Well, I think I’ve finally decided what I want to be when I
grow up. No, not a fireman, nor a cowboy, nor an astronaut. Give me credit for
greater maturity than that, OK? What I want to be now is what I wanted, and
tried, to be between the ages of 23 and 30 — a rock star.
Toward this end, I and my comrades have put together a
little combo, The Romanovs, which was around 15 months in gestation. First, I
and Friend 1, into whose makeshift orchestra he recruited me to play drums at
his high school reunion in October 2013 because he’d run out of alternatives,
thought we’d invite various musicians over to jam — that is, fool around
musically. I met an excellent singer of approximately our own vintage at a
birthday party the following February, and invited him, successfully, to form a
group with us. We sputtered along for months and months, adding and then later
subtracting a succession of lead guitarists, until finally I summoned the
courage to invite the legendary Pete Castle, who’d played briefly with my band
The Pits in the late 1970s, to consider joining us.
To my astonishment and
delight (he’d become a very much more versatile musician and very much more
accessible on a personal level since 1977), he accepted, whereupon he and I and
Friend 1 agreed that we weren’t likely to get anywhere rehearsing only three
times a month, which was the most our singer could manage. I ran an ad on
Craigslist and heard from a young Russian-born woman whose YouTube videos showed her
to be beautiful and a fab singer, and to love performing. Various nay-sayers that
when she got a load of me, Friend 1, and Pete — combined age 191 — she’d say
she’d forgotten something down in her car, and run away screaming. But she
didn’t.
We conferred, she and I. I showed her a video of The Divinyls,
on the tour they undertook after their single "I Touch Myself" captivated
American audiences, performing at Madison Square Garden, and the glorious
Chrissy Amphlett being casually ultra-provocative. “I could do that,” Motorina said
without perceptible hesitation. Music to my ears!
Boys of a certain age aren’t supposed to behave this way.
We’re supposed to pull our thinning gray hair into ponytails and play "Brown-Eyed Girl" just like on the record. From the get-go, I, for one, wasn’t
having that. Let’s play songs no one else is playing as no one else is playing
them, said I. We worked up a version of Carl Perkins’ "Honey Don’t" that’s half
Bo Diddley and ha;f breakneck rockabilly, breakneck rockabilly also being the
style in which we play The Who’s "The Kids Are Alright," which used to be my big
vocal number in The 1930 Four in 1967. We do The Velvet Underground’s "Waiting
for the Man," which Mr. D. Bowie taught my and F1’s band to play, on the A&M
Records soundstage, 20 years before Motorina’s birth. We play Freddie & The
Dreamers’ "I’m Telling You Now," perhaps the lamest song of The British Invasion
(if you don’t count Chad & Jeremy’s "Willow Weep For Me") in the manner of
Black Sabbath. Boys of a certain age aren’t supposed to behave this way.
I dare to imagine we’re going to become the toast of Los
Angeles, and then of the world, and will continue to so believe until someone
can produce the rulebook in which it’s specified that musicians my, F1, and
Pete’s ages are allowed to rock without embarrassment only if we had a big hit
in the distant past — a hit that entitles us to Legacy Act status.
I’ve puzzled over this idea in the past, beginning around
the time The Magic Numbers broke through in the UK. If the idea is that the
deep furrows the decades have etched in our foreheads, and the expansion of our
bellies make us too physically repulsive for young audiences to embrace us, how
to explain the popularity of so many acts that may indeed be young, but will
never in their lives know what it was like to be as gorgeous as F1 and Pete and I were all those decades ago?
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