Rock in the Laties

In high school Trev realised that his being able to play the guitar might compensate for his being neither bold nor good-looking, as in not very good-looking at all, as in being short and pudgy, with what his former Marine stepdad thought hilarious to refer to as moobs — man boobs. Beginning a few weeks after his 14th birthday, he began spending hours at a time alone in his bedroom listening to all the guitarists his idols had said they’d grown up listening to. 

If his mom had called through his bedroom door, “Trevor, you won't believe this, but Pamela Anderson, from that TV show you love, is here to see you,” he wouldn’t have come out of his room until he’d been able to play a lick he’d been trying to masterworking on 20 times in a row flawlessly. If he stumbled the 19th time, he would start all over again. He got really good, and worked up the nerve to ask Chris, a popular guy in the year above him who he knew played bass, and had a drummer cousin, if he wanted to jam sometime. It might have been the first time Chris had actually seen him. They’d probably passed each other in the Social Studies corridor a million times, but Chris was far more interested in the school’s female hotties, who enthusiastically reciprocated his interest, than in dweeby freshmen with moobs. “You play guitar?” Chris asked, with mock incredulity, and his friend snickered dutifully.

“Yeah,” Trevor said, “and pretty well too.” 

Chris and his buddy exchanged yeah-right looks. Chris said, “Yeah, I’ll bet Eddie Van Halen’s shitting himself in fear.” His pal guffawed. Trevor would have bet against himself being able to, but he held his ground and said, “Why don’t you come over and find out?” and Chris said, “Why not?” That night in Trevor’s bedroom, both plugged their instruments and headphones into a preamp, so as to be heard only by each other, and Chris found out that his dweeby new friend was the best musician he’d ever played with, around a thousand times better on guitar then was on bass. “Not bad,” he said at the end of the third song they played together, hoping desperately that Trevor wouldn’t say, “Not bad? Dude, you don’t deserve to be in the same county with me.” Indeed, Trevor asked if Chris and his cousin might like to put together a little band for the upcoming student talent show at school. 

The school’s coolest kids treated the biannual talent show as an excuse for a snarkfest. The lamer the act — for instance, the nerdy Chess Club kid who smelled bad, doing Chris Rock comedy routines — the more loudly they applauded. But there was no sarcasm evident in the standing ovation Trev’s band received after the second of their two songs, and then their classmates bellowed and hooted and whistled for an encore so implacably that the drama teacher who served as the show’s master of ceremonies had no choice but to let them play two more songs, resulting in the sophomore girl cellist for whom there now wasn’t time bursting into tears, and making an unsuccessful suicide attempt that evening. 

Trev’s little band soon gained a devoted local following. After every performance, Trevor would be surrounded by blues bores who tried to get him to admit he’d learned this or that lick from a player he’d never even heard of, while Chris and his cousin were surrounded by the sort of girl Trev had never had the courage to talk to. Word of how terrific Trevor was quickly made it down to The City, both of whose two daily newspapers ran rave reviews when it opened for a name UK band at Club Deluxo. The name UK band’s manager made some phone calls, and the next night saw more satin baseball jackets — encasing record company promotion men and talent scouts with coke spoons around their necks— than at any time since Van Halen’s first appearance in The City nine years before. 

One of the A&R guys came into the band’s dressing room after their second set — after which the audience, seemingly caring not a bit whether the UK band would come on or not— demanded they play encore after encore. He said he wanted, on the spot, to sign the band to Global Records, but then it emerged that he wanted only Chris and his cousin. As he explained when Trevor blurted, “Hey, WTF?”, and burst into tears, “Dude, hey, you just don’t have star quality.” 

Trevor’s suicide attempt proved very much more successful than the sophomore cellist’s.

The English Sense of Humour Is As Dry as the Thames

The English will tell you they have an arid sense of humour, and, unlike Americans, a knack for irony. One wonders. I launched a campaign in 2012 to get Kent's Isle of Thanet, where I lived at the time, to secede from the United Kingdom and request American statehood. If America didn't want to change its flag (which, since 1959, has had 50 stars), I suggested that it might give Delaware back to England. The BBC, much amused, dispatched an interviewer and her sound-and-camera guy to film me presenting the idea to the fine folks of Ramsgate. More than a few folks seethed with anger at my idea. The seethers apparently hadn't received the memo about savouring irony, and having a dry sense of humour.

Early this week, I conducted another test, and once again found that something like one in five English people actually has the sense of humour the English enjoy imagining they have. "I am hoping," I wrote on a neighbourhood Website, "to enlist some of my neighbours in my campaign to make Richmond a drive-on-the-right borough. As one who learned to drive in southern California, and drove in the USA for years and years and years before relocating here in 2001, I firmly believe that nature intended for us to drive on the right, the weird present arrangement having been originated by persons who returned from the Crusades with PTSD, and who thought it best to meet oncoming stranger sword-to-sword. I suggest that a shield-to-shield arrangement would have resulted in far fewer casualties. 

"I appreciate that converting right-hand-drive cars to the sort found in my verdant homeland will involve some considerable expense, but am confident that the many benefits of the more natural configuration will far outweigh it. Should anyone wish an attractive Driving On the Right Just Feels So Right lawn sign or bumper sticker, please do contact me here. They are only £25 apiece, or £51 for two. Happy motoring!" 

The responses follow. I have cleaned up only the most egregious grammatical errors. The English don't punctuate at all well.  

[Name Withheld 1], Ham 

I know we have some bonkers neighbours but this must surely qualify for the loopiest suggestion of the century - let alone the new year!!

[Name Withheld 2], Petersham

I agree with you! What nonsense!

[Name Withheld 12], East Twickenham

This is unthinkable, when everyone else is driving on the left!  What do you want to do - cause multiple accidents??

[Name Withheld 10], Petersham

You must have a lot of time on your hands. It's not only the cars that would need converting but all the road signs, traffic control and even the slope of the camber on bends on motorways and exits.Try Speakers Corner. 'You're havin a larf mate.’

[Name Withheld 13], Latchmere

Gosh must have reached April 1st without my realising. How time flies when you’re busy and don’t have time on your hands for foolish thinking!

[Name Withheld 3], Ham 

Driving on the right wont happen - I'm more concerned about the economics of the bumper sticker costs!

[Name Withheld 6], Teddington Park

Gosh this is crazy

[Name Withheld 8], Latchmere

Love the ambition being shown here, good work. I’m keen to buy stickers for my neighbours. What’s the going rate/deal for 78 stickers please?

[Name Withheld 9], Ham

How stupid can you get!!!!!!

[Name Withheld 13], East Twickenham

Brilliant! I'd be very much interested in some bumper stickers too. Could we possibly do some sort of 'buy one get one free' deal? Say 100? I don't currently have a car but my blinds have yet to arrive and there are lots of things I don't wish for my neighbours to see.

[Name Withheld 14], Latchmere

I don't think I would use that sticker if it was free!! Why would anyone pay that amount of money to make a nutter rich?

[Name Withheld 15], Latchmere

I think it's a great idea, specially if we started one day per week and everyone could choose a different day!

[Name Withheld 16], Latchmere

Maybe alphabetically? Or based on the street you live in? At least then everyone who lives on the same street will drive on the same side on the same day,

Name Withhelds 8, 13, 15, and 16 actually got the joke, you see, and in a couple of cases enhanced it. Bless their wry hearts. But my fave respondent by far was Name Withheld 9, whose question answered itself! 

Super Bowl Special: Who Stole D'Brickashaw's N?

When I was a boy, it seemed as though there were a great, great many black men called Willie or Leroy, but a careless, cursory examination of current NFL rosters shows not a single one, even while there are no fewer than 71 players with two-syllable names ending with -shawn — including Marshawn, Keyshawn, and, quite wonderfully, Seanshawn. 

With the Super Bowl approaching, this might be an opportune time to discuss the glorious given names that abound in the National Football League. Newly retired linebacker D’Brickashaw Ferguson’s is the zaniest in the history not only of American professional sports, but since homo sapiens began addressing one another with anything other than grunts. I had always hoped that it was a portmanteau of Brick, a key character in Tennessee Williams’s Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, and rickshaw, a three-wheeled passenger cart pulled by a member of a very low caste. It does indeed have literary origins — it was inspired by Father Ralph de Bricassart, the handsome Irish priest with whom central character Meggie Cleary falls in love in The Thorn Birds, the best-selling novel in Australian history — but nothing whatever to do with rickshaws. I am unable to account for the missing n at the end. Marshawn, Keyshawn...D'Brickashawn, you see.

The D’  has long fascinated me, but even after I slipped her a £10 note (the icky new plastic kind, rather than the old-fashioned paper), Siri was unable to explicate its origin or meaning. My wife and other animal rights types are not delighted with the new tenner being made in part with tallow, as I am displeased with its depicting Jane Austen, of whose novels PBS has encouraged many hoity-toity adaptations. I, for one, would have much preferred Clement Freud, the funniest man in the history of the English language, or gay trailblazer Quentin Crisp, but of course was not consulted.  

It’s possible to infer a great deal about a player from his given name. We would expect Carvaggio Hoskins, the Seattle Lites of Love special needs, I mean team, star to have had art-loving, probably upscale parents, and would in fact be correct — Vag (pronounced to rhyme with garage) is the son of a highbrow urologist father and attorney mother. On the other hand, we might reasonably expect LaDemetrius Hairston, the Jacksonville Fives’ weak safety, to be the son of a very young mother who was trying too hard, and probably not married, as few men would allow their sons to be given names beginning with La, the feminine definite article in many Romance languages.  

The case of Kaligula Joyner, All-Pro offensive lineman for the Yucatan Maize, is an especially interesting one. It might lead one to expect that his parents were classicists, but we now learn that the name just sounded good to Lig’s 14-year-old mother, L’Taniqua’a, who hadn’t even heard of the Roman emperor notorious for his sexual perversity. T

Given the high likelihood of their ancestors having been kidnapped at the behest of, and then sold into bondage by, Arab slave traders, I don’t understand why Islamic names like Kareem, Rashid, and Jamal have been so popular among American black people the last few decades. Surely at least a few young men with strange, fanciful names become NFL and NBA players because they find it hard to find less concussion-prone work. A 2015 study overseen by a UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture study for Evolution and Human Behavior discovered that job applicants with ordinary, non-fanciful, non-Islamic names were 74% more likely to get a positive response from prospective employers than those with stereotypically black names. Far better Chuck, Brad, and Steve, that is, than Rashid, LaDemetrius, or D’Brickashaw(n).

Or maybe it’s that fancifully named young men grow up to play in the NFL because their names compelled them in their childhoods to get strong and tough. Can you imagine the hell of being named LaDemetrius and being interested in flower arranging or hairdressing?

Mendelssohn's Rock Bible: The Brave Little Guitar That Could

In 1950, the Fender Electric Instruments Company introduced a solid-body electric guitar called the Esquire, named after the magazine best known for the beautiful pinup paintings of Alberto Vargas. (Any heterosexual male over 85 who claims not to have been inspired to masturbate by the glorious Peruvian’s work is lying.) About 50 Esquires were made, of which not a single one was fitted with a truss rod. As production began, the instrument was renamed the Broadcaster, which displeased Gretsch Musical Instruments because that’s what they were calling one of their drum lines. 

Fender grumblingly renamed its instrument the Telecaster. Because the instrument’s retail price was $189.50! — $46,923.78 in 2018 dollars — only the very wealthy were able to afford one.  A New York financier bought one for his son, Hillel, but its lack of a truss rod so dismayed the young man that he put it in the back of a closet and returned to rabbinical studies. 

For seven years the instrument languished unplayed and unloved in the back of Hillel’s closet, until being stolen by burglars in the spring of 1958, and sold to a young musician from west Texas with big spectacles — identical to those worn by Lumpy Rutherford’s dad Fred in the popular sitcom Leave It to Beaver — and a singing style characterised by overuse of glottal stoppage. Yes, Buddy Holly, who’d changed his last name from Holocaust at the behest of the Jewish owners of his record company, and, indeed, of the entire entertainment industry!

By the mid-1960s, years after Holly’s premature death of plane crash, The Guitar had made its way to England, where it fell into the hands of a pimply 19-year-old in Surrey who’d put together a band to perform the songs of black former sharecroppers, but he traded it for a Framus Inquisitor on discovering that all of his heroes had had truss rods — great big ones in many cases. 

By the dawn of the 1970s, The Guitar had returned to New York, where it was played at Fillmore East and other historic venues by Toby Klezmer of the Canadian prog-rock trio Anemone, whose name was found to be mispronounced Ani-moan by 102 percent of their fans. After the group’s third album sold only 4.1 million copies, nearly three-quarters of a million fewer than its predecessor, We Remember Ayn Rand, Klezmer became an alcoholic and compulsive gambler. 

As the latter, he quickly became hugely indebted to one of the East Coast’s least patient crime families. Discovering that he was without cash, the family tried to persuade him to avoid the shame of ongoing indebtedness by relinquishing either The Guitar or his model girlfriend. In those benighted days, many in the entertainment industry thought of their wives and girlfriends as chattel. After several minutes’ agonised deliberation, Klezmer decided to give up The Guitar, but then changed his mind. This turned out to be ill-advised, as La Famiglia wound up taking both. Klezmer found himself facing the classic rock musician’s choice — drinking himself to death or overdosing, hanging himself, or embracing Jesus. He opted for the latter, but soon came to doubt that his new Lord ’n’ Saviour was paying any attention. Nonetheless, he was seen and heard as recently as the summer of 2014 performing A Tribute to Art Garfunkel in Long Island nightclubs, accompanying himself on a Framus Inquisitor, the truss rod of which had been autographed by the guitarist in The Four Seasons. 

If I were a rich person, I’d have bought The Guitar, or something comparably impressive, for my friend and collaborator Dazza du Toit, of the defunct Freudian Sluts and funct Isambard Jones & His Orchestra and Stonking Novels. But I have a long history of being unable to buy those I love the gifts I’d have loved to give them. I suspect the three best things about being rich are flying first class, not having even to look at the prices column on restaurant menus, and being able to give people you love gifts that will hugely enrich their lives. 

The Guitar is now on display at the big Guitar Center on Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood, and protected around the clock by armed guards trained by the Transit Security Administration, which supplies the thugs who hassle you at airports. It was most recently valued at $242,961.39, without strings. When I used to go into Guitar Center as a Warner Bros. recording artist, its employees would look at me as though at a see-thru bag of maggots. If I were worth being cordial to, I think they thought, they’d recognise me. Nowadays, though, with most musicians having either drunk themselves to death or taken to ordering their equipment on line, they could hardly be friendlier.

Sarah, Seductress: Pagans on Fire

It was nearly ten by the time Sarah got home, and Bryan was as far from pleased as Portland, Maine, is from Portland, Oregon. Not 96 hours ago, the two of them had argued so loudly about Sarah’s job meaning more to her than her family that Hypocrisy, their middle child, and far most sensitive than either of the twins, Pharisee and Piety, had come into the living room with tears streaming down her pretty cheeks. Bryan’s impression had been that Sarah was no less ashamed than he about that, and had believed her promise that only the awfulest emergency would keep her from getting home in time to help him read the kids Biblical bedtime stories — that is, before 8:15. In the four days since, she’d arrived home at 7:58, 8:12, 8:41, and now 9:56. 

Bryan hadn’t forged a career as a consultant to Republican political candidates by repeating the same mistake. The more stressed she was, the more Sarah’s eyes tended to go in different directions. It looked to Bryan now, at 9:58, as though her vision must scan 180 degrees. 

Symmetry is thought to be be globally perceived as a key element of facial beauty, but Bryan had always found asymmetry much more of a turn-on. Back when they were both working on Sarah’s pop’s 2008 presidential campaign, it had been her eyes pointing in different directions that had bewitched him, and inspired him to think impure thoughts. At first, he’d been embarrassed and self-conscious about his preference, but Pastor Johnson had pointed out that, within certain parameters (like those at which the lesbians and so-described gays scoffed), variety was the spice of life. If one fellow was entitled to be more turned on by huge breasts (the Mrs. Johnson’s had apparently been surgically augmented) and his neighbor shapely  gams, it was just fine in Jesus’s eyes for Bryan to be “turned on”, as the young people put it, by asymmetry. 

Bryan had thought admitting that asymmetry turned him on might hurt her feelings. What he had admitted, early on, was that he was hugely turned by what she did for a living — lying to protect an unmistakably evil, un-Christian man. Admitting that her daily bearing false witness, as forbidden by nothing less than the 9th Commandment, aroused him sexually, he'd felt as though his face was afire with shame. But Sarah's had turned an even deeper shade of red, and they’d made love like pagans on fire. There hadn’t been too less godly young Americans from sea to shining sea that night, unless you counted the LGBT deplorables.

Bryan had discerned over the course of their marriage that in her days at Ouachita Baptist University, Sarah had secretly ached not to be perceived as having the best personality on campus, and the most famous daddy, but as being…hot. She’d have eagerly traded being voted Most Sanctimonious in both her sophomore and senior years (school rules precluded a student winning in consecutive years) for a couple of the cuter white jocks trying to hit on her. The…hotter Bryan made her feel, the more she seemed to love him.

Following her into their bedroom the night of her 9:56 return from the White House, Bryan didn’t scold her for being late, as she’d been dreading his doing, but offered her a vodka martini on a tray, as though a server at a political grip-and-grin, and then, from behind his back, a gift-wrapped package. Her defensive, don't-dare-remind-me-of-the-promise-I've now-broke-three-nights-in-a-row scowl turned into a smile. Her eyes got 10 degrees nearer agreement. 

The package turned out to contain a red lace corset from a place of which Sarah had never heard, Agent Provocateur, one of whose advertisements Bry had seen in an awful, sinful magazine he'd confiscated from one of his interns, and then examined at length to get the full measure of its ungodliness. Now he yelped in anguish as she held the garment up to contemplate it. “I should have ordered stockings too! What a knucklehead I am!”

“Not to worry, big boy,” Sarah said in her bedroomiest voice, one never heard in the White House’s James Brady Press Briefing Room.  “It just so happens that I have some, for a moment just like this.”  She loved how that made Bryan moan, and then tremble. And here he’d have expected she might throw his gift back in his face!

Sarah returned to the bedroom, not just in fishnet stockings and her new corset, but also some of the garish harlot’s lipstick she’d had her aide buy her at Walgreen’s the first day earlier in the week she knew she was going to come home well after the children’s bedtime. She’d wanted to be able to take Bryan’s mind off his anger, as she spent her days taking the press’s mind off her boss’s ever less ignorable dementia.

If Eric Clapton Was God, Call Me an Atheist

My first couple of years in high school, it was very fashionable for boys to congregate in the student parking lot and contemplate the engines of each others’ cars. One was expected to have very strong feelings about the relative merits of Ford and Chevy. The Beach Boys actually composed and recorded hit songs about their own cars (which, at that point, they may have owned only in their imaginations). “I guess I should've kept my mouth shut when I started to brag about my car”, indeed! Auto Shop hotshots who’d already been promised jobs as mechanics in their uncles’ garages ranked just below jocks. The power and speed of one’s car were perceived as analogues for his manliness.

I derived not the slightest pleasure from looking under anyone’s hood. I didn’t even trouble myself to learn any of the jargon. Everything automotive bored me senseless. 

I’m reminded of those dark times when I hear modern guitarists talking to each other about their instruments. What gauge A-string do you prefer? What thickness of plectrum? And what of your pickups and tuning pegs? Did you know that on such-and-such a track on his 1977 such-and-such album, Stevie Ray Vaughn used such-and-such strings, rather than his usual ones? One might just as well be talking to Star Wars nerds. 

A former friend of mine, with whom I was in a couple of bands, decades apart, exemplified the breed. There was no musical equipment minutaie too minute for him to have memorised. He could talk for hours (or maybe it just seemed that way) about the relative merits of different pickups, about the varying electronics of a particular manufacturer’s line of amplifiers. For him, the annual NAMM (National Association of Music Merchandisers) in Anaheim was Christmas, Easter, New Year’s Eve, V-E Day, V-J Day, and his birthday all rolled into one. I always thought that if he’d spent half the time practicing that he spent poring over catalogues, he might have been a terrific musician. 

Over the decades, I’ve probably seen 100 live shows at which a guitarist made a big show of swapping his Ibanez Interrogator for a Fender Prevaricator with pre-CBS Ernie Banks pickups, let’s say, though neither instrument actually exists. I will admit to never having detected much of a difference. As a young man, I saw opening for The Pretenders a Welsh U2 imitation called The Alarm, who made a big deal of playing acoustic guitars on stage. As said instruments were fed into big Marshall amplifiers (I so wish I could specify the model numbers, not), our heroes sounded exactly like everyone else, but I suppose it was the thought that counted. 

When I saw Cream live at the Fillmore Auditorium, I found Mr. Clapton’s extended solos fully as engrossing as my high school classmates’ Ford vs. Chevy debates. If this guy is God, I thought, call me an atheist. I can count the number of guitar solos I’ve really loved over the years without removing either of my socks, my favourite probably being Robin Trower’s on Procol Harum’s "Repent Walpurgis". No solo I’ve ever heard matches it in raw emotiveness. I fervently dislike what I’ll call the Neal Schon school of lead guitar playing, which seems to be 100 percent about technique, and 0 percent about expression. Virtuosity for its own sake made punk, and later guitar-less synth-pop, inevitable. Not, of course, that the cease-fire lasted long, not with Yngwie Malmsteen waiting in the wings.

For me, the greatest instrumental break in rock is Raphael Ravenscroft’s exultant alto solo in Gerry Rafferty’s "Baker Street", which he was asked to  play only because Rafferty’s lead guitarist didn’t turn up at the studio. It’s like glorious sunshine suddenly bursting through storm clouds, that solo, for which Ravenscroft was paid £27, but not really. The cheque bounced. 

Nicknames