Idolatry

The Bible pooh-poohs false ones, he noted sacrilegiously, but there was nothing false about my boyhood idols. I never cared that much for Davy Crockett, but a few months after his popularity peaked, I was gigantic on Robin Hood, as depicted on television by the British actor Richard Greene. The opening theme (He called the greatest archers to a tavern on the green/ They vowed to help the people of the king/ They handled all the trouble on the English country scene/ And still found plenty of time to sing) was of course the corniest in the history of popular entertainment. The guy who went on to become The Beatles’ music publisher sang the closing theme, but that meant nothing to one who wouldn't hear The Beatles for nine more years. 

By 1957, I’d transferred my allegiance to the pop/folk singer Jimmie Rodgers, who sounded like a cross between Burl Ives and Buddy Holly, and had actual Elvis’s Jordanaires velvetly exclaiming, “Doo-wah!” on my favorite of his hits, “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” containing what I thought at the time must be the most heartbreaking line in the history of Western music in Now that I’m old and I’m ready to go. (Admissions of mortality always fog me up.) I’d walk over to the grocery store near where I lived with my parents in Playa del Rey and stare for hours at the photograph there depicted, wondering if I’d ever achieve a cigarette, big guitar, and greasy kiss curl like my idol’s.

By 1960, I’d abandoned Jimmie for Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Norm Larker, though all I knew about him was that he was a good clutch hitter. I died a little bit when, on the last day of the season, he lost the National League batting title to Pirates shortstop Dick Groat, finishing .002 behind. I have since learned that he was from Alabama, of all places. I would like to think he wasn’t a redneck, but there are no photographs of him kissing John Roseboro, as there are of Sandy Koufax.

Pop music was largely dreadful in those days, unless you knew where to find the good stuff, and I had no inkling, so my 1962-1963 idol was another athlete, basketballer Hot Rod Hundley. In college, he’d been the Pistol Pete Maravich of his (earlier) era, the most exciting white guy in sight, but wound up as the Lakers’ team clown. At the end of a game in which they were very far ahead or very far behind, they’d put him in to perform dribbling and other stunts — presumably, when the Lakers were ahead, to the other teams’ intense annoyance. He lived one street south of my family’s place just outside Pacific Palisades. I walked past it an awful lot hoping that he might invite me in for a beer or some sunflower seeds, but never actually glimpsed him.

I came to adore The Beatles, after almost a year’s staunch (and misinformed) resistance, but never idolized them as I later idolized Pete Townshend, for being ridiculous and brilliant and hilarious and scary and funny-looking in a perfectly wonderful way, and for not being much of a guitarist, but playing his guitar as no one else on earth had ever thought to. I idolized Wes Wilson, the (West Coast) Fillmore Auditorium’s Beardsley-influenced poster artist, and Tom Wolfe, and maybe Philip Roth for a while there, and Johnny Rotten, until his schtick got really stale. I idolized Mick LaSalle, the best movie critic in America, and Meryl Streep, the best actor ever.

In 2014, the closest I have to an idol is my friend and mentee Arturo Lima, whose implacable good cheer humbles and inspires me. I hope you get a chance to meet him one day.

Always We'll Remember Graduation Day

I couldn’t bear the thought of being surrounded by another new crop of newly minted freshman hippies, and so before my senior year I moved at last from the dormitory. Alone in the studio apartment I was going to share with two others, I dashed off a diatribe against The Doors out of sheer boredom, and thus was my career as a music critic launched. Within a few short months, I was getting my copy of The Beatles’ white album free, and lots of others besides, and invited to historic parties, such as that at which folk singer Phil Ochs tossed a basket of fruit into Tommy Smothers’ swimming pool — to protest the war in Viet Nam, if memory serves. In those days, the most unlikely tantrums were commonly explained away as a function of the misbehaver’s outrage over the war. Caught cheating on your wife? “I wouldn’t have done it except for this goddamned unjust war!” Caught propositioning male hustlers? The war! Underperforming at work or school? The war!

The next thing I knew I was writing not just for the student newspaper, but for the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone, and getting into the Troubadour free, with a tab for drinks, and the Whisky. My little head spun. I asked out Ms. Cynthia Morin, who had the longest, straightest, shiniest chestnut hair in the world, and she said yes.

I and my roommates didn’t get along famously, but it got no worse than one of them chasing me with a carving knife just because I’d punched him in the kisser. He didn’t catch me because he’d had polio as a child. I wouldn’t have punched him if he hadn’t. I could be such an asshole.

Ms. Cynthia Morin decided she wasn’t that fond of me after all, and what a fix I was in. What good did having two free passes to the Troubadour do when there was only one of me? I felt as though back in sophomore year, when I’d bolted my dinner every night to preclude being seen dining alone. But there was no getting into the Troubadour, seeing a performance, and getting the hell out before others could come in and witness my solitude. In the UK, they'd have called me Johnny No-Mates.

Militancy was thick in the air. I joined a mob of people one afternoon marching around shouting, “On strike! Shut it down!” They apparently had a list of non-negotiable demands, as who did not in those days? While marching, I encountered Ms. Annie Sokoloff, who’d been one of Sproul Hall’s universal objects of desire when I’d lived there. To my considerable surprise and delight, I soon found myself making out with her in the library, to the consternation of scholars in the adjacent cubicle. I began turning up at the Troubadour with a universal object of desire on my arm.

She moved in with me; I now officially had...an old lady! But then, a couple of weeks later, she thought better of it, and of LA in general. She didn’t come home all night from her waitressing job in Venice. When she finally did call, it was to say goodbye. I couldn’t win for losing!

Having cut not a single class in four years, having scrupulously done all the recommended reading, and so on, I felt entitled to relax my final quarter of college, and enrolled in the easy-sounding Sociology of Sports, only to discover that the instructor expected an elaborate term paper. I did mine on the sociology of the Will Rogers Beach amateur volleyball scene. I never ventured within miles of Will Rogers Beach, and never spoke to anyone who played volleyball there. My paper got a passing grade anyway and must thus be adjudged one of the most successful of my many, many unpublished works of fiction.

On the last day of my college career, with my degree assured, I had a choice between sitting anonymously in the middle of a big field with a few thousand fellow graduates — with no one shaking our hands or handing us a sheepskin, and nobody calling any of our names — or interviewing my idol, a Mr. Pete Townshend, for the Los Angeles Times in advance of The Who’s life-changing performance of Tommy at the Hollywood Palladium.

I wish all my decisions since could have been that easy to make, though now, all those years later, it occurs to me that my parents might have been sorely disappointed not to be able to attend my graduation. I could be such an asshole.

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Mesmerized by His Astonishing Eyes

There’s a scene in the not-as-good-as-I’d-hoped Big Fan in which the main character, having followed an athlete he idolizes into a nightclub men’s room in hopes of just happening to strike up a conversation, is overcome by shyness at the last second. I had a nearly identical moment the evening my brief, but deeply embarrassing-to-remember career as a male groupie began.

B. Mitchel Reed, the hippest DJ in LA, had announced that The Who would be visiting him at the Hollywood Blvd. studios of radio station KRLA. I persuaded my friend Dave, whom I hadn’t yet persuaded that The Who were the greatest group ever, to go with me to gawk at them. Ascertaining that they’d be entering the second-floor studio through its back entrance, we staked places on the metal stairway leading to it. After a while, a limousine pulled into the parking lot down below, and my idols emerged, looking godlike. In his orange bouffant hair, Daltrey (who a couple of months later would tell Tommy Smothers quite credibly on national TV that he was from Oz) looked as though from a different planet. And it turned out that Townshend’s remarkable gigantic snout was only his second most arresting feature, his startlingly blue eyes being No. 1. As they drew nearer, though, I was overcome by shyness; it was sheerest coincidence that I happened to be there admiring the view of the back of the coffee shop next door at that moment.

When they’d finished their interview and come back out, though, I was ready. I managed, in a much higher register than usual, to speak my idol’s name. He was gracious enough to pretend not to recognize me from before, and I thrust at him some lyrics I was hoping he would want to set to music. (Forty-two years later, I still remember the first lines: Lovely leggy Sybil, let me nibble at your ear and whisper words of wisdom of a sort you seldom hear. Not bad for a 20-year-old! Not that good either!) He looked at me with those astonishing eyes and told me in his inexpressibly cool accent that he’d look them over and pass them along to his music publisher if he liked them. Naturally, I was speechless.

He claimed, years and years later, to remember that first meeting, but I think he was just being charming. His publisher didn’t contact me, and no, I don’t fail to notice the homoerotic underpinnings of the foregoing paragraph. But in all honesty it never went farther than my being mesmerized by those astonishing eyes.

Two years later, I was working in Burbank for Warner Bros. Records, mostly because I’d written glowingly about The Kinks in my college student newspaper. Ray Davies came to Burbank to hobnob with the company’s brass. Later, having been advised that I was the biggest Kinks fan on the premises, he dropped by my office for a wee chat. I realized after a few minutes that while he continued to sit in the chair opposite my desk, I had come to be kneeling before him. A natural posture of supplication!

He was as gracious as Townshend, and I was all over him like a cheap suit. When the whole group did their first American tour in four years, I was there to welcome them to New York on behalf of Warners —— and to suggest to Ray that he bring me on stage at the Fillmore East to play percussion on one song; my gall was boundless! And he tried to do it; only a zealous stagehand stood in my way!

When the group got to LA, I was there to drive them around to radio interviews in my VW microbus — at least until Warners’ incredulous promotion man apparently called company headquarters to shriek, “Can't somebody call this idiot off?” When The Kinks attended a party in their honor at what I think was still called the Daisy, I was there in poor Ray’s pocket, zealously Being Seen With Him. Oh, the embarrassment (oh, the despair!) to remember this stuff! (And yet...via Facebook, a young woman I was secretly smitten with at the time recently admitted to having been terribly impressed by my and Ray's apparent friendship!)

Several months later, when The Kinks came back to town, and holed up in their beloved Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel, I got the Los Angeles Times to send me to interview Ray. The bloom was off the rose in a big way by now, though. He was sullen and monosyllabic, and, as no else I’ve ever interviewed, conspicuously made his own recording of our conversation, presumably so I wouldn’t misquote him.

As though I would have! As though, however many months before, I, the shameless toady, hadn’t rapturously reviewed The Kinks' show at the Whisky even though they’d been brazenly under-rehearsed, out of tune, out of time, and generally appalling!

I decided henceforth to let only women break my poor heart.

[Exciting news: On Lala.com, where you can hear my new album Sorry We're Open, I am now ranked 80,573rd; next stop: stardom! Facebookers: Read more little essays and subscribe here.

Memories of MacWorld, Fond Ones!

The news that Apple is about to introduce another revolutionary product that I can’t afford has made me remember how much, at this time of year, I used to look forward to MacWorld at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center. Acres of Mac-related products as far as the eye could see! You’d walk around loading huge, colorful department store-style bags bearing this or that software company’s logo with free magazines, free floppy disks, free whatsits and trinkets beyond counting. You’d ooh and aah at demonstrations of dazzling new software, and sip complimentary beverages. You’d buy more memory.

Whole legions of badly dressed, often rat-faced former members of their high schools’ ham radio and audiovisual clubs buzzed and vituperated like callers to talk radio sports shows about What [Steve] Jobs Was Gonna Say at his big State of the Mac address. And you should have seen them when a software demonstrator made known that he’d be tossing free T-shirts into the crowd. Their pupils would dilate. The dark spots under their arms would expand, and appear damper. They’d moan, and tremble. Their tics would become more pronounced. Free T-shirts, just for correctly answering the demonstrator’s questions! Free T-shirts!

One year, it was as though you’d be arrested for using the word software; everything was a…solution. You wanted to lay out a brochure on your Mac? Well, Company A had a desktop publishing solution. You wanted to figure out how much you owed Uncle Sam? Company B to the rescue, with an accounting solution. It was really obnoxious! I related the phenomenon to the celebrated columnist Herb Caen, and he put it in his San Francisco Chronicle column, but without attribution, though I did get a nice signed note that I proudly archived beside my Pete Townshend, David Bowie, Tipper Gore, and Vin Scully letters.

I think that was the same year one software company hired a bevy of lithe young beauties to hang around in front of its exhibit in luminous latex catsuits. I spent a lot of time investigating their various…solutions; oh, did I! I am reluctant to plug The Onion, which, whenever I've suggested that I join their writing staff, sniffily inform me that they’re not looking for anybody, but I absolutely must share with you the funniest thing I’ve ever seen related to the Mac!

One year Kai Krause, namesake of the Kai’s Power Tools suite of Adobe Photoshop plugins, made an appearance. The crowd couldn’t have been more excited if he’d been Elvis, returned from the dead and carrying a naked Marilyn Monroe in his arms. Kai revealed during his presentation that he had 256 kilobytes of RAM on his own computer, and I, who had six, and a 40MB hard drive, very nearly fainted with envy; the iMac on which I’m writing this has 2GB of RAM, around a billion times more, by my calculation!

These are wonderful times in which we live, and I am using a great many explanation points today, but just try and stop me! The Lexapro may finally be working!

[Hear my life-changing new album Sorry We're Open here! Facebookers: Read more All In Tents and Porpoises essays and subscribe here.]