Friday, December 22, 2017

The Rugged Outdoorsman's Generous Endowment

I am often fanciful here. I will, just for the fun of it, suggest that Katy Perry bore Bruce Springsteen’s love child, or that Bruce Springsteen is one of South Africa’s most notable musical exports. But I am not being fanciful when I tell you that Annie Liebowitz, later America’s  most famous photographer of celebrities, once implored me to pose naked for her. I decided not to in the end, for the same reason many fellows would not — I was worried that I might be seen as stingily endowed. 

I discovered later in life that I am in fact very generously endowed, and cannot blame on the hardware that the post-coital remark I have heard most often in my life has been “Well, that was pretty disappointing”. It’s more a software problem. I may not be imaginative enough, or empathetic enough, or, as I’ve become fond of saying the past several weeks, enough enough. After all these years, it may be I have no idea what I’m doing. 

But we’re getting distracted. It was my worry about being inadequately endowed that made my skinnydipping with W— and C— and W—’s fat, neurotic male roommate in Tuna Canyon all those years ago all the more remarkable. 

You’ll need some background. W— was my pal, and C— his girlfriend. I lusted after C— in my heart, but knew I had no chance with her, as she preferred younger, very pretty men. (She and I were 22, and W— 21, and absurdly pretty.) A few months before, she and he and I had driven up to San Francisco together in my VW microbus, on LSD. Leave it to me to drop acid for the first time on Highway 1 north of San Simeon, where it gets twisty-turnier than any road anywhere in the world! While I concentrated hard on preventing our plunging into the frigid Pacific far below, C—, in the back, teased W—’s hair.  For hours. For literal hours.

But back to Tuna Canyon. The four of us discovered a little waterfall, with a pool at its base. For the reasons outlined above, I wouldn’t normally have removed all my clothing and leapt in, but we’d all taken mescaline, and I didn’t want to appear unfree, uncool, or unhip. Splash! Wouldn’t you know it, though? Not two minutes after the three of us had begun cavorting naked in nature, we realised two grizzled outdoorsmen straight out of Deliverance were looming over us, leering at C—’s wonderful firm 22-year-old breasts. It occurred to me they might slash my, W—’s, and Roommate’s throats and rape C—, so I leapt out of the pool, yanked my clothes back on without even drying off first, and tried to strike up a conversation with our visitors, who were by now licking their lips. 

But then a large wild, malevolent-looking rodent of some sort materialised at my feet, and I thought maybe The Lord Thy God had sent him to help me demonstrate to our prospective assailants that I, like them, was a nature-loving outdoorsperson. As our would-be assailants readied their crossbows, I gave Mr. Rodent an affectionate little pat on the head, which he reciprocated by taking a bite out of my finger. Our two prospective assailants looked at each other, apparently agreed without speaking that I was crazy, and disappeared quickly into the foliage, or whatever we rugged outdoors types call it. I went to the emergency hospital in Santa Monica and got my finger stitched up, and a tetanus shot. C—’s chasteness was uncompromised, as two were my, W—’s, and Roomate’s throats. 

Years later, I attended the debut performance of Bob Marley & The Wailers at the Roxy Theatre. I was enchanted by the sight of a waitress with bleached blonde hair, and passed her a note suggesting we become an item. She turned out to be C–. We did indeed become an item, for around 24 hours, after which she reverted to favouring very young, very pretty men.


Some gratitude.

Thursday, December 21, 2017

What's In a (Band) Name?

How many times a day on Facebook do you encounter the comment “That would be a great band name”? I encounter it entirely too often!

Like fashion, band naming conventions are cyclical. When The Beatles first came along, bands were commonly called [Lead Singer] & The {Nouns]. The idea was that a name that took 30 seconds to say bestowed an air of gravitas. A group that advertised in the Santa Monica pawnshop turned music store in which I used to hang around waiting to be discovered called itself Only Alternative & The Other Possibilities. I audtioned for them without success, but that was just fine, as the only good thing about them was their name. But then, a decade later, bands realised that shorter names tended to be put on marquees in larger letters, and instead of Paul Rodgers & The Middlesborough Mangetouts, say, you had…Free. Then The Lovin’ Spoonful and Jefferson Airplane made the world safe for non-plural names, and the whole world went mad, as witness Sixpence None the Richer. 

I think the worst name in pop music history was that of the group to which Bjorn Ulvaeus belonged before Abba — The Hootenanny Singers. On the other hand, behold the sublime genius of The Swinging Johnsons. The best album title in the history of recorded music is of course Joe Walsh’s sublime You Bought It, You Name It.

In Los Angeles just a few years back, I was in a group provisionally called Thee [a wee homage to East LA’s Thee Midniters] Vexations. –Tions names evoke Motown for me, as I think they did for Elvis Costello when he named his little band The Attractions. I’d wanted The Well Hungarians, but discovered that there was already a band with that name. Singer Richard Steven Black, the best male singer in LA, and a supremely nice guy, suggested we change it to Caviar On a Ritz, but then he left the band, and I wanted to call the revamped version The Romanovs because I thought it sounded cool, and because the girl singer was a Russki. The bass player, whom I was fast becoming less and less able to stand, fervently objected because Vladimir Putin is Russian, and homophobic, so the name was sure, in his mind, to offend any gay prospective fans. Behold what I had to contend with! I can't work in these conditions!

I moved back to the UK again, thinking the band I was going to have with my spouse would call itself Zelda & The Deathgrips, a name she’d devised in 1977 for a punk band she’d never got around to actually forming. (My own idea for a punk band, which I used in an unproduced screenplay, was The American Lesions.)  But wouldn’t you know it? There was a hip hop group back in Oakland, California, called The Deathgrips. I decided instead on The Freudian Sluts. For years, I’d amused myself, whenever anyone, uh, misspoke, by declaring, “Freudian slut. No! Slip!” I thought it so wonderful and hilarious and original that I didn’t bother to look on YouTube, on which I was later horrified to discover that someone had beaten me to the punch. I didn’t tell the rest of the band for fear of appearing a numbskull..

I believe the best band name I ever came up with — one I bestowed in 2005 on my recording project with the celebrated Essex (UK) jazz singer Debbie Clarke, was Do Re Mi Fa(Cough). My inspiration was my discovery that Johnny Rotten had written The Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant because he wanted to hear himself shouting, “Cunt!” (“We’re so pretty, oh, so pretty va-CUNT!”) on the radio.

I envision a day when corporate sponsorship will come to band-naming, and big corporations will sign up promising bands called, for instance, Samsung Presents Johnny Finite & The Denouments, as I intend to entitle my next project, even though I’m pretty sure everyone will pronounce it “denim mints”. But that’s fine, of course, because it will enable me to feel superior, in a sort of shallow, pathetic way. Having spelled Ulvaeus correctly without checking makes me feel pretty darned terrific about myself too.

[Don't miss the Samsung Presents Johnny Finite & The Denouements single, soon to be recalled] Swinestein. And FFS buy some of my books, please.]



Monday, December 18, 2017

The Voice, Talking Dirty

Having moved from Los Angeles up to Sonoma County with First Wife and our infant daughter, I did the responsible thing, and got a wage-slave job processing words at a big horrible law firm in San Francisco. I’d been heartened to discover they had what they called the Environmental Group, only to learn it was in the business of defending Chevron Oil against the Sierra Club and similar plaintiffs. I was surrounded by gay male fellow “support staff” who disliked me for not being gay, and by overweight female support staff who disliked me for wondering why they bothered drinking Diet Coke, rather than the ordinary sort, when they went through whole boxes of chocolates over the course of an afternoon. The attorneys hated me for hating them — for being, in most cases, arrogant little twerps who couldn’t write grammatical English and who adored the Grateful Dead. 

I’d gotten the job by guile, passing the test on the IBM Stylewriter by finding on the floppy disk they gave me the test of someone who’d actually known something about the IBM Stylewriter, and copying it. I seemed not to be the first who’d had that idea. Reviewing what I pretended to have done, the examiner scratched his head and marvelled at how many people had been unable to complete one particular task. I bit my lip to keep from laughing. Or, for that matter, crying.

The firm had offices in three buildings in a miserable, windy, gloomy corner of the Financial District. Many afternoons on the 21st floor I would think that either I or one of my little twerp attorney tormentors would go out the window by afternoon's end.

I found solace where I could. One source of delight was the voice of one of the telephone operators who would page people over the firm intercom broadcast in all three buidlngs. |Her voice was pure carnality, a Lili St. Cyr advertisement in the back of a second-tier men’s magazine made sound — a contralto purr that combined what sounded to me like disdain with…well, lust.  ”Will Mr. Carmichael please phone his secretary?” she would purr, and what I would hear was “Do you honestly imagine you’re man enough for me, darling?” She made Kathleen Turner, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, sound like Lisa Simpson. I’ve always found haughty women sexy. 

My marriage collapsed. I moved to The City. 

I learned The Voice’s owner was named N—. I contrived to meet her, and I did. I phoned the operators’ room and asked if she might be kind enough to record an answering machine message for me. She sounded flattered. 

There wasn’t a woman on earth who could have lived up to her voice, and N— didn’t. And she was ancient — in her mid-40s, probably, and I not yet out of my thirties, and still getting stopped in airports and asked for autographs by people certain I must be a rock star they couldn’t quite place. But that voice! I imagined us…getting intimate (have you ever noticed there’s no really good middle ground between “fucking” and “making love”?), and her purring into my ear, “Oh, God, darling! Fill me!” I ascertained she lived in Sonoma County too, and told her that on Sunday evenings I customarily drove past her neighborhood after driving my little girl back to her mother’s home. I hoped she’d invite me over. 

She invited me over.

I’d been without a woman for a couple of months, and N—‘s was the sexiest voice in the history of speech. Entering her apartment, though, I realised that some of the irresistible huskiness of The Voice was a result of N—’s chainsmoking. Her place reeked of cigarettes, but not as badly as it reeked of cats. Every surface was half an inch thick in cat hair.  I was nonetheless able to make out that she had perfectly dreadful taste. Not even the promise of The Voice talking dirty into my ear was enough to keep me there.