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 MTV Top 10 countdown every day after school 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 confessional narrative outlining my rock & roll journey from my late teens until about the time I was the same age as my current bandmates will be insightful. These events transpired in the late 80s and early 90s, culminating in my abandonment of the quixotic musical quest of my youth, for reasons which shall be explained.
Even before I was gifted a Teisco Tulip type guitar from the 1983 Sears Catalog I was already fixated on the thing. I had played endless hours of air guitar in my bedroom listening to Neal Schon, David Gilmour, and Eddie Van Halen. Once I had the fetish object constructed of wire and wood in my hands, my Aspergers took over and I was possessed, as though wearing blinders. Everything else became secondary to the goal of understanding those 12 tones, their mysterious, almost mystical relationship, and especially the microtonals and dissonances, which seemed intimately connected to the deepest recesses of a human being's soul. The guitar was somehow miraculously capable of transmitting those feelings. Most every waking minute I wasn't in school, working a shift at a factory, landscaping, shoveling shit on a farm, mopping blood in a hospital ER, or employed in a numerous other undesirable jobs, I was seriously woodshedding, playing until my fingertips bled. I dived deep into the styles of my original idols, along with Jimmy Page, Prince, and all of the players from the L.A. metal bands that were exploding onto the scene. The most elite and astounding shredders emerging at that time were the guys in Mike Varney's stable, many of whom seemed to coalesce around the Guitar Institute of Technology. I scoured the guitar magazines for insight into the techniques of guys like Frank Gambale while dreaming of going to GIT. It was an impossibility, as the violent alcoholic my Mother was married to had complete control of the family finances. When this drunken savage wasn't beating me, slamming me against the walls, or calling me a creep, faggot, and dumb Polack, I was reminded that he resented my ever having been born and that as soon as I turned eighteen I was to get the fuck out of his house. My Mother would bring him more beer while my terrified younger siblings looked on. I fled that dysfunctional house of horrors long before I turned eighteen, my exit occurring in fits and starts, beginning in adolescence, with periods staying with maternal aunts, my recently widowed Polish Grandmother, the family of a high school friend, a boarding house where I paid to sleep in a cubicle covered over with chicken wire, and finally with some older guys in a rock band I had joined. The hostile, physically violent antagonism I experienced within the four walls in which I was reared became part of what I understood as the very essence of rock & roll.
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. My efforts did not go unnoticed, and while still in high school I was headhunted to play in an established gigging band with a group of guys who were around 22 years old.
18 year old toomanycats performing onstage in 1987. I was ecstatic because a band who had just exploded on MTV, called Guns N' Roses, had performed on that stage a week previous. I'd known about these guys since before they appeared on MTV, as I'd bought their cassette EP Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide at the mall earlier that year. Graffiti by the band members was inscribed on the walls of the dressing room, and one of the bartenders was proudly regaling us with her story of catching crabs from Axl.
Less than a year later I auditioned for a new band being formed out of the ashes of the Vinnie Vincent Invasion called "Slaughter." I had moved to NYC and was embroiled in a torrid romance with a beautiful 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. NYC was sensory overload, like being immersed into a fantasy world. I had stepped into the set of half the movies I'd ever seen and the backdrop of the MTV. The witch's apartment reeked of Marlboros, patchouli mixed with Calvin Klein Eternity, Chinese take out, and poontang. Pages cut out from foreign editions of Vogue and from Metal Edge magazine covered the walls, depicting famous models and rock stars. The Lost Boys, Two Moon Junction, and 9 1/2 Weeks played endlessly on the VCR. The witches had heated arguments about who was hotter, Marcus Schenkenberg, Kip Winger, Billy Wirth, or Richard Tyson. Most every night I fell asleep while they listened to Brian Ferry's Bête Noire. 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.
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 remember playing a gig at an Air Force base, the enlisted men going crazy and starting a riot when we played Megadeth and Metal Church, and the top brass forbidding us from ever returning. This was shit straight out of Spinal Tap.
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 in Brooklyn, 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.
L.A. was so different than NYC, and very much in the way Woody Allen depicted the contrast in Annie Hall. Most conspicuously, Los Angeles was all about having a car. Only the bridge and tunnel people back in New York needed a car. It is true that NYC was raw, sordid, and ugly . . . though there was also something about it, in all of its filth, which was honest. There was a veneer of fake plastic sugarcoated unreality and distorted beauty which deceptively cloaked the underlying sleaze of Hollywood. Yes, I did get to hang out with Jake E Lee and Ray Gillian.
The woman who had arranged for me to come to L.A. and stay in her home probably anticipated having a romance with me. Nothing was ever said about it, and we had never been intimate in any way, but I just got that vibe. Unfortunate for her, that was not going to happen. I had never given her any indication that I wanted anything but friendship. She just wasn’t attractive to me. The blunt truth is, I’ve had a lot of experiences where people have offered career advancement in exchange for sexual relations. It’s usually not stated bluntly, though more of less understood. I have always refused such propositions. I had friends and acquaintances in those early days in NYC and L.A. who had no problem compromising themselves in ways which I simply refused. One of them became one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Another was a musician who, through a perspicacious choice in marriage, will inherit an international munitions manufacturing empire. Such are the consequences of the choices one makes in life.
A couple months after I arrived in L.A. my host moved a long haired surfer dude into the house, after which they barely left the bedroom. That guy looked like he was straight out of the film Point Break, with the So Cal accent and argot, the laid back beach attitude. It began to feel really weird, so I thanked my friend for helping me establish a toehold in California, then politely made my exit from the living situation. I found new accommodations through some musicians I’d begun playing with.
In telling that story I can’t help being reminded of my recent experiences with my psycho sex predator ex-manager in Hickory. The irony is not lost on me that after having resisted compromising short cuts offered to me in my youth by wealthy, powerful, connected, and influential people, I found myself, in middle-age, in a place like Catawba County, North Carolina, where once again somebody was trying to leverage the sex, power, money thing over me. It didn’t seemed probable or even possible that I could be exposed to such a situation at my age, as I had been in a long term relationship for a decade and a half, and the prizes I'd sought in my youth, which were fame, great wealth, and travel, no longer mattered to me. But in a way the stakes were now much higher now, as obtaining gigs represented not just a means of satisfying my own egocentric needs, but also the way by which I could sustain the colony of cats in my care. I thought that this must be a sick joke YHWH was playing on me. For my part, having a great tolerance for eccentric people, and longing for intelligent conversation, I was happy to be the stalker's friend. But the stalker wanted more than just friendship in exchange for the bookings she was providing. As if the Deity wished to add emphasis to his jest, she was an offensively ugly old lady with a FUPA butt-in-front that made her waddle like Danny DeVito playing the Penguin. There was no fuckin' way . . . not even for the cats!
Meanwhile, back in 1989 in L.A., to sustain myself I picked up odd jobs, including factory work, and gigs as a film extra, the latter of which afforded me the opportunity to eat for free on the set. There is actually a brief glimpse of me in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. 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.
Working in a factory. L.A. musicians at that time called this, "Paying your dues." That punch press was one amongst several machines I operated that scared the hell out of me, as I was familiar with the story about Tony Iommi's fingers.
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 a Swedish girl I was hopelessly in love with. My journals from those days read as the unsophisticated, melancholy account 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 knowledge he felt he could only obtain in the city, while at the same time longing for an idealistic recollection of the pastoral countryside. Though I lacked the skill to articulately document those bittersweet evocations, I know the feelings in that young man's heart, as 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 relocate to the city, experiencing that struggle of establishing a toehold within what was a dying golden age of cosmopolitan culture. That experience was worth something at that time. The internet has devalued and cheapened that real adventure. That "world" will now come to you, though in a cheapened, plastic, deracinated form.
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, where I devoured stacks of books purchased down the street from The Strand while auditing philosophy courses at NYU. This beautiful woman sat next to me on my bed and thumbed through a portfolio of promo photos I had put together. I had no aspiration for those pics other than a means of promoting myself as a musician. However, I had recently been photographed for an advertising campaign for a new gym, which I thought of as an amusing lark. The idea of using my image as a means of making my way in the world was an inconceivable thing to me. I felt the warmth of Bridget's curvaceous 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 may have misinterpreted the cool self restraint I demonstrated as an indication that I was 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 and 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, that is, other than on page 6 of The New York Post, where the drama of her socialite life was frequently written about. We recognized each other instantly. Two things were very amusing about that encounter. First, the way these two Ladies politely sized each other up, like a pair of seasoned gunfighters. Second, that Bridget and Suzi shared almost identical measurements.
My friend Bridget.
Around the same time I remember having a conversation, in between sets of shoulder presses at David Barton's Gym on 15th Street and 6th Ave, with another friend, who was giving me advice similar to Bridget's. He was encouraging me to sign on to a Chippendales style male dance review he wanted to put together. 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. My real regret about having known Vin back then wasn't that I didn't sign on to his male dancer thing, but rather that we never played Dungeons & Dragons.
If the reader will forgive me once again, I feel I must again comment upon the willingness (or unwillingness, as the case my be) to prostitute oneself for advancement, and relate my past experiences to those I've recently had with the Hickory stalker. Her most recent threats are causing me much anxiety and suffering and it helps to talk about it. The issue between the stalker and I hinged upon my unwillingness to prostitute myself. The woman offered to pay me for sexual contact. After I refused countless times she sexually assaulted me in public, which was as much about getting off as demonstrating her power. When I finally put my foot down she drove me out of Hickory, literally drove me off of jobs and out the door of venues, and blacklisted me with all of the local musicians over who she has an influence. That is how I ended up joining up with the "kids" in Lucid Outbreak, as they are based outside of the stalker's sphere of influence.
As I have previously relayed, in the past I have been exposed to similar sexual advances, harassment, offers, lewd innuendos, and requests for physical contact, though never so severe as what I experienced from the Hickory stalker. There was always a moral and legal boundary that others dared not cross. The stalker had no such restraints. Though I've had many woman who made such advances on me, the majority of the sexual predation I've experienced in my life has come from gay men. While I’m tempted to compare the Hickory stalker to a lustful old fag, upon honest reflection, I realize that this would be a grave and undeserving insult to horny gay men everywhere. I have much affection and sympathy for gay men, many of whom have been respectful and kind to me in my life, showing me a fundamental graciousness I have seldom experienced from other segments of society. I’ve had many gay friends, coworkers, clients, and once even a roommate. I'm a straight man who has vacationed on Fire Island and Mykonos; I've attended The White Party in NYC; and I've worked in professions and environments dominated by gay men. Yet even within those contexts I never experienced the kind of unrelenting and fanatical sexual advances that the stalker directed at me. I've only brought horny, old, ugly gay men into this because it's the only analog to the stalker I have at my disposal. The difference between the two was that while men, both straight or gay, fundamentally want the same thing, which is sex, the stalker was also a psychological pervert whose desires had as as much to do with power and control as they did with sexual gratification. She wanted to degrade and humiliate Mrs TMC.
"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire
That quote rings true for me. I have always been lucky in my life in that some stranger has always appeared, at just the right time, to provide me with the opportunity, connection, or situation to get me to where I was struggling to be, geographically, culturally, intellectually, spiritually, even financially. This was almost always done gratis. It got to the point that I had come to trust in this providence, even believing that I must somehow be charmed. Having had the experience of being alone, thousands of miles from home, my motorcycle broke down on the side of the road in the desert, and still having a stranger stop and be a good samaritan, proved my luck to my own satisfaction. Yet my luck ran out when I met the stalker. The stalker's deceitful stratagems, motives, and desires were singularly perverted, twisted, immoral, and devious. When I met her I was, metaphorically speaking, "broke down on the side of the road in the desert," traversing a very bad patch of road in my life. The stalker, finding me in that compromised situation, chose to abuse, torment, exploit, harass, and sexually assault me.
A sane, moral, conscientious person does not continue to pursue a romance once the object of their affection makes it absolutely clear that they are not interested. 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. Only the mentally unstable, the obsessed, and stalkers continue a pursuit after they been told "No!" The fact is, the gay men who I've rebuffed in my lifetime always showed me that which the stalker did not, which was respect for my wishes and for my dignity. But I digressed long enough on this subject . . .
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. Having had a Jewfro since adolescence, it had taken me four times longer than my friends to grow my hair beyond shoulder length. I frequently resorted to chemical straightening, a flat iron, and wearing it wet as a means of revealing it's real length. I was encouraged to make the drastic leap of cropping my locks by my new girlfriend, a hairstylist I was introduced to by a mutual friend at PolyGram. She wasn't just any hairstylist — she 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 guarded 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. A short time previous to this, while at my job at the Bottom Line, I'd been instructed to go 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. Upon opening the door I caught Steve mid pose, his guitar held up in front of the mirror, hair a foot high, clad head to toe in PVC leather, making a pouty duck face at himself. He didn't even break pose! Total pro. As I was listened to the message Billy was leaving 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 an 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 a circuitous route to that overarching goal.
I believe that The Barracuda now owns a vineyard and lives in France.
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.
"I don't like that surfin' shit. Rock and roll's been going down hill ever since Buddy Holly died."
— John Milner in American Graffiti
There was a several year period after this, during which I lived, worked, and studied in Europe, only visiting the States occasionally, when I didn't even own a guitar. Given what was being called "rock music" in the 90s I chose to opt myself out, spending a lot of my time listening to Johnny Hallyday. Once when I was in Bruxelles during those years, at a Richard Artschwager exhibition at a gallery owned by a friend, I came across a Fender Strat laying around in the private rooms. 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. Both Victor Borge and Rivers Cuomo knew this and made bank on it. Rivers lingers in my mind because I remember talking to him standing outside Gray's Papaya on 8th Street in the Fall of 1993 while Weezer was recording the Blue Album across the street at Electric Lady with Rik Ocasek. At the Artschwager exhibition newly rich Russians scooped up the expensive works of "art," which to me looked like packing crates. I couldn't understand this art, just like I couldn't understand Weezer's music. Both had something to do with inwardly turned irony and self referencing deprecation, which I found offensive. I bought an Artschwager anyways. 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.
