These are John Gilmore’s words and also his story. The spectre of the Black Dahlia, the archetypical doomed would-be starlet hangs over the entire proceedings. A tragic lodestone, she guides the young Gilmore through the labyrinthine nether worlds of his fabled birthplace, Hollywood. Laid Bare captures the Santa Monica-and-Western squalor that has seemingly always surrounded the klieg lights of the movie premier with the occasional brutal murder popping up as the sporadic punctuation of the deranged rollercoaster of Hollywood life.

Laid Bare is a haunting, soulful evocation of the existential stirrings kept deep within by those who would play the games that the pursuit of fame requires. It is the strangely recurring shards of doomed 20th Century myths that emanate in spirals throughout this project that give it a seductive eeriness: Black Dahlia, James Dean, Charles Manson, Janis Joplin, Lenny Bruce, and Ed Wood. Tearing away the shrouds of the gauzy, sappy myth, Gilmore's truth is unflinchingly brutal and therefore ultimately liberating no matter how ugly it might get.

"Skip Heller and his musical collaborators have evoked all the tension, dread, and transcendent moments of the desperate attempt to embrace the dream of Hollywood that Gilmore’s words convey."-- Stuart Swezey, Amok Books and Audio

The Laid Bare CD is available at CD Baby
Amok Books and Dionysus Records

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John Gilmore's books are available at AMAZON and BARNES AND NOBLE