That guy on the far left looks like Traccii Gunns playing a Vivian Campbell signature Kramer Nightswan. The guy with the beard looks like Vinnie Paul from Pantera. The guy with the flying V looks like the leader of the band Steel Dragon from the movie Rock Star. The guy with the mic is definitely doing a Axl Rose thing. The bass player is the stereotypical tall, blonde dude holding down the bottom end . . . Eric Brittingham of Cinderella, Duff McKagen of GnR, Lonnie Mack from Bullet Boyz . . . he's that guy. This band is a semiotic mash up.
Rock & roll isn't a pose. Cool is a real thing. It's not only expressed in the music, but permeates everything about an artist and performer, yet it cannot be forced. It must be effortless. Either you're cool, or you're not. If somebody knew how to bottle cool and sell it they'd be a billionaire. This was the plot of an episode of Happy Days after it jumped the shark.
I've always felt like there were many members on this forum I could relate to in a unique way, in that we are roughly the same age, sharing the same formative musical/cultural points of reference. Some of you, like myself, came of age as guitarist in the 70s or 80s, your primary musical influences being rooted in the blues infused hard rock of the late 60s, as exemplified by Cream, The Yardbirds, and Hendrix, which subsequently spawned bands like Led Zep, Montrose, and Aerosmith. A few years later you had Van Halen, which inspired the entire 80s L.A. scene, which is now collectively referred to as "Hair Metal." Some of you guys actually lived this stuff, playing in bands performing that music, knowing what it was like when guitar and hard rock topped the music charts, and when videos on Headbanger's Ball crossed over to Adam Curry's Top 10 countdown at 3 PM. If you were there, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. With these considerations in mind, I ask that you humor the following meandering, random contemplations regarding the irony, absurdity, and euphoria I feel as this Friday gig approaches.
I wonder how old the guys in That Arena Rock Show actually are. I'm guessing probably not old enough to have actually been there back in the 80s, not like I was. I was at the NYC clubs like Lamour's, The Cat Club, Webster Hall, The Scrap Bar, The Limelight, and a dozens other places in the boroughs, Jersey, Long Island, and Westchester that I can't even remember the names of. I actually worked at The Bottom Line, which, though it wasn't as cool as the other clubs, gave me the opportunity to interact with many famous musicians while on the job. On the West coast I hung out at the Whiskey, Gazzari's, The Troubadour, The Cat Club, The Rainbow, and so on around the same time. Those East and West coast venues were ground zero of the rock and metal scene. I lived it. To the hilt.
Perhaps a short narrative outlining some of my rock & roll journey from my late teens until about the time I was the same age as my current bandmates would be insightful. These events transpired in the late 80s and early 90s, culminating in my abandoning the quixotic musical quest of my youth, for reasons which shall be explained.
18 year old toomanycats performing onstage in 1987. I was ecstatic because the hottest new band on MTV, called Guns N' Roses, had played on that same stage the week previous. Graffiti by the band members was freshly inscribed on the walls of the dressing room, and one of the bartenders was proudly regaling us with the story of how she'd caught crabs from Axl.
A few months after this I auditioned for a new band being formed out of the ashes of the Vinnie Vincent Invasion called "Slaughter." I was having a torrid romance with a red headed jewish girl who was a student at F.I.T. and shared an apartment on 27th Street with a group of sex witches. The witches dragged me around NYC to see all their favorite local bands, like White Zombie, Law and Order, Raging Slab, and Warrior Soul. My girlfriend also had a connection at Chrysalis. After submitting my pic, a cassette demo, and performing in person at S.I.R., I was knocked out of the running, being told that the reason was that I was, "Too young for the job."
How the ironies of my existence haunt me. In the 20th Century I was, "Too young," and now in the 21st Century I'm feeling too old.
Yeah, I know, I'm just a footnote, on a footnote, on a footnote . . . but at least I was there and ran the race.
Promo shot used for my Slaughter audition, circa 1988. That Charvel Model 1 modified with an EMG 81 and Original Floyd Rose was stolen from me a few years later. To this day I hunt for that guitar.
As the the end of the 1980s approached, most every waking minute I wasn't working a shift at a factory, or landscaping, or shoveling shit on a farm, or mopping up blood in a hospital ER, or employed in a dozen other undesirable jobs, I was seriously woodshedding, playing my fingertips to the bone, studying all of the astounding shredders who were at that time emerging, scouring the guitar magazines for insight into the techniques of the guys in Mike Varney's stable. In those days a lead guitar player — even one in a cover band playing bars — could be kicked to the curb, losing his position to the next hot gunslinger in line if he couldn’t nail the George Lynch and Reb Beach solos on the new Dokken and Winger records. That’s the way it was. The same standard of extreme musical competence and technical ability that had characterized classical and jazz music had migrated into rock & roll, and if you didn't absolutely "kill it," then you didn't get to play first violin.
Working in a factory in the 80s. We called this, "Paying your dues."
I had the experience of touring in the late 80s in a beat up 1970s Winnebago. I remember scrounging under the mouldering carpet, desperately searching for change so I could call home to my Mom and buy a package of Ding Dongs at the next service station. During that time I got most of the juvenile bullshit on the periphery of rock & roll out of my system; I mean the really crazy stuff — like excessive drinking, drug experimentation, howling at the moon naked in an ecstatic trance in some backwater place like Show Low Arizona, three women in the bed, that kind of thing. I was so bored in between the highs of kinky sex and performing onstage that I'd use a shot glass to catch the flies that tormented us in the back of that camper and burn their wings off with a lighter. I struggled to maintain monogamous relationships with strippers and models who cheated on me with Zack Wylde and Nuno while I was simultaneously being unfaithful with a Victoria's Secret model and a buxom Swedish Baroness who taught me all about the cruelty and sadism in the blood of the European Aristocracy. I've been there when Bubbas with a shotgun and baseball bat were trying to break down the door because somebody in the band had screwed their younger sister after the last show. Compared to those experiences, the rock scene going on around me right now is like catching a faint sniff of a fart downwind. But there is some sense of the naiveté, enthusiasm, and frenetic energy of my youth.
Portrait of feral rock & roll animal taken on the road, late 1980s. As I look at that kid now, he appears like one of the satyrs depicted in the later works of Picasso: Hirsute, chthonic, an overtly and comically sexual creature. I related to the strippers I slept with because like me, most of them had been sexually molested, beaten up by a drunken (step) father, and cast away as trash. I might not have slept for days when that pic was taken. That is an angry and fiercely determined young man, disinherited, bereft of existential commitment, owning no property and no capital, wielding no political power, heir to no fortune, déclassé. What I did have going for me was a good brain (much better than which I was aware), along with a "secret weapon" that kept making all the girls exclaim, "Wow!" There was so much I didn't know — even about myself. I had no plan B. It was rock & roll or bust. As Louis XV said, “Après moi le dé·luge.” (After me the deluge).
I was playing around NYC in a couple bands while working several jobs, moving around from apartment shares in Hell's Kitchen, Soho, Chelsea, and on Staten Island. Most of my roommates were aspiring models, photographers, or students at F.I.T. or Parsons. I lived hand to mouth, blowing all my money on clothes, booze, chasing girls, and most crucially, making sure I was in the scene. One night I was at the Cat Club at 76 East 13th Street and met a woman who plied me with rounds of cranberry and vodka, claiming she was in the music business. I knew she was for real when a couple weeks later she took me backstage at a Badlands show at Lamour's, where in the dressing room she introduced me to a couple guys she worked for named Jake and Ray. She insisted that I could make it if I relocated to the West coast. It kills me to think about how little I let go of my equipment for to raise funds for that move. One of the constants in bands is that there's always a "friend" eager to pay you pennies on the dollar for your gear when you're in financial desperation. I landed in L.A. in 1989 and took up residence in Laural Canyon, throwing myself into the Hollywood music scene with gusto. The promo pic below depicting me as an opened shirt, long haired, male peacock dandy was taken shortly after I arrived.
I picked up odd jobs in Hollywood, including work as a film extra, which allowed me to eat for free on those days. I recall getting drunk at the bar at the Rainbow with Chris Squire while watching Lemmy play games in the background. One time when I was driving up the boulevard Nikki Sixx was in the oncoming lane driving a red Ferrari. His head spun around as our cars passed, and I then watched in my rear view mirror as he made an aggressive U turn. At the next light he pulled up behind me, got out of his car, and upon finding out I wasn't a chick walked away laughing. The stories I have about those couple years playing in bands, girls, and zipping around Hollywood, Santa Monica, the Valley, and up and down the Pacific Coast in a Mazda RX-7 could fill a novel.
In retrospect my arrival in L.A. had been just under the wire. The scene was saturated, overcooked, with glam metal already starting to implode. Near the end I saw flyers on the Strip advertising a band called Alice In Chains, thinking to myself, "These guys look different." Their grungy look wasn't entirely dissimilar to some of the L.A. bands, like Love/Hate for instance, who I'd seen play like a gazillion times; but this AOC band seemed more morose, not smiling, just different. One night at a rock club in North Hollywood a revelation occurred to me as I looked around, finding myself surrounded by tall, blonde, tan, ridiculously handsome, gregarious rocker dudes with sparking white Chicklet teeth, all sorta resembling Mike Tramp. They reminded me of clicky, sporto jock, frat boy preppies, only with long hair. I fit in like Emily Brontë's Heathcliff at a pool party. I missed NYC.
These have been tucked away in the pockets of a leather jacket for the last thirty years. I once had an entire cardboard box of relics from those years: Flyers pulled off of poles on the Sunset Strip; music papers; a velvet bag containing crystals, ampoules of patchouli, and the kind of Maltese cross pendants on leather straps I'd seen Joe Leste and Ian Astbury wearing. I kept that box stored in my Mother's basement, until she went on a neurotic cleaning spree and tossed it in the trash.
Perhaps you're reading this and share similar life experiences to mine, consequently perceiving That Arena Rock Show as something of a watered down recapitulation, akin to Disney on Ice, or a Vegas nostalgia act. No offense to the headliner, but 80s rock & roll wasn't as slickly polished and contrived as that. It was grimy, soiled, and smutty; it actually stunk, in an olfactory sense. It seemed like I was constantly searching for a laundromat. It also itched and burned. Hot showers helped with that, and penicillin stopped the burning. At one point everyone in my band had shaved their pubic hair.
When grunge finally exploded full force, enveloping the scene and killing rock & roll as I had known it, I found myself stranded on Manhattan Island, struggling to maintain a toehold, living hand to mouth, sleeping on sofas. Nobody cared anymore that I could play Paganini's Caprice No. 24. For a time I lived at the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street. There was a period of about a week when every day I walked down the block to the Chelsea Cinema to watch the matinee showing of Wayne's World over and over again, sitting all by myself in that dark theater. It was escapism. Through the world of Wayne and Garth I was clinging to the past, crawling back into the 80s rock & roll womb, knowing that something had drastically changed — that it was in fact already over. "The Nothing" had devoured my world.
In any case the Chelsea Hotel was for me something like the sanatorium in Mann's Der Zauberberg, a refuge for my cultural and spiritual malaise and a local where I could interact with an eclectic group of people. I spent hours pumping change into the payphone booth in the lobby talking to girls I was hopelessly in love with. My journals from those days read as the unsophisticated and melancholy accounts of an adolescent obsessed with sex and survival in Manhattan, enraptured by the ecstasy of music, pained in his soul by the transience of love and beauty, grasping for the cultural knowledge he could only obtain in the city, while longing for an idealistic recollection of the pastoral countryside. I am still that divided soul. I thank God I got to live in a time when a young person had to make an arduous effort to get to the city and establish a toehold in order to experience a "Walk on the Wild Side." The internet has devalued and cheapened that real, unreplicable experience.
I had become friends with Kate Pierson, who lived in the neighborhood. She was such a sweet, kind soul with a beautiful smile. Despite her contrived and caricaturist appearances on MTV, there was no artifice in Kate. We spent a lot of time talking about music. She suggested taking me on the road with the B-52s, but I declined, knowing there were important things I still had to learn where I was.
A psychotherapist named Dan Bloom had become a mentor of sorts, helping to guide my, until that point, autodidactic education. He brought Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Nietzsche to my attention. He also introduced me to Mann's novella Tonio Kröger, which had an inestimable impact upon me, planting a seed in my head about the concept of the artist and self creation.
Around this time my beloved Charvel Model 1 was stolen. I bought an Epiphone Les Paul at a pawn shop in Chelsea, then a short time later had to sell it back to the same shop for rent money. That particular Korean LP was an exemplary instrument, and I was compelled to continue this cycle of buying it and then selling it back, until I finally moved out of the neighborhood and the temptation to reacquire it was removed.
Another friend was a young woman named Bridget Marks. She had appeared in a layout in Playboy Magazine and was studying philosophy at university. She was an intimidating beauty with a big brain to match her other outsized assets. I saw Bridget as something of a female analog of myself, in that her brain and body were a perverted contradiction, a vulgar combination of the intellectual and physical awkwardly instantiated in a single human form. Bridget too had spent much time in Hollywood and was the girlfriend of aging actor Tony Curtis — or at least she posed as such on the red carpet and at high profile events. I believe it was some kind of arranged thing. One afternoon, after Bridget and I had hung out in the Village, we went back to my apartment. I had moved out of the Chelsea Hotel into a one bedroom flat near University Place. This beautiful woman sat next to me on my bed, thumbing through my portfolio of promo photos I had put together. At the time I had no serious aspiration for these pics other than as a means of promoting myself as a musician, though I had recently appeared in the advertising campaign for a new gym — which for me was like a lark. I felt the warmth of her thigh against mine. Maybe she was testing me . . . maybe I was testing her. There was probably an unconscious sizing up of the compatibility of our bloodlines occurring, as Schopenhauer had written about in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. I felt like the purity of my soul was being measured, my capacity to dominate the physical with the mental. Bridget and I somehow cancelled each other out. A less intelligent and perceptive woman might have misinterpreted my cool self restraint as my being gay — though I think not in the case of Bridget. I had passed the test of a real world Bene Gesserit. Though she was lovely to behold, it was Bridget's mind, perspective, and insights that I was most interested in. Though we were the same age, she knew things far beyond my keen, how the real world worked, how the game was played. Bridgette suggested that I might do better to use my visual assets to advance myself.
Years later Mrs TMC and I bumped into Bridgette on the sidewalk on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I hadn't seen her in nearly two decades (other than on page 6 of The New York Post, where the drama of her socialite life was frequently written about), but we recognized each other instantly. In was fascinating to observe these two Ladies politely sizing each other up, like a pair of seasoned gunfighters.
My friend Bridget.
Meanwhile, in between sets of shoulder presses at David Barton Gym on 15th Street and 6th Ave, another friend and coworker was giving me advice similar to Bridget's, encouraging me to sign on to an edgier Chippendales style male dance review he was conceiving. I made a hard pass on Vin Diesel's business proposal, choosing instead to spend my free time studying Heidegger, along with the considerable propaedeutics such an undertaking implies. I was coming around to the idea of using my image as a means of progressing myself, though I was adamant that I would never be put in a position where I was degraded. Not then, not now, not ever.
If the reader will allow me some degree a latitude, these considerations regarding the willingness (or unwillingness, as the case my be) to prostitute oneself for advancement brings to mind the ongoing situation with my stalker, which, due to recent threats, has been on my mind and is causing me much suffering. The stalker drove me out of Hickory as punishment for refusing to let her touch me, which is how I ended up playing with these kids further afield from home. As a young man I was exposed to the same kind of sexual advances, harassment, offers, lewd innuendos, and demands for physical contact that the stalker directed at me. As the majority of this sexual predation came from horny gay men, I’m tempted to compare the actions of the stalker to those past experiences. However, upon honest reflection, I realize that this would be a grave insult to horny gay men everywhere. The truth is, I’ve had many gay friends over the years, some quite close, including many coworkers, clients, even a roommate at one point; I've vacationed as a guest on Fire Island and attended The White Party; yet even in those contexts none of the gay men I've interacted with ever showed the same unrelenting and fanatical persistence as the stalker. Sane people don't continue to pursue a romance once the object of their affection makes it clear that they're not interested. Stalkers do that. In the end the gay men I rebuffed always showed me that which the stalker denied me, which was respect for my wishes, my person, and my dignity. The stalker's deceitful stratagems far exceed those of the gay men I've had to fend off in my lifetime. She really is a singularly unique pervert. For instance, no gay man ever tried to gaslight me; or made claims that I had been sexual with them; or fabricated a fake romance between us and foisted it upon the public; or used associates to harass and threaten me. The stalker's desires, motives, and methods are uniquely devious, deceitful, and crazy. She is a psychological pervert, as I believe her desire to have physical contact with me was as much about power and control as it was about sexual gratification. She also wanted to degrade and humiliate Mrs TMC. In contrast to the stalker, I’ve generally found gay men to be brutally honest in their motivations. They want more or less the same thing straight men want, which is sex; and when declined they’ll readily move on to the next prospect. Sane, rational people recognize that no matter how ardently they lust after someone, if it’s not going to happen there are a other fish in the sea. But I digress . . .
THE BARRACUDA
"Friends don't let Friends get Friends haircuts." — Mike Inez
I, gulp, cut my hair. Those who grew up as boomers, or in the generation of their children who grew up in the 70s and 80s, understand what this meant symbolically, culturally, and politically. For those generations long hair wasn't just about fashion — It was a serious statement about male beauty, virility, youth, nonconformity, and membership in the subculture of rock & roll. I was encouraged to make this drastic leap by new girlfriend, who was a hairstylist, and who I had been introduced to by a mutual friend who worked at PolyGram. But she wasn't just any hairstylist; this woman was infamously known in the industry as "The Barracuda." She was about ten years older than me, and consequently that much further ahead in the game.
I honestly don't know if I ever saw the Barracuda in anything other than the custom leather outfits made for a lot the rock stars at that time by a seamstress in the East Village named Agatha. It was like the Savile Row "power suit" of the rock stars. In the bedroom it was a struggle to peel off her stitched cowhide second skin — though even after that there was still leather involved. She had styled many of the iconic covers for Rolling Stone Magazine, (more than that, some of the iconic advertising images of the late 20th century), worked on music videos, album shoots, and went on tour with major rock bands. She knew which rock stars had hair pieces, extensions, or were bald, and fiercely guarding that information as though it were the nuclear codes. She wouldn't even reveal that info after a bottle of wine, I'd done my worst to her in bed, and I attempted to slyly slide the question into the afterglow of our pillow talk and smoking. Code of the hairdresser.
Honestly, this woman was herself like a rock star, considered like a peer of the famous musicians she worked with. Her real life, for a rocker "kid" like me who'd been schlepping in the bars and clubs with bands for the previous several years, was an intimate look behind the veil, a glimpse at what "making it" could mean in the business. One Saturday night, after I'd moved in with the Barracuda, we were watching Headbanger's Ball on the sofa. In between punctuated episodes involving rock stars, famous models, and other glitterati, our life together was oddly domestic. Watching Headbanger's Ball was like market research for her. Michael Monroe's video with Axl Rose for "Dead, Jail or Rock 'n' Roll" came on and the Barracuda nonchalantly quipped, sounding almost bored, "I worked on that video," elaborating, "They wanted me to be in it too." I watched intently, and sure enough, there she was dancing with the band. She subsequently pointed out countless other examples of her work. We never really talked in depth about what went on at these video shoots, or on tour with Bon Jovi, or when she'd fly to Europe for a week and return looking like she'd gone ten rounds with Tyson . . . and maybe I really didn't want to know. Once the doorbell rang and a delivery man had piles of large boxes in the hallway. The Barracuda opened up a card and casually said, "It's a drum set from Tico Torres." Stuff like that was a regular occurrence.
Unbelievably, rock and roll was sorta the Barracuda's side gig, as she also worked all the fashion shows in Paris, Milan, and London, and so on. When in NYC she based herself out of Oribe's saloon on the 10th floor of Elizabeth Arden. All the haute couture runway models — who I was familiar with because my fashion school roommates had torn their pics out of French and Italian Vogue and tacked them on the walls of our apartment — were the Barracuda's friends. As the Barracuda bridged these worlds of music and fashion, she frequently played matchmaker between rock stars and these models, in one case arranging a celebrity marriage in which she herself participated as one of the "groomsmen."
Not long after we met the Barracuda started suggesting that I should let her cut my hair. It took some convincing, but I finally reasoned that if Jon Bon Jovi — who had a serious fiduciary responsibility to protect an iconic brand worth hundreds of millions of dollars — had explicitly trusted this woman to shear his famous 80s mane, then surely I too could put myself in her capable hands.
The wheels came off after — well . . . there's no easy way to say this — the Barracuda cheated on me with Billy Idol. Dear reader, just try to imagine that instantly recognizable, gritty London accent we were all familiar with from MTV, except that voice is leaving a message on the answering machine as I awaited the Barracuda's arrival home from the airport:
"Hello luv, this is Billy. I miss you and can't stop thinking about you . . ." (and so on with explicit kissy kissy talk, leaving no doubt about what had transpired between Billy and The Barracuda during her stop in L.A. at the end of the Cindy Lauper tour).
Yeah . . . that actually happened to me. My sentimental young heart was absolutely crushed. I was hurt, angry, thoroughly devastated. It hadn't been too long before this, that while at my job at the Bottom Line, I'd been instructed to go back to the dressing room and tell Steve Stevens it was time to go onstage. I think he was sitting in with Tower Of Power that night. When I opened the door I caught Steve mid pose holding up his guitar in front of the mirror, his hair two foot high, clad head to toe in leather, making his pouty duck face. Steve didn't even break pose when I told him it was time. As I was processing the message Billy had just left my girlfriend, I made a quick mental note that if I ever saw Steve again I'd tell him what a wanker his boss was (I couldn't listen to Rebel Yell for years after that, but I've since gotten over it). My immediate concern was finding a new place to live. As my friend David Barton had just moved in with his girlfriend Susanne Bartsch at the Chelsea Hotel, he handed me the keys to his own apartment and told me I could live there.
In retrospect, I have fond memories of the Barracuda. She taught me many things about being serious, tough, and professional. At the time I had seen her as an object of both love and intense sexual attraction, though she had been much more than that. She had been a mentor, a teacher, somebody who gave me a glimpse into a world that transcended the Wayne and Garth, immature, adolescent realm of the man-boy, which until that time I still had one foot stubbornly mired in. After the Barracuda cut off my hair off all kinds of opportunities had begun opening up to me, and perhaps that was her parting and lasting gift. Truth be told, working as a model took me more places than playing rock guitar — which at that point, given my disgust with the music scene, was starting to wane in my interest. I initially picked up guitar in adolescence because I had a intense, deep love of music, and particularly appreciated the guitar's ability to express emotion. Later, after I realized I had a special aptitude for the thing, I conceived that if I became very, very good at it, I could use that skill as a means of transporting and inserting myself into the cosmopolitan, sophisticated, culturally creative realm I saw on tv and in the magazines. I wanted to travel, learn things, grow in experience and knowledge about the world, and I saw guitar as my vehicle for that. Even though I had rubbed shoulders with the set off people who inhabited that world in Manhattan and L.A., I'd never been able to truly break into it through playing guitar. Through refocusing the emphasis upon my image I found an alternative route to that overarching goal.
A musician friend named Mark was experiencing his own rock & roll teething pains. He was a huge fan of The Eagles and especially adored Joe Walsh. His employment as a bouncer at the club Woody's (owned by Ron Wood of The Rolling Stones), had recently required him to literally toss an incredibly drunk, belligerent, abusive Joe Walsh out the front door. There's a reason for the saying "Never meet your heroes." Mark and his girlfriend had a roommate who had just committed suicide because her boyfriend, who was Rod Stewart's guitar player Stevie Salas, had broken up with her. Mark's brother had died from AIDS in recent years. All these stories revealed the dark side of rock & roll and the life of libertinage. But Mark wasn't ready yet to give up on music, and I believe the tragic experiences he carried with him inclined him to appreciate the somber overtones of grunge more than I did. We began a songwriting partnership and he encouraged me to compose more grunge-ish, songwriterly type material. We wrote a lot of songs together around this time, some of which made it onto an album he subsequently recorded with Jonathan Mover and Eric Czar. But my heart just wasn't in that music. Mark would chide me whenever I had an electric guitar in my hands because I inevitably lapsed into Jake E Lee sounding riffs and licks.
Songwriting with Mark on a rooftop on East 13th Street in the East Village in the early 90s.
Through these varied interactions, and dozens more, I navigated my way through the death of my rock & roll world. I went sideways, completely reinventing myself, and was subsequently whisked away to places, adventures, and experiences I could scarcely have dreamt of.
There was a period after this, several years in fact while living in Europe, when I didn't even own a guitar. Given the music that had become dominant and was being passed off as "rock," I didn't see the point. Once in Bruxelles, at a Richard Artschwager exhibition, there was a Fender Strat laying around in the private rooms of the gallery. I casually picked it up and played "Eruption" and "Spanish Fly," just to fuck with people's heads. I knew that virtuosic artistic ability had become the punchline of a joke, something to be embarrassed about. If one was clever, they adopted an ironic stance towards long cultivated skill. Rivers Cuomo knew this and made bank on it. At the Artschwager exhibition newly rich Russians scooped up the expensive works of "art," which to me looked like packing crates. I bought one too. Money was all that seemed to matter anymore.
It is strange to comprehend that these events I've just narrated, which end off right around the time I was the age of my current bandmates, happened to me about thirty years ago. This is where I was at around 22 years old. To me, with my unique brain, it is as though everything happened just yesterday. How I envy people with that merciful gift of forgetfulness. Am I crazy to think that I can defy Thomas Wolfe's maxim that one can't go home again, picking up rock & roll right where I left it off in 1992? Sure, I returned to music decades ago, and in more recent years rekindled my intense devotion to guitar and love of performing by way of a deep dive into the blues — but somehow playing 70s and 80s rock with these young guys feels different, like circling back to where I had once left off so many years ago.
While people do often mistake me for being younger than I am, age does matter; that's a cold hard fact. My body hasn't deteriorated too much, though my mind has turned into something of a subtle trap. I feel like the elves of Middle-Earth: Morose, filled with ennui, poisoned by the curse of knowledge. That in middle age I find myself sleeping on French linen, with a Matisse hanging over my head, and a Kangzi porcelain collection is a bizarre thing; and deep down I feel guilty about it. I’m terribly susceptible to romanticizing the struggle, to longing for the realness and rawness of the gutter. I feel ashamed of my refined civility and softness, as if I've betrayed the spirit of rock & roll.
All of the guys I'm playing with on Friday night are young, and youth matters. Do you want to see cheerleaders in their 50s? Of course not. Rock and roll has always been a young man's game. Think of your favorite albums by Zep, Van Halen, Sabbath, Skynyrd, and so on. You know what they all have in common? All the members were in their 20s when that stuff was created. Old guys don't make music like that. The smart ones had the sense to die young and spare their fans the fat, old, dead and bloated on the toilet scene. That's a big part of the thrill for me of playing with guys in their 20s. There is an energy there that is undeniable.
But I'm, well . . . let's just say "not young." Here I am playing songs primarily from around 1970 in a band with "kids" young enough to be my sons, opening for another band of "kids" who were probably born in the 90s that play music from the 80s.
One of the craziest things is that Riki Rachtman supposedly lives in Mooresville. That the guy who owned the Hollywood Cathouse I had so many adventures at, and who I used to watch hosting Headbanger's Ball, now lives around here — that's just fuckin' weird.
The best comparison I can make to how I feel is the sense of disjointedness evoked by recently watching old episodes of Dr Who from the 70s on VHS. I feel like I'm time traveling in the TARTUS. In one program the Doctor has a dagger wielding stone age warrior chick from the future with him, traveling back to Edwardian England to do battle with an Egyptian God on the planet Mars. Whatever, sometimes you've just got to go along with the crazy and enjoy the ride.
