My Performing Career Resumes!

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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Saving Our Marriage: The Way Forward

You’re wondering why I’m saying all this in an email, rather than phoning you. Do you remember, when we negotiated our trial separation, how loudly you shouted at me, and how you threw that vase at me? And then, two months after I’d moved back, and confessed I might have underestimated how much alone time I needed, you came at me with my favourite paring knife, and if my attorney hadn’t stepped between us, I might be dead now. Can you blame me for not wanting to go through anything like that ever again, Judi?

You keep asking if I…saw anyone during that second trial separation. Of course I did, Judi, for the same reason I’d seen Susanella, Gail, Bobbi, Jakki, and Dyan during the first one. Oh, and Candice. How was I supposed to determine how much you meant to me in a vacuum? It was only by getting intimate with others that I was able to corroborate that it’s you with whom I want to spend my life. My discovering that I still wasn’t completely sure is why I hooked up with all of them except Gail again. (She was on vacation.) I wanted to be nothing less than 100 percent sure. Excuse me for assuming that’s what you wanted too!

I’m not going to lie to you, Judi. Sex with Bobbi, Dyan, and Susanella was better than it’s ever been between you and me, but what I realised is that sex isn’t everything. Bobbi doesn’t get my jokes as you do, and I’ll let you in on something. A man wants to feel funny almost as much as he wants to feel a superman in the sack. Dyan’s put on some weight, and turned out to resent my having offered to pay for her to see a personal trainer. Susanella’s needy, and begged me not to leave her almost as piteously as you did, the difference being that you and I are married, whereas she and I were just two ships that passed in the night, so to speak. Which, at the end of the day, is to say I’m yours, Jude, pending your acceptance of certain conditions. 

Do you remember how happy we were two and three and four years ago, when we were footloose and fancy-free, and before you got the stretch marks I’ve tried my best to ignore, but just can’t? If we wanted to hop in my car and drive up to Santa Barbara or down to La Jolla for lunch, that’s exactly what we did. I love spontaneity, and it was my understanding that you do too. If we wanted to lie in, we lay in to our heart’s content. If we wanted to spend the night somewhere, we did, without a care in the world. What fun we had, Jude, and how we loved each other!

When you told me you were pregnant, I was the happiest guy in the world. I think you know very well I’m not just saying that. Do you remember how I would talk to The Bun [in the oven], whose sex we didn’t want to know, during your pregnancy? Do you remember how I’d say to your tummy, “This is your daddy speaking, little son or daughter, and I already love you, but if you’re considering having some sort of weird defects, I’m going to kick you ass, OK?” Don’t you remember how you laughed at that, Jude? 

So finally our little man was born, and I let you name him after your late dad, whom I didn’t particularly like, but I knew it was important to you, and our whole world got turned upside down. While you were going through your post-partum depression, and seemed to forget all about the fact that a man has certain needs, I held my tongue. I manned up, Jude! God knows I did. Didn’t I change Jerzy’s diapers that time? Or have you conveniently forgotten that?

Spontaneity went out the window. I was no longer No. 1 in your life. Jerzy was. Do you suppose that didn’t hurt? Do you suppose I didn’t resent his being the only one who got to enjoy the remarkable fullness of your boobs, or being woken up three times a night by his crying for more of them, not that I claim to be able to speak baby. Do you have any idea how the sound of his eager…is it called suckling?…made me feel? 

I have an idea how we can save our marriage, Jude. I can anticipate your being uncomfortable with it at first, but it seems to me the only viable way forward. Our son is white, and not defective, though it may be too early to know if he’s going to be autistic, or to suffer from ADHD or one of the other fashionable acronyms. Let’s put Jerzy up for adoption. I am advised that there are any number of good Christian families in the area who would love to have a little cutie like him as their new son. Most such families will probably want to change his name to something less ethnic, if you will, but that’s a small price to pay to save our marriage, isn’t it? 

Shall I get one of my attorneys to make some enquiries? 

Your loving husband, 

Jack xxx

The Parfumier

I’m a little fed up with being a glamorous literary lion in the traditional mode. I go over to the nearby Tesco Micro to see if they have anything appetising in their markdown section (I can taste a bargain!), and am invariably asked for an autograph, or to pose for selfies. Though I’m unaware of there being any Asians (the British kind — from Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka) in Ham, the Tesco Micro is staffed exclusively by such persons. I am unable to explain this, but can reveal that my disgruntlement with the literary lion  life has inspired me to think in terms of a new profession. I am too nearly deaf to revert to being a jazz critic, as I was when I was young and full of semen and collagen. Over the course of a typical one-hour cop drama of the sort we watch in such profusion on the television, I am apt to turn to Dame Zelda and ask what a character just said, and then not hear her answer, usually tendered in an impatient hiss because she’s trying to hear what the characters are saying as I pose the question. What I have resolved to become is a parfumier, in significant part because I really like the word. As I write this, I have just listened 25 times to the little guy on the Internet pronouncing, “pɑːˈf(j)uːmɪə/“. I find his voice very sexy, but that might be a subject for another essay. Knowing that it's spelled with an a, rather than an e, will make me feel superior to those who do not, and one with my self-esteem issues snatches eagerly at every opening. 

Anyway, I’m old and deaf enough to know that in this topsy-turvy world in which we’re all just dust in the wind, a product’s actual quality is of no relevance to anyone. It’s all about how ingeniously it is marketed. A whole industry exists to make consumers crave things they neither need nor even want, to get men who watch football on television believe that drinking something called Bud Lite will make them more virile, and maybe even get them invited to the table in the school cafeteria at which the jocks eat. But I didn’t need a so-called branding consultant in fashionable eyewear and a self-assured smirk to think of a name for my first fragrance — Promiscuous — or its all-important tag line: Smell easy.

In the wake of the Harvey Swinestein brouhaha, and all those that followed, we are not comfortable talking about this sort of thing, but have you noticed that on Halloween, a very large percentage of women dress as sluts, and only a handful as nuns or associate professors of English at stuffy women’s colleges? Many women, while understandably not wanting someone fat and repulsive and altogether ghastly like Swinestein to demand “massages” from them, obviously revel in the power of their sexuality, and I believe that before the midterm elections have plunged us even more deeply into despair, all your most fashionable models and actresses and female electronic journalists and pundits and celebrity chefs and oncologists and what have you will be wearing Promiscuous, and, though they won’t admit it, savouring the lust they inspire in it. 

I have of course considered Promiscuous for Men, but some of the brand consultants I’ve been pretending to be considering hiring (gerunds on parade!), based on their responses to a few preliminary questions intended to demonstrate how far out of the box their thinking is, have pointed out that the name is redundant, male promiscuity being assumed. It’s biological, having originated at a time when many died in childbirth, and the survival of the species depended on fellows filling as many gals as possible with their rich, frothy cum. Now, of course, there are far, far too many of us on the planet, and the oceans are apparently full of plastic crap, but the wheels of biology turn slowly. Moreover, the sort of man who’d consider wearing a cologne called Promiscuous might well be iffy about his product being an offshoot of a ladies’. 

Can you imagine how much Bud Lite one would have to make a big show of guzzling publicly to compensate for that?

An Evening With Dumpster Fyre

To start with, the band really sucked. I think they were called Dumpster Fyre, with a y. I can’t be sure because whoever wrote the name on the front of the bass drum must have been like totally gouged. They played a lot of music that I kind of recognised from my dad playing it at home, all miserable and like, I don’t know, grinding? They were louder than anything I’d ever heard. They wore stuff that would have gotten them sent home if they’d shown up at actual school in it —greasy jeans with the knees ripped out (not like intentionally, like the ones you can buy at like Target and even Walmart), and like lumberjack shirts, the kind Daddy wears if it ever cools down enough. They had the longest hair I’ve ever seen, except for the one whose hair looks like an explosion at the frizz factory or something. Daddy pulls what hair he has left into a ponytail, but Dumpster Fyre had theirs tied up on top of their heads in that kind of Japanesey way.  

For a while everybody just sort of stood there like gaping at them, unable to believe how bad they sucked, or how loud they were. Marty Collins, the class clown, made a big point of standing right in front of one of the big speakers to either side of the band, grinning. I wondered if he’d ever hear again. After a while, everybody seemed to like resign themselves to either liking Dumpter Fyre or lumping them, and kids began to dance. 

i didn’t expect to be asked. I never am. Marty told me just before Xmas vacation that I’m one of the four least hot girls at my school, and two of the other three have gone since then. Kirsten Morales might be the only girl who gets like ridiculed more than me, and she weighs like 300 pounds. She doesn’t come to dances because she’s so like self-conscious, and hasn’t learned the cell phone trick. Lissa Feldman's dad, who owns three dry cleaning places here and in Castor, I guess is making a fortune laundering money now, and moved his family to a house in Coates that I hear is humongous. I haven’t been invited. Me and Lissa had a falling out at the end of last year and don’t speak any more. Sissy Tomlinson was even lower than me and Lissa on the hotness scale, but I don’t count her because she got killed in February when Joey Dasilva’s tweaker uncle like barged into English with a machete. Mrs. Stover shot Sissy dead before she finally hit Joey’s uncle.

So it’s maybe 15 minutes before 11, when the chaperones will realize their dream of being able to take their fingers out of their ears and tell Dumpster Fyre the party’s over, and I’m standing alone, as I’ve been standing there all night, trying to pretend I’m getting a lot of texts on my phone. I notice Joey Dasilva — speak of the devil! — looking at me. There's something like 360 boys in 11th grade with me, and Joey’s maybe 10th or so from the bottom. It’s not that he smells or eats his own boogers like some of my male classmates, or that he’s like deformed. It’s that he had his personality surgically removed or something. He’s probably the shyest boy at my school, He eats alone every day, with his face like buried in a book. I like that he reads.

Maybe he’s had something to drink or smoke. We make eye contact and he doesn’t immediately look away. In fact, he actually smiles at me. He’s got braces, and not the expensive invisible kind. I never realized. Who’s ever seen him smile? I do something really stupid, something I know much better than to do, and smile back. I think he might come over and ask me to dance, or at least like talk to me. Or maybe smiling at him wasn’t so stupid after all. Maybe the stupid thing was always to expect the worst, and keep myself like isolated. He’s still smiling, and coming toward me. 

it’s happening! He asks me how I’m doing. He smells like a distillery, and if he smelled 1000 times worse at this moment, I’d still be just about peeing myself with like excitement and delight. I tell him I’m doing good and ask how he’s doing. We’re conversing, the second least-hot girl at school and the shyest boy! At this rate, I’ll be dancing any minute now.

Or not. He thinks me and Kirsten Morales are friends, and wonders if I’d be willing to ask her if she’d like to chill with him some time. I don’t know how, but I manage not to burst into tears. and not to try to break my cell phone in Joey’s ugly face. 

The Art of the Rock Star Interview

During my career as a music journalist, I interviewed a great many ultradeluxe rock and pop stars, losing my cherry to Procol Harum, who were boring and difficult, not that I was much help. I was so frightened as to be barely able to read my (frankly inane) questions. The organist, Matthew Fisher, seemed to take an instant disliking to me, as I, in turn, took to him. He said something derogatory about “Presley”. I thought he might be the only person in the world who didn’t identify the guy as Elvis. 

My most difficult interview ever was with a surly and monosyllabic Iggy Stooge, who hadn’t yet rebranded himself as Iggy Pop, at the infamous Tropicana Motel on the eastern edge of what even then was becoming Boys Town in West Hollywood. I complained to his manager Danny Fields, who apparently phoned him to read him the riot act. When I returned the following morning, our hero was a changed man, welcoming and voluble. 

Pete Townshend and Peter Noone were a journalist’s dream. One said howdy, turned on his tape recorder, sat back, and let them talk. And talk, and talk, and talk. The most common headline on the covers of rock magazines in the 1970s was something like “Part XVI of Our Exclusive Interview With Pete Townshend!” Most of what he said, you see, was indiscardably interesting. Noone, better known as Herman of Herman’s Hermits, was just as garrulous, if unnervingly short. 

David Bowie effectively interviewed himself. He was pretty clear about what he wanted Rolling Stone’s readers to know about him, and didn’t allow me to distract him. I interviewed Mick Jagger, dreadfully. He too interviewed himself — I was too starstruck to speak, especially after he claimed to be aware of my own group — but didn’t do so as well as Bowie had. Years later, the two would appear together in the worst music video in human history, “Dancing in the Street”.

I went through a punk phase, and was horrid to Queen’s drummer, Pat Benatar, and Mike Love. Queen’s drummer had just released a solo album, and I disapproved fervently of the idea of drummers releasing solo albums, so I was intent on annoying Roger Taylor, whom I interrogated in the new home he’d bought himself in Hollywood just up the hill from the notorious Continental Hyatt House, off of which Led Zeppelin were thought to hurl 14-year-old groupies to appease Satan, or something. I thought having bought a house just up the hill from the so-called Riot House betrayed a woeful lack of imagination, but a person’s real estate choices are his or her own, and I didn’t ask Roger about his. I asked instead why Queen’s choral singing sounded so much like that of a junior college men’s glee club. He didn’t know what a glee club was, and wasn’t amused when I told him. I asked if he were ever embarrassed to go on stage with Fred Mercury in a harlequin body stocking, for instance. 

As the interrogation continued, I could sense his sussing that my intention was to rile him, but he wouldn’t give me the satisfaction. He was of course English, and when the English aren’t bitching and moaning (whingeing, spelled that way, in their own parlance) petulantly, which they are a great deal of the time, they pride themselves on their ability to endure hardship or even provocation stoically. When it came time for me to photograph him, though, he seemed to decide he’d had quite enough. After allowing me to snap a single frame of him sticking his tongue out at me, he wondered pointedly if I might wish to vacate his home. 

La Benatar was surrounded, when I interviewed her, by two slobberingly unctuous PR types who called her Patti — they were best friends forever, the three of them! The video for “Love Is a Battlefield”, in which she foils a greasy little villain with a pencil moustache by dancing poorly, was in heavy rotation on MTV. I’d read that she was bright, and dared imagine she might have a sense of humour, so my first question was what she disliked most about being so short (around 4-11, if standing on one of the PR people). She sighed unhappily and said sometimes she was unable to reach things in the kitchen. So much for the sense of humour idea. The two PRs hated me, passionately, and about that, I felt nothing but terrific.

I interviewed some of the Beach Boys, but not Brian. Interviewing Carl was like interviewing a roll of grey wallpaper. I’d heard that Mike Love was a jerk, and a dedicated transcendental meditator. If I’d been obnoxious with Roger Taylor, I was twice as obnoxious with poor Mike, but he was a living advertisement for meditation. I couldn’t get him to wince perceptibly no matter how hard I tried, and as the interview progressed, I tried ever harder. I think his heart must have been beating around 40 times per minute. 

I’ve been on the receiving end many times. A kid called Danny Sugerman, who would later “co-write” the Jim Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, read me a list of inane questions, often cutting me off in mid-answer. He then told everyone who would listen — as he would later tell everyone who would listen about his addiction to heroin — that I’d come on to him. I’m straight, and hadn’t, and was much annoyed, but not nearly as annoyed as when a greasy-haired bodybuilder who called himself Johnny Angel interviewed me for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, took no notes, made no recording, spent our whole conversation sneering at me disdainfully, and then went home and made up a collection of quotes intended to make me look foolish. 

I may have accused Queen of sounding like a junior college men’s glee club, but I never did what Mr. Angel done, and have never hurled a virgin from atop the Continental Hyatt House, though I lived right across the street for three years. 

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