The Greatest Record of All Time

I woke up this morning feeling pretty certain that the greatest record of all time is Norman Greenbaum’s 1970 hit Spirit In the Sky, which no one doesn’t love.

How not, before you’ve heard him sing or play a single note, to love a pop star who uses his real name when his real name is as ethnic and nebbishy as our hero’s? Did Robert Zimmerman not adapt a more glamorous name before launching his career as an entertainer? Did not Shlomo Finkelbaum and Chaim Weitz? One hears Norman Greenbaum and reflexively pictures a spotty, chubby, yarmulke-wearing Yeshiva student with little bits of the egg salad sandwich he had for lunch clinging to his orthodonic braces. In fact, our hero was a skinny, lank-haired hippie who might have grown up an observant boychik in a Boston suburb, but who had relocated to Los Angeles as a young adult, and there written the, uh, mindbending Top 55 hit The Eggplant That Ate Chicago for a group I would have expected to have seen at the Troubadour, when it was a folk club, but did not, though my first group, The 1930 Four, had the pleasure of borrowing Peanut Butter Conspiracy’s amplifiers when we played Hoot Nite there. 

But can we please stay focused? Once Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band had broken up, Norman apparently relocated to Petaluma, in southern Sonoma County, whence Winona Ryder would later emerge, and saw country star Porter Waggoner, a key early patron of Dolly Parton, on television, singing about religion. He was inspired to compose his own little homage to Christianity (though, being Jewish, he didn’t understand that Christians aren’t permitted to assert they’ve never sinned), basing the arrangement on the hoariest blues riff in all christendom, one featured mere weeks before in Canned Heat’s On the Road Again, and which would be the bedrock on which boogie bands beyond counting would build their careers. 

Producer Erik Jacobsen’s stock in trade had always been gently electrified folk-based music, but there was nothing very folky about the sound Norman’s Fender Telecaster, into which an electronics whiz friend had implanted a distortion device, made in the recording studio. Indeed, Norman and lead guitarist Russell DaShiell sounded together like an auto body repair shop in a town that didn’t very vigorously enforce drunk driving laws. Jacobsen hired a female gospel trio from down in Oakland to bolster Norman’s anemic lead vocal, and presto — the greatest record of all time! 

I saw Norman in concert as Spirit in the Sky was selling its two millionth copy and reaching No. 3 on the Billboard chart. He was something less than Mr. Excitement. He sang badly out of tune from first song to last, and within a couple of years was working as a cook in Sonoma County, even though everyone from Canadian songbird Dorothy Combs Morrison, of whom only Canadians have ever heard, and the seminal UK Goth band Bauhaus was trying in vain to surpass the sublime original version. The extremely silly UK glam/Kabuki band Doctor and the Medics got to No. 1 with their faithful imitation of the original version in 1986, the year after I relocated to Santa Rosa, where Norman was by this time working as a sous chef. 

After the original, my own favourite version of the song is actually one of the thinly disguised copies of which the UK has produced so very many — Alvin Stardust’s My Coo Ca Choo. Here, Al, whose real name as a boychik had been Bernard Jewry (!), did a Gary Glitter, re-emerging from obscurity (he’d achieved pre-Beatles fame as Shane Fenton) to take a bite out of the glam rock pie. Visually, he takes Gene Vincent’s sinister fetishism (later a key part of The Music Machine’s brand) to heretofore-undreamed-of heights. Watch this and tell me Billy Idol didn’t learn everything he knew from him. Just try! 

Je Suis Trump

For around 11 months now, Donald J. Trump, whom I have alternately enjoyed referring to as Fucko the Klown and The Vat of Steaming Gonorrheic Discharge, has had my blood boiling. But I’ve had it easy compared to some I know, who’ve suffered high blood pressure and even the odd aneurysm. I have realised that the chances of my changing Mr. Trump are pretty small, and that the course of action with the best chance of success is to change myself. 

I haven’t failed to notice that Mr. Trump and I aren’t nearly as dissimilar as I might like to pretend, He desperately needs to be perceived as brilliant and hypermanly. I find machismo deeply distasteful, but God knows my appetite for affirmation is insatiable. People have always thought I was kidding when I said all I wanted in life was the Pope’s balcony, but I wasn’t saying it in jest. If, at the sight of me, countless thousands were to break into rapturous applause, as for His Papal Popeliness, it might make me feel for a few seconds like a viable human being. 

A few days ago, a reporter on Air Force One asked Mr. Trump if, because of Xi Jinping’s recent dramatic successes, he might feel intimidated by the Chinese leader. Mr. Trump was quick to point out emphatically (and, of course, completely falsely) that he too has been spectacularly successful in the first year of his presidency. Sounds like something I’d do! Whenever I hear anyone who does any of the things I do (writing, music, graphic design) being praised, I reflexively think, “Hey, what about me?” though sometimes I manage not to say anything. I think Morrissey (who has been called the greatest pop lyricist on earth, and whom, predictably, I think I’m better than) had a song called something like We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful. Boy, did that resonate for me! 

Thin-skinned? The Trump epidermis must be one cell deep. Mine might be two. Rather than calling my detractor over-rated on Twitter, or suggesting that he or she is failing in business, I turn the hurt and anger inward, and go into a deep funk. Mr. Trump doesn’t like being troubled with details, and extensive preparation? Neither do I! Mr. Trump has no perceptible patience, and a low boredom threshold? Paisano! Mr. Trump commonly shoots his mouth off without knowing fully what he’s talking about? Me too, though perhaps less frequently, and my lovely vocabulary occasionally fools many listeners into erroneously perceiving me as smart. I don’t use Twitter.

Heartless? Me too! A friend reports she spent the day after the recent mass shooting in Texas in tears. I felt nothing much beyond fervent loathing of our national stupidity and the brazen venality of Our Elected Leaders. I stopped eating red meat in 1978, but when I did eat steak, I liked it well done (its looking bloody put me off bigly), just as Mr. Trump does. I have traditionally felt it imperative to be linked to beautiful women, thinking (as I suspect he does too) that the world might be marginally more likely to mistake me for a viable human being if I’d seemed to win the heart of one for whom other men lusted. We both dye our hair. When I encounter spectacular food, it’s hard for me to think of anything else, as it was when, explaining his decision to bomb Syria this past April, he could hardly stop talking about the glorious chocolate cake he and Xi had been enjoying at the time.

So how to proceed? Well, I’ve decided to think of Mr. Trump as the lead character in an ongoing TV sitcom — Oh, Donny, Not Again! — as a cross between Eddie Haskell (one word, UK readers: Google), Archie Bunker, and David Brent, a big, venal lummox who desperately wants everyone to love, or at least admire, him, but who’s forever doing or saying something that elicits only exasperation, dismay, or even wrath in all but a few louts even more clueless and feckless than he. 

Just picture it. After a long, exhausting day of being president of the United States, our hero staggers into the tavern where he likes to commiserate with his pals, a Russian spy, a Mafia enforcer, and an alcoholic golf pro. The Mafia enforcer says, "Yo, Donny. Why the long face?" He, and the spy and golf pro, all pronounce the definite article as though it starts with a d.

Our hero, who doesn't drink, draine the glass of ginger ale the bartender has slid across the bar to him. He shakes his head and says, "I called the widow of this coloured soldier who was killed in some little African country I'd never heard of. Do you think she was grateful? Like hell she was grateful! She busts my balls because I forget Hubby's name. Some gratitude!|"

The Russian spy, Mafian enforcer, and golf pro all shake their heads at each other. The golf pro says, "You can't live with 'em..."

The Mafia enforcer finishes his thought for him. "And you can't live with 'em!" to the accompaniment of delighted canned laughter, folowed by delighted applause. Our expectations confounded! Hilarious!

Donny says, "But you can always grab 'em by the pussy!" On the soundtrack: canned groaning, and a couple of snickers. Oh, Donny, not again!

My Dark Places

I see now that I was born to the wrong parents, and in the wrong body. That isn’t to say I’ve ever felt myself to be female, or that I didn't love my parents, but that I've never been good at the traditionally masculine stuff, and that my body has never had much interest in my winning other boys' or men's admiration. Very early on, I couldn’t master shoelace-tying. I wasn’t rambunctious. The only allure of Cub, and later Boy, Scouts was the promise of feeling that I fit in somewhere. I've never had that feeling. 

I wasn’t brave. Indeed, I was the opposite of brave, but how could I have been otherwise? My mother, very much my dominant parent, was terrified of everything and everybody, and taught her handsome little angel — not intentionally, of course — to be the same. I never saw anyone stick up for himself. She ran roughshod over my very passive dad every day of my childhood (and indeed, adulthood), and he let her, even though she was meekness made flesh around any third party. 

The wrong body I’d been born into wasn’t well coordinated. I adored sports, and ached to be good at them, to win the admiration of other boys, but was awful at them. I played them all, avidly, and ineptly, invariably getting picked second to last for every team. Given my lack of coordination and my parents’ reflexive passivity, I couldn’t imagine being very good with my fists, and walked away from every fight, each time with another little piece of my self-respect missing. By the age of eight, there was nothing left to lose. I had no way of knowing that the pain of self-contempt, which i’ve carried with me all my life, would exceed any physical pain I may have suffered by a factor of many million. 

I spent yesterday in the darkest of my dark places, hating the world and everyone in it, no one more than myself. In the morning, a young woman friend ent me a message. She thought our friendship had become toxic, and wondered if she ought to walk away. Last week, I sent her a message offering to do a Website to promote her freelance social media consulting business. When she didn’t respond for several days. I sent her this message: Cat got your tongue? That apparently upset her terribly — and, in my own view, wildly disproportionately. Her furious response dismayed me, and I left it unanswered, which was what led her to threaten to abandon our friendship. I couldn’t summon the energy to argue with her, and told her to walk away if that;s what felt right to her. Welcome to Monday, Johnny! 

Not long thereafter, as I was trying (not at all successfully) to figure out a way to make myself feel worthwhile and purposeful, rather than as though bing crushed by boredom, a young man whose accent I couldn’t place impatiently rang our doorbell while Dame Zelda was walking her dog. He wanted to tell me about how he could improve our little house’s exterior. I was in no mood for a sales pitch, and politely told him it wasn’t a good time. He made no secret of his exasperation. “Old people!” he snarled as he spun on his heel and walked away. “Fuck off,” I suggested loudly — and injudiciously. If he’d come back, one of two things would probably have resulted. Either I’d have gone reflexively into coward mode and slammed the door, and hated myself for it, or we’d have tried to hurt each other physically, which probably wouldn’t have gone terrifically for me, as I have one fewer functioning arm than most people, and he had the great advantage of being around 27. 

I emailed Isambard Jones tracks to more Facebook friends, hoping that they’d like it enough to recommend it to others. (So far, three of the 40 people I’ve sent tracks to have responded in any way.) I managed to put together a page of my life-changingly hilarious comedy stuff, and sent it to half a dozen BBC producers and three agents. I fully expect not to hear back from any of them. I should, and indeed do, expect by now that the world will be in a meeting every time I call. I spent the day wishing it were much later, as I yearned all day for the oblivion of sleep, and felt ashamed of myself for doing so. I am ever mindful of how few days I have left, and of how awful it is to spend one of them feeling as though being drowned from within.

A bit later, I went on my daily constitutional, which usually make me feel better, but was in too much of a state to be heartened by the autumnal beauty all around me. I wound up at the local barber shop, owned and operated by Kurds. The guy who was going to cut what remains of my hair asked if I’d had a good day. I nearly burst into tears, and for the duration of my haircut had to keep fighting them back. 

Welcome to my world, and thank God you don't live in it.