlight Sonata. Oh my God, this guy could play it. He plays it slow, and I heard that he had the ability to play a piano key in one hundred different intensities, from the tiniest little note to a break-the-window note. Such soul comes through when he plays it. And Beethoven wrote that damn thing when he was deaf! Just amazing. Captain Beefheart was really a great artist, and I used to listen to Trout Mask Replica all the time then, too. People would start showing up at the stables at around six o’clock, and while we were waiting, Jack and I would sit in the food room and crank the music. We were in the best part of Beverly Hills, and we’d sit and watch the woods and the sunlight getting dimmer and smoke cigarettes and listen to this really loud music.
During that first year working on the film, I was drifting away from home, but not on purpose—I was just working all the time. Peggy and I were always friends and there was no dispute at home, because she’s an artist, too. When Jennifer and I made her a mud sculpture on the dining room table for her birthday, we got buckets and buckets of mud, and the mound went up at least three feet and to the very edge of the table. How many wives would love that in their dining room? About one! They’d fucking freak out! They’d say, You’re ruining the table! Peg just went crazy for it. She’s a great girl and she was letting me be an artist, but she had to take the back seat for a long time and I think she got depressed. It wasn’t a good time for her.
I ran out of money a year into shooting Eraserhead and Herb left, but I understood why Herb had to leave. Herb was a very interesting fellow. He was an excellent pilot because he thought in three dimensions, and he was a great mechanical engineer. One time Herb said to Peggy and me, “I’m getting an airplane. How would you like to fly out to the desert with me for the day?” We said, “Great.” When we got back it was getting dark, and as he was taxiing in he got on the radio and said good night to the tower. The way he said good night to the tower made the hair on the back of my neck go up. I had this feeling that in another time Herb was a long-distance space pilot. The way he said good night was just so beautiful, like he’d been saying it for a billion years.
One time Herb and Al decided to fly back east. Al is legally blind but he’s going to navigate, so they take off to go across the country, headed first for Pocatello, Idaho. They fly up there and Herb radios ahead to the little airport up there, and the guy said, “I’ll have a rental car here for you with the keys in the car. Turn off the lights and lock up when you leave.” So Herb parks the plane and they get in the rental car and start driving into Pocatello. They’re driving along at night on a two-lane highway with Herb driving, and Herb starts talking. As he’s talking, his voice starts to go up in pitch and he starts going off the road. Al says, “Herb!” Herb gets back on the highway. He keeps talking and his voice is going up even higher and he’s going off the road again, then he goes off the road completely and his voice is super high. Al is screaming at him, “Herb!” Finally Herb comes out of it and gets back on the road and he’s okay. Who knows what that was about.
Sometimes we’d get through shooting at two or three in the morning and it was too late to start another shot, so we’d all leave. Herb was living with us, but he wouldn’t come home. No one knew where Herb went, and then at nine in the morning his car would pull into the driveway. He’d come in and not say a word and you sort of knew not to ask. Jen remembers Herb in the morning and he moved real slow, not grumpy but not happy, and he’d reach up into this stash he had of chocolate breakfast bars that no one was allowed to touch. Jen wanted one of those breakfast bars so bad and I don’t think he ever shared one with her.
When Herb was working at Calvin de Frenes, there were times when you’d need high-security clearance to work on films because they were government films, and Herb had that clearance—a lot of people thought Herb worked for the CIA. Herb got a job designing 16mm projections for airplanes and had to go to London on a job. He’s traveling with some guys and they all know Herb’s an interesting guy. They were supposed to meet one morning in the Gatwick area, so these guys show up and they’re waiting for Herb and he’s not showing up. They call his room and there’s no answer, so they call the manager of his hotel and ask him to check Herb’s room, and they go up there and Herb is dead in the bed. They did an autopsy in London and find no cause of death. His mother has a funeral home in North Carolina and they did an autopsy, too, but they couldn’t find a cause of death, either. That was Herb.
Fred Elmes came in after Herb left, and the film changed as it went along. I’m always drawing stuff in the food room, so I’m in there and I’m drawing this little woman and when I finish the drawing I’m looking at her
