Rock Stardom or the Wall of Brick

It didn’t work out having the woman to whom I am wed as the singer in The Freudian Sluts. Oh, did it not work out! I invited the fellow who’d been the singer on a side project to replace her, and he said he would, but then he said he wouldn’t. The stroke that had robbed him of the sight in one of his eyes had made it impossible for him to memorise lines in plays (he was mostly an actor) or lyrics, and even my saying he could have his lyrics on a music stand on stage didn’t help, as he didn’t think he’d remember how to phrase them. I became the group’s singer by default, but continued to advertise for someone much better.

And to receive virtually no replies. There were a fair number of responses to my ads, but when I would send links to our Website, there to watch videos and hear our songs, only one was ever heard from again, a fierce-eyed young Moldovan immigrant with a Paul Ryanesque widow’s peak who audition consisted of his growling along with an MP3 of The Thompson Twins’ Hold Me Now on his mobile phone, not impressively. 

I could certainly understand that we’re not everyone’s cup of tea. We’re not very jazzy, for instance, and a balls-out metalhead, dude, would undoubtedly find us insufficiently…rawk. Still, one audition in three months! When I’d formed The Pits in Los Angeles at the dawn of the punk era, if you put an ad for any kind of musician in The Recycler, your phone wouldn’t stop ringing for two years. My impression is that millennials don’t want to be in bands. They want to win a televised singing competition and become instantly rich and famous, or to be DJs, as its they who make the enormobucks, without having to be able to sing in tune, or to learn a lot of complicated chord positions on a fretboard.

Finally, in the fourth month of my being the reluctant lead singer, we got a fellow American expatriate, a 36-year-old MBA with a high-paying corporate PR day job that required her to wear uncomfortable shoes. She had a lovely understatedly soulful voice, but was able to rehearse at most three times a month. Worse, when we tried some recording together, she accused me of stifling her creativity. Having learned to dislike run-on sentences in Miss Marian Titangos’ junior high school English class, I asked her not to sing “and” at the end of every line. A skinny blonde woman with a nasal voice professed to like the songs, and seemed musical, but then announced that, as A Professional, she would rehearse only if paid. Oh, you betcha, Natali!

And then, finally, a breakthrough! The lovely and talented Susan P—, who lived north of north London, but had a car, and was willing to drive it long distances through Greater London traffic, seemed to like what the band was doing, and joined it. She sang beautifully, and didn’t hesitate to buy herself a sparkly red Jessica Rabbit gown to perform in when I suggested it, and was a pleasure to work with. But then, after a few months, she went through a painful romantic breakup, moved back to her native Midlands —  very far north of north London! — and pronounced herself available for no rehearsals, no recording sessions, and a maxiumum of one — count it! — performance per month. 

Back to gumtree.com, and to joinmyband.com. And to getting lots of completely inappropriate responses (as from persons who imagine that homemade videos of themselves rapping might fill me with enthusiasm) or persons from foreign countries. As I write this, I have now heard from four singers in eastern European countries who, apparently imagining the streets of London to be lined with gold, think The Freudian Sluts are going to fly them over to audition. 

We pause to note that it was exactly the same in Los Angeles in 2015. My band The Vexations (later The Romanovs) advertised for a singer, and got four responses.

A young Metropolitan Police constable with a beautiful voice responded to the ad. He provided a link to a video of him singing a Keane song, quite beautifully. He was also in a Led Zeppelin tribute band, in which he wore a chest-baring blouse and a curly blonde wig, so he was apparently versatile, and not easily embarrassed. After having watched our videos and listened to the music, he texted me, “I want to be part of this.” Which yearning persisted until around 35 minutes before we were to meet face-to-face. I began the 90 minutes’ bus-and-train journey an hour early to ensure that I showed up on time, and was sitting there in the pub he’d nominated, tapping my fingers on the table, when he texted to inform me that, on reflection, he found my songs “too dark” for his taste. It was kind of a nice change from people seeming not to note that, while many Freudian Sluts songs are upbeat and satirical, the majority, in one way or another, are about the myriad ways in which we hurt each other, or about my perpetual loneliness and despair. But I looked at the bright side. What fun I’d had travelling three hours back and forth for nothing!

It’s 14.00 as I write this. Up until a couple of hours  ago, I thought I was going to be meeting an actual Brit who'd sent me an MP3 of her performing A Natural Woman a cappella. Her intonation was far from impeccable, but her low voice had an appealing raspiness, and beggars can’t be choosers. But now she’s texted me that she’s decided she’s going to hold out for something more up-tempo and disco-y. 

Having an original band in London in the autumn of 2017, or standing six inches from a brick wall and trying to knock it down with my forehead. Decisions, decisions. 

Fats Domino Was Walkin', and So Am I

I walk about an hour a day because I can no longer run. I mean, I can run, but if I run too far I’m afraid of the high price I’ll pay in pain. I don’t have resilient joints (my right shoulder’s been replaced twice, and I’m losing my left hand), and my knees and ankles took a beating when I ran on the sidewalks of West Hollywood for eight years. Then, nine years ago last month, I was hit by an inattentive teen driver in Beacon, New York, and my left meniscus was ripped. My left knee’s never been the same. Most nights, even with walking instead of running, I’d be howling from the ache if Dame Zelda didn’t bring me a hot water bottle. 

The cultural centre of our quiet neighbourhood is the little parade of shops a couple of hundred metres to the south. There’s a pharmacy, and a newsagent’s/post office, and an off-licence (Californians would call it a liquor store), a Chinese takeaway place, a beauty parlour, an opium den, a German bakery, and a German deli. Many Germans have settled here because of the nearby German School. I was only joking about the opium, but one can dream, can’t he Sometimes, in clement weather, the village slag may be glimpsed sipping coffee, smoking, and contemplating her semiweekly change of hair colour, from blinding blonde to darkest black, outside the bakery. I have never bought so much as a pretzel from it, nor patronised the deli, nor conversed with the village slag, though I have watched her try to seduce a geezer on the 371 bus from Kingston.

Most of my walks begin with me heading east, toward central London. I walk past the field on which Queen’s Park Rangers develops young football talent, and on which the Richmond Reprobates baseball team has been known to practice, past a playground, and then through the path between two long brick walls featured in so many Freudian Sluts videos. I emerge in a big field popular with equestrians, and then, after traversing much grass, wind up on a wide dirt bridal path. On my left is the Ham Polo Club, the only polo facility in London. There are commonly matches on weekends, and I enjoy listening to the play-by-play announcer through the facility’s PA system. He reminds me of Chick Hearn, the brilliant Los Angeles Lakers announcer of yesteryear, though I’ve no clue what he’s on about. 

Finally i reach the comically narrow main road that links Richmond and Kingston, the mighty A307, and salute the Fox & Duck, on the opposite side of the road, with my middle fingers. (The proprietor’s daughter booked the Sluts to play there, cancelled on us when someone booked a birthday party on the night we’d been promised, and then never made good on her promise to give us a make-up night. I’ve been in there once, with Dame Zelda, to see a Bowie tribute band that pretty nearly deafened me.) 

Walking north on the mighty A307, which I suspect I could cross, given a running start, in four steps, I must remind myself not to be clumsy and to step off the pavement, as there are always buses coming, and there’s no margin of error whatever. (My telling myself not to be clumsy is sort of like the sun telling itself not to rise in the morning.) I do not turn left on to the footpath that would lead me to the Petersham Nurseries, whose stock in trade isn’t plants, but cuisine, and to which foodies from all over London flock eagerly on weekends. I ascend Star and Garter Hill as fast as my ancient legs will take me, for I am intent on getting my heart beating as fast as possible. I pass the spot on Richmond Hill where I encountered Pete Townshend a few months ago, admire JMW Turner’s view, as immortalised in a celebrated painting, and then descend down the hill depicted above, heading homeward at last, with the Thames on my right, and the beautiful Petersham Meadows on my left. The Thames is a tidal river, and sometimes the tow path is flooded. I bid Eel Pie Island, on which I think Pete used to have a studio, a mental howdy, and overhear many conversations, an alarming majority of them in Spanish. 

The other day, as I neared the car park in which I make the last left turn of my traipse, I espied a wonderful couple. The guy was around my own height — 1.85 metres — and his girlfriend a dwarf who literally came up to his waist. He was walking at probably a third his natural speed in concession to her steps being so much shorter than his own. 

True love, I thought. 

Who Sang the Background Vocals on Whole Lotta Love?

In Led Zeppelin’s entire recorded canon, there is only one song in which Robert Plant’s voice is joined by others’. It is of course the group’s iconic breakthrough hit Whole Lotta Love, in which Plant suggests to the woman he’s addressing that she consider renewing her academic career, and promises that, if she does so, he will give her every inch of his love (all four and a half, according to a friend who claims to have enjoyed coitus with him in the mid-1970s). 

It is commonly assumed that Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John (Bongo) Bonham — rumoured at the time to be contemplating a CSN-style harmony album they would release as either The Three J’s, or as Jimmy Jonesy & John — did the supplementary singing on the song’s title line, but Mendel Illness has found out otherwise from the wife of the group’s late road manager, now a psychotherapist in New Zealand (the wife, you see, and not the late road manager, who is of course deceased). 

Smarting from the disparaging things i’d written about them in Rolling Stone and the Los Angeles Times, Page recruited an all-star cast of critics and critics’ darlings to do the referenced singing, including Greil Marcus, Janet Maslin, Matthew Sweet, Big Star, Tom Waits, and two members of The New York Dolls, David Johansen and Dag Hammarskjöld, later to become Secretary General of the United Nations. 

Johansen affected oafish nonmusicality with the Dolls, but in fact had a velvety Nat "King" Cole-ish baritone, and three years before had been a featured soloist in Staten Island High School’s much-praised choral group, The Concertaires. 

The rest is history!