A lot of readers have been imploring me to reveal why, at an age at which other men had dedicated themselves to problems with their prostates, I dared dream of resuming my career as a performing musician.
I don’t think there’s a feeling in the world quite like stepping on stage and being greeted with a roar of applause, and that isn’t a feeling one easily forgets. It makes one feel so…validated, so loved. It compensates for all the excruciating rejections of childhood, for one’s parents’ casual (if usually unintentional) denigrations, for the indifference of the girl (or boy!) for whom one secretly pines. And the drugs and alcohol! We’d come off stage and be affectionately greeted by the dealers of the best, you know, shit available, and importers of the best vodka and cognac, for which they’d want no remuneration beyond our posing for selifies with them. The nostrils of the king of Ecuador weren’t welcoming purer cocaine than we hoovered up greedily before every performance — and, toward the end, between songs.
And the women! Oh, my god, the women! Around the time our popularity peaked, we added to our road crew a tour manager who, back in his native England, had worked for Rod Stewart, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Soft Cell. He said that if the most gorgeous young women in those artists’ dressing rooms and those in ours had entered a party thrown by the sultan of Brunei from opposite ends of a ballroom, no one would have noted the other acts' gorgeous young women. Everything was coming up roses!
I gave it all up at 30 to pursue a career in legal word processing. Between that awful night at Mabuhay Gardens in November 1977, when punks jeered at us for not having the prescribed new hairstyle, and late 2013, when my roommate, in desperation, asked if I’d play drums with the band he was putting together to entertain at his 40th high school reunion, I went on stage only as an actor, male stripper, and motivational speaker. I hadn’t owned a drum kit for 20 years. All I had was one of those electronic pad things. But anything for friendship!
It was clear from the first number we played at the reunion — a really horrible version of The Animals’ We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place — that I still had whatever it was that had attracted the most beautiful women on earth in the 1970s. I assumed a lot of my roommate’s former classmates were married to the gentlemen with whom they were dancing so caucasianly, but they seemed to forget all about Hubby as we played. Several of them, through a combination of regular exercise, sensible diet, and good genes, had remained shapely and attractive even into their 50s, and I won’t pretend not to have loved their flaring their nostrils at me as I played, at their standing up just a little straighter and more protuberant.
I guess I’d gotten older myself, though, for the evening’s highlight for me wasn’t four of the referenced MILFs slipping me their phone numbers (and, in one wonderful case, panties) during the band’s breaks, but the remarkable empathy I discovered I had with the impromptu ensemble’s keyboard player, who apparently played the organ (I intend no pun here, and hope you have the maturity not to infer one) at the church at which my roommate worshipped every year on Easter because even the most lapsed Christian generally makes a display of piety on the anniversary of Christ having risen.
Any musician will tell you there’s no pleasure quite like that of performing with others whose hearts seem to beat at exactly the same rate as his or her own. Some musicians refer to it as being in “the pocket”, others “the zone”. Whatever you call it, this fellow and I had it — truckloads of it, especially on Girl From Ipanema, at the end of which the audience was eerily silent for a long moment before it tendered us an ovation as loud as any from my rock dreamboat days. Was it any wonder that I dared dream anew, even at an age to which David Bowie hadn’t lived, of a career as an entertainer?
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