[Famous Person] RIP

Much compassion is expressed on Facebook, and that’s a beautiful thing. I find very much less beautiful, and in fact sort of distasteful, how, whenever someone famous dies, many seem to rush to post something along the lines of, “[Famous Person] RIP,” as has just happened with Jack Bruce.

It is difficult for me to imagine that those who post, “[Famous Person] RIP,” picture the object of their beneficence pacing nervously back and forth in some celestial motel office, wondering if they might have to do so for the rest of eternity, and then bursting into tears of relief on discovering that those who enjoyed their music or movies or what have you all those decades ago have wished them eternal serenity instead.

In my darkest moods, all that rushing to post, “[Famous Person] RIP,” seems a form of showing off, and to be more about the poster’s craving for attention and praise (“Look at me! I’ve got information you don’t!”) than anything else. I’m reminded of how sometimes the most hopeless wallflowers at my elementary school (and here, of course, I speak of myself in the third person) would occasionally enjoy a moment of celebrity for having knowledge that the alpha kids did not.

Mr. Bruce was a freakishly talented musician, but I suspect a very large majority of those who rushed to proclaim their bereavedness had heard very little of the music he’s made in the past 30 years. I wonder if it might not have depressed him to discover (or, given his ever-smaller royalty cheques and performance fees, have confirmed the sad fact) that he’d substantially lost his audience by his 30^th birthday.

Why, I’ve often wondered, does the typical artist’s audience make clear after only a very few years that all it wants to hear is the old stuff? If I were the Rolling Stones, for instance, I think it would drive me a little bit crazy to know that only a very few people would investigate any new music I recorded, and instead preferred to hear something I’d written and recorded 45 years ago — and become sick to death of playing 44 ago.

John Lennon is said to have observed that no one will ever love any music more than the music he or she loved at 19. Does the disinclination to hear anything new after a certain (very young age) serve a biological purpose?  Being thought of 40 years and more after the fact as The Man Who Wrote Those Kinks Liner Notes or The Critic Who Detested Led Zeppelin, when I have in the interim written more novels than I can count, and 100 songs of heartbreaking beauty and poignancy, is more than bad enough.      

For the record, I do like very much when one goes to the trouble of expressing what someone newly departed meant to him or her.                                   

24: Snake-Hipped and Svelte

My star kept rising. No sooner than I’d introduced David Bowie to the readers of Rolling Stone than Warners threw a big party for Faces at one of their big soundstages in Burbank. I’d reviewed their most recent album for Rolling Stone, and said, with rare accuracy, that much of it wasn’t very good. They regarded me with bruised expressions when I made my grand entrance; the very gods cowered before me! Rolling Stone invited me to write a feature article about my own aspirations to rock stardom, newly boosted by the interest of a young go-getter at an actual major label.

My band was taking up more and more of my time, and how I was enjoying it! I felt at last as though part of a gang. We rehearsed in the guitarist’s parents’ garage in West LA, or, very much more glamorously, on the A&M soundstage. We dined together at a place in Westwood where it was said that no man had ever managed to finish their gigantic seafood salad, and this decades before the obesity epidemic. I finished it and ordered dessert, and was nonetheless snake-hipped and svelte. The bass player and I chased skirts together. My egomania clouded my judgment, and I allowed one of our succession of managers to talk me into moving out from behind the drums to stage-center. I went from being a mediocre drummer to a worse lead singer, but after we played the Whisky, someone asked, not sarcastically, at least as far as I could see, if I were a professional dancer. I’d never felt more complimented in my life. But I was about to feel a great, great deal more complimented.

My No. 1 friend had gone to work for the selfsame old-school Hollywood publicist who six months before, at Elton John’s famous debut at the Troubadour, had scurried around in a huge cowboy hat screaming, “Fan-fucking-tastic!” into the face of anyone who looked vaguely like a writer. Said publicist had also come to employ P—, literally the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person, and I began inventing excuses to visit my friend at his office. I made one such visit the week that hot pants hit Hollywood. P— was wearing a pair, and I’m not sure how I lived through it, or even how — after my friend ascertained that she was commuting to work for hours from her mother’s home in Orange County — to offer her the use of my apartment while I went to New York to advise that city’s tastemakers of the glory that was Procol Harum’s new album. While in New York, I was made to feel hot stuff by Lisa Robinson, and worked up the gall, with the help of much vodka, to call P— just to shoot the breeze.

She picked me up at LAX in my Porsche when I got home, and then drove me to West Hollywood. Her bags were all packed, but when we got back to Selma Avenue, I asked her to stay, and to my astonishment she agreed. So now the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person and I were as one, and living together in über-hip Laurel Canyon, Rolling Stone was printing my little autobiography over four pages with photos by Annie Liebovitz, albeit not very good ones, the Porsche still looked really nice, and I had a small fortune in the bank. When I and P— went to Pasadena together to see Badfinger’s local debut — I no doubt smirking smugly, and in new platform boots made for me in London’s Kings Road — we schmoozed afterward with Gus Dudgeon, Elton John’s producer, but, much more important, formerly the Bonzo Dog Band’s. Spencer fucking Davis suggested we have lunch together. The world finally seemed repentant about having made me suffer so as a boy.

I continued in print to play the same character as which I’d first become famous — an acid-tongued curmudgeon with strong, usually negative, opinions about everything. The guitarist in my band noted that I wasn’t loved and respected, but feared. Gene Clark, once of The Byrds, was apparently telling a mutual acquaintance that I was doing my karma irreparable harm. But I wasn't yet a believer in karma.

Recipe - The Amazing New ProTools Plugin!

I have an idea for a new plugin for ProTools and other, ahem, digital audio workstations — you know, the applications that enable people like me to produce records on their computers. Sort of in the way AutoTune or Melodyne adjusts pitch according to the user’s instructions, this plugin, which I might call Recipe, or Ingredients, or Hidey-Ho, would enable the user to transform the sounds of whole completed tracks by entering certain values in little boxes.

Say, for instance, that you wanted to sound like the Rolling Stones of Out of Our Heads. You might add 30 percent Muddy Waters to 30 percent Chuck Berry to 20 percent Motown to 20 percent Otis Redding. Or how about the "Surf Safari"-era Beach Boys? Let’s say 20 percent The Ventures, 25 percent Chuck Berry, and 55 percent The Four Preps. Tom Petty? 45 percent Byrds (themselves, in their classic original incarnation, 50 percent The Beatles, 50 percent Pete Seeger), 45 percent Stones, 10 percent Dylan. Prince? Let’s try 33 percent James Brown, 33 percent Jimi Hendrix, and 33 percent Sly & The Family Stone.

Are you getting the hang of it yet? The early Beatles? Does 15 percent The Marvelettes, 10 percent Chuck Berry, 15 percent Little Richard, 15 percent Buddy Holly, 20 percent the Everly Bros., 15 percent Carl Perkins, and 10 percent Tin Pan Alley sound about right?

Where this is really easy is for slavishly imitative acts, or those just starting out. Motley Crue? 50 percent Kiss and 50 percent Aerosmith. Early Dylan? 100 percent Woody Guthrie. Janis Joplin? 50 percent Ma Rainey and 50 percent Bessie Smith. Where it’s extremely difficult is for one of those acts that’s managed to become much more than the sum of its influences. You could give yourself an aneurysm trying to concoct the recipe for the Sgt. Pepper-era Beatles.

In any event, all I need now is a team of brilliant software engineers who are happy to work on spec.