Underground Flier

“If you want people to know about good things,” says Hollywood’s longtime self-promoter Tequila Mockingbird, “you have to show them, you know? Point it out.”

Today she is handing out fliers for her current endeavor — Club Fluffer at Zen Sushi — but this isn’t how she reaches her biggest audiences: “I still flier by hand but I also can reach a couple of million people at once. The information age is upon us and I can really get my point across in one second as opposed to running around going crazy.”

In other words, Tequila is on MySpace (myspace.com/tequilamockingbirdmusic) — and is currently having an affair with Beethoven.

Mockingbird, with green cornrows one day and heavy-metal trusses the next, has been fliering and bringing glamour to the L.A. underground since 1976, when she came here from Miami Beach to see the Sex Pistols. She never did see the Pistols, but she did become a friend of Johnny Rotten as well as hundreds of other musicians, filmmakers, dancers, artists, fashion designers and deli workers. The diva has produced local television programs and radio shows, published and been published in several local newspapers, promoted a gazillion clubs and sings like Aretha Franklin on steroids. Mockingbird has fronted her own groups, and she’s sung and toured with the likes of Green Jello and Trouble for Nora with Mitch Mitchell. What’s more, Mockingbird is the barometer by which one measures whether the event one is attending retains the proper prominence. If Tequila ain’t at the gig .?.?. it probably ain’t worth being there.