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, expressed in the music, but also permeating everything about an artist. It cannot be forced and must appear effortless. Either you've got it or you don't. If somebody knew how to bottle and sell cool they'd be a billionaire. This was actually the plot of a Happy Days episode after it jumped the shark.
There are many members on this forum who are roughly the same age as myself, sharing the same formative musical/cultural points of reference, coming of age as guitarists in the 70s and 80s. Our primary musical influences were 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 there was Van Halen, who inspired the 80s L.A. scene, which is now collectively referred to as "Hair Metal." Some of us actually lived this stuff and played in bands like that; we can remember when hard rock topped the charts, and when videos on Headbanger's Ball crossed over to Adam Curry's MTV Top 10 countdown 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.
How old are these guys in That Arena Rock Show? I'm guessing not old enough to have been there in the 80s. 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 worked at The Bottom Line in the West Village, and even though it wasn't as cool as the other clubs, it gave me the opportunity to interact with so many famous musicians. Around the same timeframe I also made the scene at the Whiskey, Gazzari's, The Troubadour, The Cat Club, The Rainbow, amongst other clubs in Los Angeles. Those NYC and L.A. venues were ground zero for the rock scene. I lived it. To the hilt.
A short confessional narrative of my rock & roll journey from adolescence until about the time I was the same age as my current bandmates will be insightful. These events encompass a decade beginning in the early 80s and terminating in the early 90s, culminating in my abandonment of the quixotic musical quest of my youth, for reasons which shall be explained.
In 1983 my Mother relented to my persistent requests and I was gifted a Teisco Tulip from the Sears Catalog. I had been bewitched by Neal Schon, David Gilmour, and Eddie Van Halen for the past year, playing endless hours of air guitar in my bedroom. With the fetish object in my hands, my Aspergers took over, everything became secondary to understanding those 12 tones and their mathematical, almost mystical relationship. I was fascinated with the microtonals, the seductive interplay of consonances and dissonances, harmonics, the way feedback could produce both cries of joy and howls of despair which mirrored human emotion. Though these feelings were imprisoned inside of me and incommunicable through the clumsy apparatus of my dumb body, this contrivance made of wire and wood, like Descartes' pineal gland, could miraculously transmit those messages from inside my soul. Most every waking minute I wasn't in school, working a factory shift, landscaping, shoveling shit on a farm, mopping blood in a hospital ER, I was seriously woodshedding, playing until my fingertips bled. I studied Eddie, Jimmy Page, Prince, and all of the players from the L.A. metal bands that were exploding onto the scene. The most elite shredders at that time were in Mike Varney's stable and coalesced around the Guitar Institute of Technology in Los Angeles. I scoured guitar magazines for insight into the techniques of guys like Paul Gilbert and Frank Gambale while dreaming of going to GIT. While I was enamored with technical playing, I also loved bands like Aerosmith, Hanoi Rocks, and Faster Pussycat that played old school rock & roll.
The reality of attending GIT in L.A. was an impossibility, as my Father was a violent alcoholic who had tyrannical control of the family. My siblings and I referred to him as Darth Vader, that figure from popular culture who, for a child of that time, most represented evil, cruelty, and schwarze Pädagogik. I was an introverted child, who, for reasons I could not comprehend, was the black sheep of the family. At 13 Vader sat me down, standing over me with my Mother at his side, informing me that he wished I had never been born, I was a burden he resented, and that he could have had a 69 Corvette instead of me. Vader wanted me removed from his home as soon as possible, he didn't care to where. This was one of the few instances when he ever spoke to me. Most every day thereafter I was assailed with an onslaught of degradation, insults, berated as weak, worthless, a creep, a girl, a faggot, a fairy, a moron born of a cretinous race, the Poles, a stupid Pollock, just like my Mother and her family. Vader was angry and drunk most every night. He would grab hold of me by my hair and drag me around the house, punching, slapping, backhanding, and kicking me in my ass until I collapsed on the floor and crawled like a dog, curling into a ball to shield my organs from his boot stomps. He'd pick me up like a doll and send me airborne, crashing into walls, doors, and cabinets. My Mother propitiated this man who sired her three younger children by bringing him more beer, as her own situation and security depended upon being obsequious. My younger siblings witnessed all of this, sometimes crying, or running to hide. One particularly terrifying evening is mostly blocked out from my memory, though I recall my baby brother Dan, perhaps four years old at that time, hiding under a bed next to my cowering Mother. My school friends were too afraid to ever come to my house, and I preferred that they didn't, as it was too humiliating. Even decades later, when I have spoken to childhood friends, they mention the man who "scared the shit out of them."
The gypsy woman told my mother
Before I was born
You got a boy child's coming
Gonna be a son of a gun
He gonna make pretty womens
Jump and shout
Then the world wanna know
What this all about
Muddy Waters
There were many secrets in my family, about Grandpa pushing Grandma down the stairs, about illegitimate offspring, amongst other hushed stories. Only in middle age did I discover that I was a bastard, which statistically tend to be the firstborn. It is a well known evolutionary strategy. Vader had sired and abandoned a bastard of his own while stationed in Korea. In a twist of fate my Mother got pregnant by another man, deceived Vader that I was his, thereby trapping him in marriage with a bastard of her own. In her youth my Mother was a prize, a belle juive, a delicate beauty with dark black hair and brown eyes. Besides being physically attractive ("The pick of the litter," as Vader once boasted), my Mother was, despite her lack of formal education, exceptionally cunning and calculating. In her own limited way, she made and advanced herself, not unlike literary parvenus and social climbers like Becky Sharp and Madame Bovary. Four months after Vader's "shotgun wedding” to my Mother I was born, under a bad sign, a month premature, likely due to alcohol consumption during gestation. I spent the first month of my life in an incubator. I have only ever known myself as a Mother's son. I was my own Father in that I raised and formed myself, was my own teacher, guide, adviser, and supporter. I had to seek the answers to my own questions. My Mother was like an older sister, while to Vader she was a servant and concubine. Both of us were under his absolute authority. As her bastard, my Mother could lobby for my interests, advocate, and provide apologetics, though she had no real ability to guide nor advance me. She possessed neither the economic, physical, or intellectual power. She cut bait with me when she began having Vader's own children. I believe Vader somehow discovered the original deception regarding my paternity when I was around thirteen years old. This was the primary reason he resented my very existence. As a child I recall Vader and his father speaking about an unbroken line of seven, all firstborn, all males, all bearing the same name, with I being the seventh. I had broken that line. What was worse, I was a fraud, a deception, the seed of another man's loins. Vader's malice was intensified by a racial animosity which I could not possibly comprehend as a child. It wasn't just that I was, but also what I was. Vader was a German Irish Catholic and my Mother was descended from Polish Ashkenazi Jews. Though my maternal Jewish ethnic heritage was a secret, I suspect that Vader's Father knew, likely goading his son about it, which may have been the reason they fell out. Decades later, Vader's father would once again vehemently protest when two of my cousins married Jews.
For Vader I was an object of embarrassment, shame, a constant reminder of his being duped. He may have literally wanted me dead, once cornering me in a bathroom, drunk, menacingly wielding a hammer, complaining that he was forced to sustain my existence by the, "Sweat off his balls." Another afternoon he lingered in my doorway, threatening, "There are places I can have you sent." I knew he didn't mean Catholic school, as that would cost him money. He meant a shallow grave in the woods, or the bottom of a flooded rock quarry. The physical, verbal, and psychological abuse of Vader was relentless. I knew I had to leave that house or die.
Teachers, family, my Uncle who was the chief of police, and my own Mother failed to intervene. My Mother should have left, with all of her children, and many woman would have. But when the given the choice between an abusive husband and her children, my Mother chose her own security and prosperity. This seemingly irreconcilable conflict was resolved by sacrificing the bastard, a scapegoat who was sent into the wilderness. Sometimes I think that rock & roll was that wilderness I was cast into. It was a broken home, but only for me. For the rest, a facade of respectability and normalcy was maintained, as it has been to this day.
My escape occurred in fits and starts, beginning in adolescence. I tumbled and stumbled into the world with my guitar in my hand, naive, untutored, unguided, unsupported, left to rely upon my own wits and skills, made easy prey to unscrupulous and exploitive parties. A survival mentality dominated my thinking, leaving me no time and freedom to develop the educational capacities kids pursue at that age. It's a wonder I didn’t end up a criminal. The first time I read Shelley's Frankenstein I wept agonizingly, recognizing that this creature with a sensitive soul, driven out into a hostile world, and maligned by his own creator, was I. There were periods spent with maternal aunts. I stayed on a remote farm with my recently widowed Polish Grandmother, where I first picked up some Yiddish. I stayed with high school friends, puzzled how their parents loved them, offered guidance, support, and took an interest in their future. There was a boarding house with partitioned cubicles covered over with chicken wire; very bad things happened there. For several weeks I hid in a college dorm, where I lost my virginity. Upon joining a gigging band I lived with the bass player and drummer.
Why have I divulged this very private and personal information? The answer is that the violent antagonism I experienced within my home was an essential part of what I understood as the essence of rock & roll, as bastard child of the blues and hillbilly music, invoking prometheus, the wandering Jew, the outcast, the outsider, the disinherited, storm and stress, and the raw sexual energy and enthusiasm of youth. Rock & roll meant having a Father who oppressed you, as metaphorically expressed in music and film, with "Father" representing authority, the government, repression, the man, the system, the constraints of working class and petty bourgeois values. When cast into the world I took all of those assumptions with me, along with a fearless bravado and enthusiastic trust in fate. My ignorance, instinct, and raw libidinal energy were my greatest strengths.
Despite the imperative to provide for the material necessities of life, I continued my monastic devotion to guitar. At that time a lead guitar player — even one in a cover band — 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. The 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. At eighteen I had already achieved the 10,000 hour rule and could play pretty much anything in a technical sense. I'd frequently display my flashy skill set of string skipping, sweep picking, two-handed tapping, and crazy whammy bar tricks at the local music stores while trying out guitars. These informal exhibitions did not go unnoticed, and while a junior in high school I was headhunted by some guys in their 20s to play lead guitar in their established gigging band. Overnight I was immersed in a world of bars, alcohol, drugs, groupies, sex, and everything else that went along with playing guitar in a gigging hard rock band in 1987. Everybody called me "Sheepie" because of the mop of kinky hair on my head. I had a manager, stacks of Marshalls, roadies, and a guitar tech. All I was required to do was stand in front of that wall off guitar cabinets and blow people away with my chops.
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. The lyrics to GN'R's songs made sense to me because I was living them. 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.
At a gig one night I watched as an exquisitely beautiful, curvaceous girl with curly, long red hair danced in front of me while I performed. After the show she approached me and introduced herself as a Jewish college student from NYC, making her amorous affections explicitly known. After the show she took me back to her dorm room and I didn’t leave for three days. She insisted that if I really wanted to make it I had to move to the city, and she could help me get there.
Though it felt good to be known as the top young gunslinger in my area (Joe Bonamassa lived about 5 minutes from me, though he was only 10 years old at the time); and I liked having teenage girls chase after me at the mall screaming "Bon Jovi" while offering their bodies for my unconditional use; and it was equally nice to have the more expert affections of the "older woman" who frequently took me home after the gigs I played at rock clubs . . . I knew deep down that I was a big fish in a small pond, a banty rooster with a guitar strutting around some far flung barnyard. This was before the internet, when every local scene was completely isolated from the rest of the world. I was never going to make it if I stayed here. Los Angeles was the indisputable epicenter of the glam metal scene, though New York City was much closer to me. Manhattan was a supermassive black hole which irresistibly pulled in all cultural creatives for hundreds of miles, and it was inevitable that I too was sucked into that singularity.
After moving back to NYC the red headed Jewish girl maintained contact, saying she had a connection at Chrysalis records and could get me an audition for a band being formed out of the ashes of the Vinnie Vincent Invasion called "Slaughter." I took the train to NYC to stay with her at an apartment on 27th Street, where she resided with a coven of sex witches who were students at the Fashion Institute of Technology. If I was a rock & roll Moses cast into the desert, then this was my well in Midian. Manhattan was mind blowing, overwhelming with the energy, scale, and limitless amount cultural information I had to absorb and process. I was enraptured by the sophistication and exotic beauty. I felt like I'd stepped into the set of half the movies I'd ever seen and the backdrop of MTV. Manhattan became one of the great loves of my life, insofar as a place can be said to hold such an intimate affection in one's heart.
The witch's apartment reeked of Marlboros, patchouli mixed with Calvin Klein Eternity, Chinese take out, and poontang. I was just one of many young male musicians who cycled through that apartment, the witch's having an inexhaustible sexual appetite. 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. After submitting my pic, a cassette demo, and performing in person at S.I.R. for the Slaughter audition, 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.
My trials and tests in 1980s rock & roll bootcamp continued as I parlayed my skills of being able to execute flashy guitar parts while looking cool in exchange for being in the band and sleeping on the floor of the beat up 1970s Winnebago in which we toured. 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 this 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. We played a gig at an Air Force base and the enlisted men nearly started a riot when we played Megadeth and Metal Church. The top brass forbid "that band" from ever returning. This was shit straight out of Spinal Tap.
I struggled to maintain 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 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 eventually planted myself in NYC, playing in a couple bands and working multiple jobs to maintain my toehold on a piece of Manhattan schist. I frequently moved from apartment shares in Hell's Kitchen, Soho, Chelsea, the Village, and Staten Island. Most of my roommates were models, photographers, students at F.I.T. or Parsons. The most dangerous job I ever had was as a bike messenger in Manhattan. When riding across 48th Street I’d linger and drool over the guitars in the windows of Sam Ash, Manny's, Rudy's, and 48th Street Custom, especially lusting after an ESP. It was way out of reach, as I was living hand to mouth. What little money I had left after paying rent was spent on clothes, chasing girls, and most crucially, making sure I was either gigging or on the scene every night, as being seen and making connections was everything. The Cat Club at 76 East 13th Street had a weeknight hard rock and metal night hosted by a tall blonde transvestite. I saw some of the greatest rock shows in my life at that venue. One night while there I met a woman who plied me with rounds of cranberry and vodka, claiming she was in the 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 desperate for cash.
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 shots below, depicting me as a long haired, male peacock dandy was taken shortly after I arrived.
L.A. was so different than NYC, and in many of the same ways Woody Allen depicted that contrast in Annie Hall. While only bridge and tunnel people needed a car in NYC, L.A. was about having a car. It is true that NYC was raw, sordid, and ugly . . . though there was also something about it, despite 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.
My host probably anticipated having a romance with me. We had never been intimate in any way, but I just started to get that vibe. This wasn't going to happen because she was not attractive to me. This was just one of many times in my life when I was offered career advancement in exchange for sexual relations. It’s usually not stated bluntly, but rather insinuated. With one exception, I always refused such propositions. I had friends and acquaintances in those early days in NYC and L.A. who had no qualms about 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 my host got a DWI on the freeway while we were on our way home from the Whiskey, and shortly after that she moved a long haired surfer guy into the house. They hardly ever left the bedroom. That dude was straight out of Point Break, with the So Cal accent, argot and attitude. Things began feeling weird, so I thanked my friend for helping me establish a toehold in California, for introducing me to Jake, Ray, and other friends, and then I politely made my exit. I secured new accommodations with the musicians I’d begun playing with who shared a one bedroom apartment near the Strip.
In recounting those days in L.A. back in 1989, I can’t help being reminded of my recent experiences with my sex predator ex-manager in Hickory. The irony was not lost on me that after having resisted compromising short cuts offered to me in my youth by connected and influential people, I found myself, in middle-age, in a place like Catawba County, with an ugly old lady attempting to leverage me with the sex/power/money thing. It didn’t seem possible that at this juncture in my life I could be subjected to the humiliation of being treated like a piece of meat, as upon entering the local music scene I'd conspicuously shown off Mrs TMC, making it clear I was unavailable. I'd even purposefully hidden my face and physique, as no less than my Ashkenazic intellect, they had mostly attracted attention and trouble. Nor could the stalker tempt me with the prizes I had sought in my youth, which were travel, fame, and wealth. Yet in a way the stakes were now much higher, as securing gigs was how I sustained the colony of cats in my care. The stalker's sexual advances seemed like a sick joke YHWH was playing on me. I've always had a great tolerance for eccentric people and was content to be her friend, but she demanded more in exchange for the bookings she provided. As if the Deity wished to add emphasis to his jest, this battle-axe was a short, fat, dowdy, decrepit old sow with a protruding FUPA butt in the front accented by too tight pants that made her waddle like Danny DeVito playing The Penguin. In every conceivable way this loud, bawdy, coarse, pushy, low class philistine with a heavy bridge-and-tunnel accent was a boner killer. There's no need to pile on further descriptors to drive home the point that this stunted goblin was not an object of romantic or sexual attraction. There was no fuckin' way . . . not even for the cats!
To sustain myself in L.A. in 1989 I worked in a factory and as a film extra, the latter of which allowed me to eat for free on the set. There's a glimpse of me in the film 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. We called this, "Paying your dues." Being familiar with the story about Tony Iommi's fingers, the punch press was one of several machines that scared the hell out of me.
My arrival in L.A. had been just under the wire, the scene being overcooked, with glam metal already starting to implode. Near the end I saw flyers on the Strip advertising 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.
After grunge exploded full force, burying the rock & roll scene as I had known it, I found myself struggling to maintain a toehold on Manhattan Island. Nobody gave a fuck that I could play Paganini's Caprice No. 24, and playing anything like that on a guitar with a pointy headstock was absolutely verboten. I lived hand to mouth, sleeping on friend's sofas, in hostels, at the McBurney YMCA, and for several months at the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street. There was a week when every day I walked down the block, past Chelsea Guitars, to watch the matinee showing of Wayne's World . I sat all by myself in that dark theater, indulging in escapism. Through the fictional world of Wayne and Garth, and 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.
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 that there were vitally important lessons I still had to learn in NYC, which was a crucible whose severe trials and outlandish experiences could forge the raw slag of a human being into a more purified form.
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.
At this time my Charvel Model 1 was stolen. I bought a MIK Epiphone Les Paul at a pawn shop in Chelsea. A short time later had to sell it back to the shop for rent money. I repeated this cycle of buying and selling, until I finally moved out of the neighborhood and the temptation to reacquire that guitar was removed.
Another friend was a woman named Bridget Marks who had appeared in Playboy, was studying philosophy at Columbia, and whose father was professor. Bridget was an exquisite beauty with a big brain that matched her other outsized assets. I perceived her as female analog of myself, a vulgar, perverted combination of the intellectual and physical, both awkwardly instantiated in a single human form. She too had spent time in Hollywood and was the girlfriend of aging actor Tony Curtis — or at least she posed as his companion at red carpet events. I believe it was an arranged thing. One afternoon, after we'd hung out in the Village, Bridget and I went back to my apartment near University Place, where I was devouring stacks of books purchased from The Strand, attacking the history of Western thought from Heraclitus to Foucault as ferociously as I had formerly taken on the guitar. The single incident when I seduced a woman to get something I needed was with a professor at NYU, which allowed me to audit courses on Hegel's Phenonmenolgy of Spirit. I deeply resented having to do this, as many of my friends were alumni of Horace Mann, The Crossroads School in L.A., Tisch, The New School, and other such institutions, for whom admission to such places of higher learning was a birthright. My access to understanding German Idealism was by alternate means. Bridget sat next to me on my bed, thumbing through a portfolio of photos I used as to promote myself as a musician. I had recently modeled for an advertising campaign of an exclusive private training facility near Union Square Park, though I saw that as nothing more than an amusing lark. The idea of using my body as a means of earning a living was still an inconceivable thing. I looked down upon it contemptuously, as something people who lacked any real skill or intellect resorted to. As we flipped through the pages I felt the warmth of Bridget's 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. Bridget suggested that I might do better to use my visual assets to advance myself.
Years later Mrs TMC and I bumped into Bridget on the sidewalk on the Upper East Side of Manhattan while we were walking out of Elaine Kaufmann's restaurant and commenting about how sloppy Jack Nicholson looked. I hadn't seen Bridget 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.
During the time when I first knew Bridget, I recall having a conversation while training shoulders with a co-worker at David Barton's Gym on 15th Street and 6th Ave. Vin Diesel was giving me advice similar to Bridget's. Vin always wore an unzipped sweat shirt with the hood pulled over his head, had a baritone voice, shoulders about four foot wide, was superhumanly strong, and appeared possessed while training. A lot of people were frightened by him, but for some reason he liked me, we'd sometimes train together, and he'd give me a ride to the East Village in his Jeep to see a beautiful Swedish girl with waist length blond hair I was involved with. Vin always made a Tex Avery Big Bad Wolf face whenever she was around, and I still wonder if they ever screwed around. Vin wanted me to sign on to a Chippendales style male dance review he was putting together, where we'd be oiled up, wearing chains, amongst other absurd theatrics. It sounded incredibly cheesy to me. I made a hard pass on Vin's business proposal, choosing instead to spend my time studying Heidegger, along with the considerable propaedeutics such an undertaking implies. I was contemplating 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. There were plenty of opportunities to have advanced myself while working at Barton's Gym, which at that time was equivalent to what Studio 54 was in the 70s, with all of fashionable society flocking there, and it was well known that many of the trainer's were also high dollar gigolos. 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, I must again comment upon the question one's willingness to prostitute themselves for advancement, as this question is related to my recent experience with my stalker. It was my refusal of the stalker's sexual advances which resulted in my being driven out of the Hickory music scene, and joining the "kids" in Lucid Outbreak is my way of escaping the stalker's sphere of influence.
In the past I have been exposed to unwanted sexual advances, harassment, lewd innuendos, and requests for physical contact, though never anything so severe and bizarre as what the stalker directed at me. There were boundaries of morality, legality, and sanity which everyone else dared not cross. The stalker had no such inhibitions. Though many woman have made such unwanted sexual advances, the majority of such attention has come from gay men. Gay men have always been attracted to me. Just a couple years ago, while playing a gig in the beer garden at Lowes Food in Hickory, a latino man standing next to me at the bar whispered a lewd proposition in my ear. I politely declined, and he went away. While I’m tempted to compare the Hickory stalker to a lustful 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. A sane, conscientious person does not continue pursuing a romance once the object of their affection makes it absolutely clear they're not interested. A reasonable person recognizes that no matter how ardently they may lust after someone, if it’s not going to happen there are other fish in the sea. I'm sure that the man who propositioned me at Lowes Food just moved on to his next prospect. Only stalkers continue pursuit after they've repeatedly been told "No!" 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 gay men and the stalker is that while the former just wanted 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. Every gay man I've ever rebuffed showed me that which the stalker could not, which was respect for my wishes and for my basic dignity.
"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire
I've always been lucky in that a stranger had always appeared at the right moment, providing the opportunity, connection, or situation needed to get me to where I was striving to be, either geographically, culturally, intellectually, spiritually, or financially. This was always done gratis. I reciprocated by helping people whenever it was in power to do so. I trusted in this providence, coming to believe I was charmed. Having had the experience of having my Harley broke down on the side of the road in the remote desert thousands of miles from home, and still having a stranger appear help me, proved this kismet to my satisfaction. Yet my luck ran out when I met the stalker, a monster whose deceitful motives and stratagems were singularly perverted. When I met her I was, metaphorically, "broke down on the side of the road in the desert," traversing a rough patch of road. This twisted, immoral, devious person, upon finding me in that compromised situation, used my misfortune and disadvantage as an opportunity to harass, sexually assault, and terrorize me.
But I've 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 are boomers or even children of boomers will understand what this meant symbolically, culturally, and politically. For those generations long hair wasn't just about fashion — It was a 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, bleaching, a flat iron, and wearing the wet look as a means of making it longer. 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, but 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 don't recall ever seeing the Barracuda wearing 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. She was very Leather Tuscadero. 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, the Barracuda was herself a "rock star," considered a peer of the famous musicians she worked with. For a rocker kid like me who'd been schlepping in the bars and clubs for the previous several years, the Barracuda's world 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 the Barracuda's side gig, as she also worked all the major fashion shows in Paris, Milan, and London, and so on. In NYC she based herself out of Oribe's saloon on the 10th floor of Elizabeth Arden. I was aware of who all of the haute couture runway models were because my fashion school roommates tore their pics out of French and Italian Vogue and tacked them on the walls of our apartment. These models were the Barracuda's real 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 suggested that I should let her cut my hair. It took some convincing, but I finally reasoned that if Jon Bon Jovi had explicitly trusted this woman to shear his famous 80s mane, knowing he had a serious fiduciary responsibility to protect an iconic brand worth hundreds of millions of dollars, then surely I could too.
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. He didn't even break pose! Total pro.
As I 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.
Yet I have fond memories of the Barracuda. She taught me many things about being serious, tough, and professional. 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 teacher, a mentor 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 mane opportunities began opening up, and perhaps that was her parting and lasting gift. It was like Sampson in reverse. Truth be told, working as a model took me more places than playing rock guitar — which at that point, given my ambivalence to the then current music scene, was waning in my interest. I initially picked up guitar in adolescence because I had an intense, deep love of music, and particularly appreciated the instruments 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 inserting myself into what I perceived as 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 a new overarching goal, which was not pursuit of the middle-brow culture I had previously esteemed, but something beyond that.
I believe that The Barracuda now owns a vineyard and lives in France.
My 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, many 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 his hot rodded, white 70s Fender Strat in my hands because I would inevitably lapse into Jake E Lee sounding riffs and licks. He insisted that I needed a mature, serious person's guitar, like a Telecaster. Mark and I would hang out at Carmin Street Guitars, where we would watch Rick Kelly building bowery wood Teles while Robert Quinn sat strumming innocuously. One time when they sent me across the street to buy sandwiches for everyone I realized that Monica Lewinsky was standing behind me in line. That memory has only just came back to me because the prostitution thing is lingering in my mind.
https://books.apple.com/ie/audiobook/th ... 1671050026
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
For several years I lived Europe, through my travels and social interactions being enlightened about about the peerage that existed beyond the old money of NYC. I didn't even own a guitar during this time. Given what was being called "rock music," I opted out, instead listening to Johnny Hallyday, Clint Black, Coltrane, Mahler, just other stuff. Once when in Bruxelles, at a Richard Artschwager exhibition at a friend's gallery in, I saw a Fender Stratocaster laying on sofa 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.

The events I've just narrated, which ended right around the time I was the age of my current bandmates, happened about thirty years ago. My unique brain perceives everything as though it happened just yesterday. How I envy people with that merciful gift of forgetfulness. Am I crazy to think I can defy Thomas Wolfe's maxim that one can't go home again? Can I pick up rock & roll right where I left it off in 1992? I did return to music years ago — but somehow performing this kind of music with these young guys feels different, like circling back to where I had had left off so many years ago.
While people do mistake me for being younger than I am, age does matter. That's a fact. My body hasn't deteriorated much, though my mind has turned into a subtle trap. I'm 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." I'm playing songs 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.
Riki Rachtman supposedly lives in Mooresville. That the guy who owned the Hollywood Cathouse, where I had so many adventures 1989, now resides here is just too fuckin' weird.
The disjointedness I feel is best evoked by referencing my recently watching episodes of Dr Who from the 70s on VHS. I'm time traveling in the TARTUS. In one episode 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.
