Growing Old With Rock & Roll

Hamell On Trial Gets Up Close & Personal in Dayton, Ohio

2012-02-21T10:55:00.000-05:00

It was November 2003, in the midst of a Midwestern swing on Hamell On Trial’s early 2000’s Never-Ending Tour. My friend Kyle Garabadian, Ed and I headed out for Dayton, Ohio. It was a Saturday night gig at the Canal Street Tavern, only an hour and a half away from my home base of Columbus. Canal Street was consistently the best-attended and definitely the most congenial of Ed’s Ohio venues. Owner Mick Montgomery was (and still is) a prize and a prime example of that thinning breed of rock club owners; a good guy who knows and cares about music and takes great care of the acts he books.

The show that night went great except Ed was being heckled by one really drunk middle-aged woman. She was evidently a fan/associate of the opening act and kept yelling for them to come back on. After awhile I found it necessary to tell to her to shut up. She eventually drank herself into a stupor under the watchful, approving gaze of her husband and grown son. (I think they also wanted her to shut the fuck up.) Hubby went to get the car at some point and I wound up having to help her kid walk/carry her out of the bar. In the process, all three of us fell down the steps. Just another Saturday night in Ohio.

We left Canal Street way too late because it was always just so damn easy to hang out with Mick and his staff and lose all track of time. It was between 3 and 4 o'clock in the morning when we hit a BP gas station on the outskirts of Dayton for provisions. (Some combination of Hostess cupcakes, milk, microwave food, potato chips, coffee and Mountain Dew were essential for late night drives when 24-hour diners were unavailable.)

The only other customers of the gas station in those pre-dawn Sunday morning hours were four drunk teenagers cruising for microwave burritos. And I mean young teenagers, 16 or 17 years old tops, no way were they anywhere near legal to buy alcohol.

We’d gassed up the car and Kyle and I are sitting in it waiting for Ed, whom we last saw in line at the microwave. Kyle said to me from the back seat, "Hey, I think Ed fell down." I looked up from opening my orange cupcakes to see Ed straightening up and rushing over from the other side of the gas pumps.

"Did you fall down?" I asked as I pulled away from the station island. "No, I didn't fall down," Ed replied, "I got in the wrong goddamn car." "What?" Kyle and I chorus as I paused at the station entrance to check traffic. "I came out of the gas station and got into those drunk kids' car by mistake." Ed explained.

Kyle and I were now laughing so hard I had to pull back into the station because I couldn't drive. "I'm glad you both think this is so amusing. I could have gotten shot." Ed said testily. "But you didn't get shot," Kyle comforted, "If you had gotten shot we probably wouldn't be laughing so hard." "How did you get in the wrong car?" I asked, tears in my eyes from laughing, "There were only two cars in the whole place."

It turned out Ed was concentrating hard on his microwave sandwich, saw a car with a driver and somebody in the back seat he claimed looked like Kyle and plonked himself down in the passenger seat. He never looked up from unwrapping his sandwich for what must have been at least 30 seconds, until the kid in the driver’s seat said simply, "Dude."

Ed looked up into a stranger's drunken 16-year-old face and realized he was in the wrong vehicle. He bailed out fast, stumbled getting out, pulled himself up and that's when Kyle thought he fell down. I'd have paid a huge sum of money to have a video camera on that kid's face as a bald, dressed-head-to-toe-in-black Hamell On Trial invited himself into his car and settled in for a late night snack. I bet Ed scared the fuck out of those poor drunk kids. No wonder all the driver could manage was a monosyllabic "Dude."

"I could have been killed, you know." Ed said, as Kyle and I tried to stop laughing, regain our composure and furrow our brows pensively to feign concern. It's my sincerest hope to this day that Ed gets hugely famous and someday those boys see him on the Grammy Awards, recognize him and tell all their wives, kids and/or friends, "One time in Dayton at a gas station at 3 o’clock in the morning that guy got in our car by mistake."

Their friends and families will never believe them.

postscript – Two months later in Birmingham, Alabama, Ed and I were leaving a movie theater at midnight and Ed AGAIN started to get into a strange car, which this time, just by luck, was unoccupied. "That's not our car." I said nervously, because we were not in a nice neighborhood.
"Yes, it is." Ed replied and sat down in the passenger seat. "No, it's not," I insisted, standing well clear of the vehicle and speaking quietly through the open driver's side window, "our car was locked and the windows were rolled up. And where did all those beer bottles come from since neither of us drink?"

I stepped away, waiting for shots to ring out and bullets to start hitting us and/or the car. Ed surveyed the liquor-strewn interior of the car and exited calmly but quickly.

I worry about Ed when he tours by himself nowadays, I really do.

© 2012 Ricki C.

Hamell On Trial / Canal Street Tavern / Dayton, Ohio

The Guitar / The Band / Dave Blackburn (Bonus Video Friday)

2012-02-17T11:39:00.000-05:00

The Guitar, The Band, and Dave Blackburn are condensed, Reader’s Digest versions of the third, fourth and fifth installments of A Life Of Rock & Roll. Refer to The Bathtub and The Transistor Radio earlier in this blog for installments one and two…..

The Guitar

My dad bought me my first guitar for Christmas in 1968. A guitar was not the kind of present given in my family. I think Dad was so heartened by the fact that I wanted something which inferred an interest in the outside world and the people in it that he would probably have bought me a Gibson Les Paul if I had asked for one.

That first Christmas guitar was a fairly cheap acoustic. The next summer, when the neck separated from the body of the acoustic from constant use and Dad could see I was really serious about playing, he bought me a second-hand white Kalamazoo electric guitar. It looked just like the Fender Stratocaster that Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock, only cheaper. My brain exploded. It was more than I ever could have hoped for. Dad rewired an old World War II vintage radio we had in the basement so I could use the huge built-in speaker as an amplifier. I was in seventh heaven . I was in sonic heaven. I was alive and amplified.

I sat in that basement for months, playing along to the radio or to the 45-rpm singles I bought at the Lazarus department store or Marco Records in downtown Columbus. I know I must have eaten and slept and gone to school during that period, but I have no clear memory of those things. I got good. But there was no such thing as solo rockers in 1968. There were folk singers, but I really wasn’t interested in that scene, ya know? Even at that early date, Pete Townshend and Keith Richards were my inspiration, my heroes, my gods.

I had to find a band.

The Band

Late spring, 1969: Dennis O’Dowd sat next to me in first period history class our junior year at Bishop Ready High School. He was the bass guitarist in one of the bands that played at the school functions I was still lurking in the dark corners of. One Monday morning after they played a Saturday night dance I turned to him before class started and said, "You know, I play better than the guitar player in your band." He stared back at me for a moment and replied, "I didn’t know you could even talk." (That abject shyness thing was still going on, but was very soon to change.)

We started talking about guitars and bands we liked and after class Dennis told me to come to his house Wednesday night. He’d have the guitar player stay home and I could try out. The rehearsal went great. I blew the guy out of the band in one night. That was how things happened in those garage band days. I don’t even remember his name.

We played out the next weekend, at a party in a well-to-do classmate’s rec room. I already knew all of the songs from those months in the basement. We went over great. Between sets people talked to me. They smiled at me and asked me if I knew songs they wanted to hear. They asked me if I needed a Coke and wanted to know when and where we were playing next. Girls wanted to make out with me. Wait a minute, let me repeat that sentence – it’s important to the story. GIRLS WANTED TO MAKE OUT WITH ME. I didn’t at first because I had no clear idea what I was doing in that department, but eventually I fell into line.

Quite literally overnight I went from being completely invisible to immensely popular. I had to invent an entire new personality just to talk to people, just to deal with that recognition. Later, of course, I came to resent those people for treating me differently simply because I had a highly-amplified piece of wood with steel strings on it hanging around my neck, but that was at least a year away. At that point I just smiled and basked in the warmth of learning the game.

Over time I became the lead singer of that band, partly because they got an even more hot-shot guitarist than me and partly because the old lead singer couldn’t remember enough lyrics to play three sets a night. I had already started to write lyrics, mostly by putting new words to songs we already played, but nobody in the band wanted to write music to my lyrics so we could play originals. Even in those days you could get more gigs and make more money playing covers than by writing and playing your own material.

I didn’t like singing lead. I wanted to play guitar. And I wanted to create songs nobody had ever heard before.

It was time for a change.

Dave Blackburn

Dave Blackburn and I met halfway through junior year in English class. I think we hit it off immediately over our love of books, but I don’t really remember talking about music all that much at the beginning. I knew Dave played in the school marching band and was big in the Drama Club – he was the lead actor in at least one of the plays produced that year – but I didn’t know he was into rock & roll. I remember him at a couple of dances and parties we played through the summer of ’69 (insert Bryan Adams joke here), then just before senior year began, late in August, we ran into each other at the aforementioned Marco Records.

I had just finished talking to a couple of girls from our school. I must admit, by that point I had started to enjoy the attention and status that playing in a band afforded. I don’t think I had quite reached the arrogant point, but the painfully shy kid of a year earlier was long gone. I nodded, "Hi," to Dave and he said, quite simply and quietly, "You know, that band you’re in is shit." I thought about that for a second and admitted, "Yeah, I know."

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

There’s a song for and about Dave on my demo CD entitled "If All My Heroes Are Losers" in which I state that everything I know about music I learned from Dave. That is precisely and entirely true. I knew one little window of rock & roll covering maybe 1958 to 1969. Dave knew classical music, he knew jazz, he knew Broadway show tunes, he knew blues, and he knew where they all fit into rock & roll. He taught me how to LISTEN to music.

We would lie on the floor of Dave’s room on the West Side of Columbus, Ohio, at the end of the 1960’s, with our heads pressed between the record player speakers because we couldn’t afford headphones and Dave would show me things: Like how John Cale’s viola IS the heroin shooting up Lou Reed’s veins in that Velvet Underground song. Really, try it at your house; cue up "Heroin" and listen from 4:18 until the end of the song as the smack of Cale’s viola slides up Reed’s spine to a center in his head. I could have listened to that song for twenty years straight and would never have arrived at that kind of insight without Dave’s guidance. I listen to music differently to this day because of those sonic tutorials.

Before all that could happen, though, I had to split from the cover band. One night in early September, at a birthday party gig in some girl’s basement, during our last set of the night, somebody requested The Beatles’ "A Day In The Life." The band knew the song but I had repeatedly told them I couldn’t and wouldn’t sing it: Couldn’t because John Lennon’s vocal was way too high up out of my limited range, and wouldn’t because even at that point in time I knew the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album was an overrated, pretentious slab of vinyl that would forever doom, displace and ruin the raw, primal rock & roll I loved.

One of our classmates in the audience volunteered to sing the song and Gary, the rhythm guitarist and founder/leader of the band, told him to come up. I told Gary and Dennis that they had better make sure the guy knew all the lyrics to all the rest of the set, because if he set foot on the stage I was leaving. The band thought I was bluffing. They were wrong. I walked off the makeshift stage and sat at the top of the basement steps long enough to make sure that the band and their impromptu lead vocalist truly butchered the Beatles classic. And sure enough, they did. I smiled at the resultant musical train wreck, ignored the tearful pleadings of the birthday girl to finish out the party (I truly had become a prick by that point), walked out of her house and into the night.

Dave and I started writing songs the next day. I wrote the lyrics, Dave wrote the music. We finished about 13 songs in the first week. It was that kind of firestorm of creativity you can only command in your teens, in that first burst of finding your true voice and the best friend you’ll ever have. It was symbiosis. It was synergy. I’d start a verse and Dave would finish it with just the perfect chord. We wrote songs like you take a breath.

I’ve tried to think as I’m typing this if I’ve ever in my life met a more intelligent or more creative person than Dave was at that point. I haven’t. I’ve never met a funnier person either. (That includes Hamell On Trial and that is saying something, high praise indeed.) Dave could take the bleakest hour of your life and somehow have you laughing through it. He taught me that humor could both defuse or ignite any situation. And that combination of intellect and humor guaranteed a scathing swath of between-song banter at gigs.

Dave sang lead and played guitar, keyboards, and saxophone. I played lead guitar and sang the songs Dave played sax on. Dave was the star, I was the sidekick. (For most of senior year I was referred to as "the guy with Dave" much more often than I was called by my given name.) I was finally exactly where I wanted to be: On the side of the stage, bashing out chords, anchoring the sound for a truly gifted lead singer, on songs I helped write. It was no accident that the best band we had together was called Crash & Sideshow. I was Sideshow.

We sounded like The Kinks backed by The MC5. Dave brought the smart, inventive melodies, I brought the rock & roll rama-lama testimony. We went through a succession of bass players and drummers who either never quite got what we were saying or who simply couldn’t keep up. We were hippies for about 20 minutes. We were working class kids and it was hard to take The Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead seriously when you could be blasted by The Stooges in a small college auditorium one town over. We kept it together through 1972. Then Dave (purposely) flunked out of Ohio State University and moved first to Boston to play music and then to New York City to become an actor. I stayed in Ohio and played guitar. Someday when my rock & roll memoir is published you’ll read all about it. For now, let me just say this: Crash & Sideshow was the best band that you never saw. Dave, all of this is for you. I salute you, my brother.

half of Crash & Sideshow, 1970

As mentioned above, in the 1960’s, we – Dave Blackburn & me and all of our friends – were hippies for about 20 minutes. It was hard to be a hippie on the West Side of Columbus, Ohio, back in the day. But while we were hippies this was our band. Damn, but it’s hard to remember that Stephen Stills and Neil Young were once good-lookin’ bad-ass guitar-slingers and singers. (David Crosby, of course was always a useless hippie/zero.) If anybody should’ve died in a plane crash the day before their 30th birthdays it was all these guys.

Current Events – The 2012 Grammy Awards

2012-02-13T19:29:00.002-05:00

This is our first foray into current events in Growing Old With Rock & Roll, largely because I haven’t seen any concerts or shows yet this year, or bought any good records. Participants are my lovely wife Debbie and my good friend Kyle Garabadian, who, in the words of Hamell On Trial, "knows a fuckload of shit about rock & roll." Sound credentials.

8:01 pm – Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band open the festivities with a new tune, "We Take Care Of Our Own." Given my natural cynicism, I fully realize this is a ploy by CBS to hook aging baby boomers like myself into the telecast, but I really don’t care. Bruce and the band are great, they don’t play "Born To Run" or another retread hit (as Pete Townshend would undoubtedly have done, given the current moldy oldies act that The Who have become), I’m perfectly happy. I notice that Clarence Clemons’ old stage position has been taken over by bassist Gary W. Tallent. This seems like a sound tactic. For long-standing E Street band diehards, there is no way Bruce can simply replace Clarence with another player. Kyle relates that word is the band will take an entire horn SECTION on the road with them this spring, therefore making an end run around cheapening the hallowed saxophone spot. Bruce Springsteen did not just fall off a turnip truck into rock & roll, ladies & gentlemen.

8:07 pm - Lady Gaga is shown in the audience sporting a veil very much like the ones my sainted Italian mother wore to Mass and novenas at St. Aloysius in the 1960's. Who knew my Mom was so fashion-forward and ahead of her time?

8:11 pm – Initially I think that Bruno Mars and his band are channeling any number of old Prince videos, then realize they’re going all the way back to James Brown, whom Bruno acknowledges during the number, a fact I’m enormously heartened by and which may help change my opinion of Mars.

8:26 pm – Chris Brown slaps around both Rihanna AND Chris Martin of Coldplay during his dance routine before being bitch-slapped and laid low by Gwyneth Paltrow. (Kyle’s comment about Brown's performance, "Since when does everybody have a Garth Brooks headset to sing into?") (ps. I do not believe for one nanosecond Brown was actually SINGING during his little 21st century Gene Kelly routine.) (Later in the evening Debbie wonders aloud how much tape both Rihanna and Gwyneth employed to keep their dresses in place.)

8:36 pm – Fergie from The Black Eyed Peas takes the stage as an award presenter in a dress designed to hide her now de rigueur onstage catheter.

8:47 pm – Dave Grohl (rocking a Slayer t-shirt) proves himself the luckiest drummer ever on the planet, for having his lead singer die and leaving a hard rock/alternative hole he could fill with The Foo Fighters. (ps. I genuinely LIKE The Foo Fighters but every one of their songs is two minutes too long.)

8:57 pm – Quote from Debbie, "Oh, that wasn’t Rihanna’s backstage warm-up outfit, that’s her ONSTAGE outfit." (Later, of course, she loses the ragged vest to reveal something appropriately clingy and revealing underneath. This IS, after all, modern R&B.) Kyle is gratified to see that Rihanna has made it to the Grammy festivities this year sans black eyes. Kyle further suggests that we make every gratuitous mention of "Whitney" during the artists’ performances a drinking game, even though we’re all only drinking pop. (Or, in Debbie’s Jersey girl vernacular, soda.)

9:17 pm – Maroon 5 kicks off The Beach Boys tribute. Please God, take me now. Lord, bring me to your kingdom. Kyle’s comment, "I’m so glad Whitney Houston didn’t live to see this."

9:23 pm – Mike Love falls down onstage, breaks a hip and the vaunted Beach Boys reunion comes to a mercifully quick end.

9:41 pm – Taylor Swift dresses down, decks her band out in Depression-era duds, rocks a banjo at punk-guitar just above the knee-level and I still love every second.

10:11 pm – The Grammys promise to return after a commercial break with a "loving" tribute to Glen Campbell. What, as opposed to a hateful tribute?

10:35 pm – Bon Iver wins Best New Artist award and delivers his acceptance speech sporting the WORST haircut I have ever seen in what nowadays passes for rock & roll. In the immortal words of David Minehan of The Neighborhoods: "Today’s bands are like a school of fish / When I see a star I’ll make my wish." This means you, Mumford & Sons.

10:57 pm – Deadmau5 appears, Walt Disney stirs in his cryogenic chamber and commences several lawsuits.

11:05 pm – Nicki Minaj’s performance makes me fervently wish I’d joined Whitney Houston in that Beverly Hills Hilton bathtub. (ps. You think Catholic bishops currently have a problem with President Obama? Wait’ll they get a load of Nicki’s stage act.)

11:24 pm – Paul McCartney ends the Grammys as Bruce Springsteen began them; warming this baby boomer’s heart by NOT rocking a heard-one-hundred-thousand-million-times-on-classic-rock-and-oldies-radio Beatles tune but instead choosing the last section of the concluding Abbey Road medley. Just before New Year's I roadied a show my friend Joe Peppercorn mounted, wherein he and a crack band he assembled for the night played every Beatles album in order, in a row, WITH NO BREAKS! It was grueling, monstrously difficult, ambitious and lovely. It also gave me a whole new appreciation of The Beatles’ canon and especially of the Abbey Road medley. Thank you, Sir Paul, for not finishing with "Let It Be."

postscript; Oh yeah, Adele’s 21 record sold millions of copies this year and won all the Grammy Awards, perhaps suggesting that people just might want to hear real songs about true emotions sung by actual human beings who do not rise and fall by the machinations of Auto-Tune.

© 2012 Ricki C.

Fighting with Ric Ocasek (Bonus Video Friday)

2012-02-10T10:11:00.000-05:00

It was sometime in the mid 1980’s. My then-girlfriend Mary Jo and I jetted to Boston on People’s Express (see January blog entry; The Neighborhoods) for a week’s vacation. Our second day in town, a Saturday afternoon, we were hitting the racks in Newbury Comics’ (Boston’s preeminent indie record store) original Newbury Street location (they’ve branched out since then). Leaning on the counter shooting the breeze with the cash register clerk was a guy with long straight black hair, sunglasses and a black suit. I said to Mary Jo, "That guy at the counter is doing the best Ric Ocasek impression I’ve ever seen." Then I thought a little bit and realized The Cars studio, Synchro Sound, was right across the street from Newbury Comics and that it WAS Ric Ocasek. I had loved The Cars when they first emerged in 1978, loved their first two albums, loved reading about how Ocasek had put them together from the ground up to achieve maximum rock stardom. I had learned a lot from reading about them, I really had, so I wanted to at least acknowledge my big fan status.

At that time Mary Jo and I both worked in Columbus, Ohio, at Ross Laboratories, which was right up the street from the Columbus College Of Art & Design, where Ocasek had attended school in the early 70’s. Also, Ocasek’s ex-wife was still living in Columbus and one of his sons was delivering flowers for the flower shop where my ex-wife worked. None of this was particularly noteworthy to the national rock press but it was fairly common knowledge in Columbus rock & roll circles. Plus his other son had recently spoken to a DJ friend of mine in a bar and brought up his famous dad to try, in her viewpoint, to get a little attention/notoriety/play. So, not wanting to just walk up to Ric Ocasek and start slobbering out a typical fan-boy greeting like, "Oh, Mr. Ocasek, I love your music and I just wanted to say hello." I led with, "Hi, I’m from Columbus, Ohio, and I work just up the street from where you used to go to school."

Ocasek looked down at me (that cat is TALL) from under his insect sunglasses and droned, "Who said I went to school in Columbus, Ohio?" I was a little taken aback by his tone, but pressed on with, "You didn’t go to the Columbus College Of Art & Design in the 70’s?" He replied in the same haughty, deadpan drone he started with, "I’ve never even HEARD of Columbus, Ohio." Okay, so then I was angry. And the problem was, in those days when I got angry I would completely lose my temper. I fully realize that maybe Ric Ocasek didn’t want to deal with fans bothering him when he was "off-duty," but then why was he hanging out in a record store on a Saturday afternoon in full Cars rock star regalia? There was just no reason, in my mind, why he would treat a fan that way.

Since I was mad, and since I knew from the rock press that Ocasek was touchy about his age, the next sentence out of my mouth was, "Oh, so then I guess you don’t have an ex-wife and two grown kids in Columbus, Ohio, either then?" Now Ocasek is pissed. "I don’t know what you’re talking about," he says, his voice going up a little from the deadpan drone. "I’m talking about the fact that you don’t want anybody to know you’ve got a kid at least 16 years old and that you’re almost 40, Mr. Rock Star," I spat back. Now we were both getting loud and people in the store were starting to pay attention. We went back and forth at each other a little more and then EVERYBODY in Newbury Comics was gaping at us. I glanced off to the side and Mary Jo, who hated conflict and public attention of any kind, was literally holding her face in her hands and shaking her head. (I KNEW I was gonna be in trouble there.)

Finally, Ocasek said, "Why don’t we take this outside?" Now, where I grew up, on the West Side of Columbus, "Why don’t we take this outside?" means nothing else, or less, than a challenge to a fight. At that point I hadn’t been in a physical fight since 1978 and I was thinking, "Oh my God, I’m going to have to fight Ric Ocasek." So we wound up on the sidewalk out in front of Newbury Comics and now we were SCREAMING at each other. I realized then that Ocasek had just wanted to take our "discussion" away from the prying ears of the record store crowd, but that idea backfired badly, because not only did the Newbury Comics people follow us outside, but we had also drawn a whole new group of onlookers from passersby on Newbury Street.

We were both yelling back and forth, spitting mad; at some point I threw in something about Ocasek’s other kid trying to pick up my DJ friend in a bar; there was a circle of at least 20 onlookers in a circle around us; it was getting intense; it was BAD. Finally Ocasek had had enough, spun on his heels, walked across the street into Synchro Sound studios and you could hear the sound of the lock being thrown from all the way across Newbury Street. People were laughing and cheering, one guy clapped me on the back and said, "Man, that was great. That guy is always hanging around here being kingshit rock star asshole." The victory was short-lived, however. Mary Jo would not speak to me for the rest of the day. (Though truthfully, that was not always the punishment she intended it to be.) And that night I went to see The Neighborhoods at the Channel club solo. But hey, it was The ‘Hoods in Boston on a Saturday night in the summer, how was that NOT gonna be a good time?

postscript; Two weeks later I was back at home in Columbus and my ex-wife called up to put in an order for baby formula. (My ex had remarried and started a family since our split and during the time I was employed at Ross Laboratories I obtained cut-rate or free baby formula for her. It was the least, really the least, I could do after the way I had treated her during our marriage.) She asked what I had been doing and I said, "I went to Boston for vacation." "How’d that go?" she asked. "It was okay," I said. "Oh hey, I almost got in a fight with Ric Ocasek," I added, recalling my close encounter of the Cars kind. There was a long, pregnant (no pun intended) silence on the other end of the phone. "Are you there?" I said. "I should have known," she replied, sighing. It turned out that Ric Ocasek had called his ex-wife in Columbus after our little tête-à-tête and threatened to cut off her alimony and child support for the boys, as there was some kind of confidentiality agreement in their divorce settlement, and none of them were supposed to talk about Mr. Rock Star Dad. He had somehow gotten the idea the kids were giving interviews about him on the radio when I brought my DJ friend into the fray. "I should have known it was you," my ex said, "you can’t get along with anybody." So, totaling up, that was two women pissed at me over the same incident, in which I was only trying to pay a rock star hero of mine a compliment. That was definitely NOT just what I needed.

post-postscript; Fully five years later, and not even knowing who he was, I almost got into a fight with one of Ocasek's sons outside a rock club in Columbus. I had not one altercation with any other human being in that intervening five years. There was just some kind of weird blood feud going on with me and those Ocasek boys.

© 2012 Ricki C.

I am not suggesting in any way, shape or form that this video is from the same night I've blogged about above, but then again, I have no real way of knowing that it isn't. And, at any rate, I'll take just about any opportunity to upload The Neighborhoods on Bonus Video Friday. inspirational verse; "Tell me a story / 'Cause if I find the truth / I'll tell the world." - David Minehan, 1982

Exchanging Pleasantries with David Johansen

2012-02-07T11:01:00.000-05:00

It was sometime in 1979, I was a roadie for The Buttons, Willie Phoenix's second-best band EVER, after Romantic Noise. (Much more on them in a later post.) Willie & the boys were hot in Columbus right then, they were the go-to band for opening slots at the 1300-person capacity Columbus Agora when the club booked "punk" or "new wave" acts. David Johansen and his band were touring their first or second album, David was an ex-New York Doll, they were big, it was a great opening opportunity.

We loaded in right before Johansen’s soundcheck and got to stay around. (Back then, not every band would let you watch their soundcheck. Some of them cleared the club entirely.) Johansen and his band were a BLAZING live act during that period. Their SOUNDCHECK was better than 90% of the rock & roll shows I saw in those nascent synth-pop days. First rule at the Agora for opening acts was "Don’t fuck with the headliners." We were pretty much instructed not to even TALK to them, let alone try to pass off demos or stump for opening gigs in other cities.

But, as I was setting up Willie’s amp and such, David Johansen walked over to me and asked in that foghorn-rasp-Staten-Island-by-way-of-Brooklyn accent of his (for the uninitiated, rent that Bill Murray movie Scrooged, or check out a Johansen interview on YouTube) "So, we gonna have a rockin’ show tonight?" I told him I thought we were. He said, "These guys any good?" nodding over at Willie, Greg Glasgow, John Ballor and Dee Hunt, who were huddled in the wings, watching me break the rule about not talking to the headliners. I told him, "Yeah, they’re great, they might actually give you guys a run for your money."

Johansen laughed skeptically but graciously at that and, emboldened by the fact that he spoke to me first, I carried on the conversation with, "Ya know, I saw you play here in Columbus at Vet’s Memorial with The New York Dolls in 1974." Johansen stopped laughing, got instantly serious, looked me up and down and said, "Really? You don’t look like a faggot." I was pretty taken aback by that reply and managed to stammer out, "Uhhh, I’m not, actually." Johansen continued with, "Well all I remember coming back to the HO-tel after the show in Columbus at Vet’s Memorial in 1974 was faggots." We both cracked up laughing at this, he high-fived me, told me to have a great show, spun around and conducted a perfect rock & roll star exit.

I had long hair on the West Side of Columbus, Ohio, in the 1960’s; I played in punk-rock bands on the West Side of Columbus, Ohio in the 1970’s; I was no stranger to being called a faggot. That instance with David Johansen was by far the coolest.

© 2012 Ricki C.

This video is from from a German television show in 1978, the year I first saw David Johansen & the Staten Island Boys, as his band was known then. The drummer in the video was Frankie LaRocka, who would later become Watershed's A&R rep when they signed to Sony in the early 90's. Check in with Colin for some great Frankie stories. LaRocka died in 2005 at the age of 51 and was a rocker to the end.

postcript: Classic lyric moment in Frenchette; at the 2:33 mark Johansen sings "Want you to come in my dining room, not my dinette, nyet, nyet," instead of "no, no." Genius.

a people’s history of rock & roll; part one, The Sixties (Bonus Video Friday)

2012-02-03T14:37:00.000-05:00

From the ages of 0 to 12 years old all I cared about was World War II. No, wait, I cared about comic books too. (In fact, I taught myself to read with them at age four, probably beginning with Sgt. Rock in Our Army At War because they were about World War II and then extending out from there. And yeah, for those of you scoring at home, I was just as OCD about comic books as I was later about rock & roll.) Then in 1964, when I was 12, The Beatles hit America and that was all she wrote. From their very first Ed Sullivan show appearance in February 1964, let’s just say this; I was one hooked little West Side boy

Then, really soon after that I saw The Dave Clark 5 on Ed Sullivan. Truthfully, I kinda liked them better than The Beatles. For one thing, The Dave Clark 5 had better suits than The Beatles. (More on suits below.) The DC5 were just so cool; the drummer was way out front, Mike Smith was a KILLER lead singer, and they had a saxophone player. (My Uncle Joe on my mother’s side of the family played saxophone in an Army Veteran’s band and to that point he was the only live musician I had ever seen, or known personally.) (True story: One Thanksgiving or Christmas, probably 1965, The Dave Clark 5 were on a holiday special and Denny Payton took a wicked sax solo on a song that escapes my memory. Somebody in my family said, "Can you play like that, Joe?" And before he could open his mouth to reply my dad said, "If Joe played like that his saxophone would melt." It got a huge laugh from the family. You’ve gotta understand, adults in my family did NOT make jokes at the expense of other adults. Uncle Joe did not laugh. He was not a happy camper. But I digress….)

I also saw The Animals and The Rolling Stones on Ed Sullivan but really didn’t like them that much. First off, they didn’t wear matching suits. Matching suits were very important to me in those early rock & roll days, probably because of superhero comic books in which The Fantastic Four and The X Men, both of whom I loved, had matching outfits and all my World War II heroes wore uniforms. (That attitude has lasted to this very day. It’s one of the reasons I loved The White Stripes when they first came on the scene. Even The Strokes kinda had your basic black leather jackets and black jeans almost-matching outfits down.)

Anyway, the thing about The Sixties that always floors me in retrospect is HOW FAST the music advanced. The Beatles hit America in early 1964. By 1965 The British Invasion was in full swing (all the aforementioned bands plus The Kinks, The Searchers, Gerry & The Pacemakers, The Who, The Zombies, etc., literally too many to mention) PLUS American garage bands had already begun to spring up. The very first live rock & roll band I ever saw was a group of rich Upper Arlington kids that played in the ballroom of the Scioto Country Club. My mom was a waitress (and later a hostess) there and called my sister to drive me up there to see them. I had to watch from the kitchen (God forbid, kids of the help would mingle with the members) but man, it was just so great to see a rock & roll band up close and in person. I have no idea what band it was but they had a killer version of "Gloria," years before Patti Smith or Willie Phoenix ever got ahold of it.

By 1966 Bob Dylan had burst out of folk music to bring an entirely new lyrical consciousness into rock & roll and folk-rock bands like The Byrds, The Lovin’ Spoonful and Buffalo Springfield arrived. (In many ways, 1960’s folk-rock remains to this day my very favorite form of music. Give me The Leaves, give me The Beau Brummels, give me Tim Buckley’s first album and I am in 12-string guitar heaven, pal. Folk-rock music always sounds like autumn to me and my brain thinks like autumn feels, so you do the math.) By 1967 Haight-Ashbury began to take over, Flower Power bloomed and suddenly all the garage-rockin’ guys & girls were donning kaftans & beads and grooving to English psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd when Syd Barrett could still function. The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and suddenly everybody got lofty and pretentious as a way of rock & roll life. The Beatles even got The Rolling Stones to play their game and the result was Their Satanic Majesties Request, a severe musical misstep if there ever was one. No more fun 45’s, overnight everyone started recording weighty, ponderous, cosmic concept albums.

In 1968 acid-rock reared its ugly head as San Francisco’s Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead made 20-minute jams the norm and I sadly waved goodbye to my beloved 3-minute rock & roll song. Goodbye Standells, farewell Paul Revere & The Raiders (again, great outfits!), adieu Turtles. (At one show in this time period my best rock & roll friend Dave Blackburn sidled over to me in the middle of yet ANOTHER 20 minute jam by some lame local band, put a coin in my hand and said, "I’ll bet you a quarter this song ends someday.") The Doors from L.A. and The Jimi Hendrix Experience from N.Y.C. by way of England were some help, some relief, some succor, but hardly made up for the loss of all the great one-hit wonder combos from Anywhere, U.S.A. (R.I.P. Count Five, Syndicate Of Sound, Chocolate Watchband.)

By early 1969 country rock tipped its laid-back cowboy hat as the first records by The Flying Burrito Bothers and Poco were released. All of a sudden every wannabe-hippie had to "get back to the country." (At that juncture Dave Blackburn asked very cogently, "If we all get back to the country and there’s no electricity, where are we supposed to plug in our amplifiers?") Thankfully, for us in the Midwest, The MC5 and The Stooges soon roared outta Detroit to save us from that cocaine cowboy fate. Confessional singer-songwriters like James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and Crosby, Stills & Nash eased into our hearts & minds, trying to heal some of those end-of-the-60’s blues. (Whenever my peers or, more problematically,whenever younger kids that I run into at gigs get all dewy-eyed about the peace & love 60’s I feel compelled to remind them: John F. Kennedy, assassinated; Bobby Kennedy, assassinated; Martin Luther King, assassinated; Malcolm X, assassinated; all the men & women, black & white alike, killed during the civil-rights movement; 50,000 dead soldiers in Vietnam.) Heavy metal music stormed in from England with bands like Black Sabbath providing the dirge soundtrack to all that mayhem. Woodstock wafted into our conciousness in August 1969 and by December 1969 all of us became witnesses at Altamont. You could go from light to dark just that fast in the 60’s.

All of that rock & roll history took place from 1964 to 1969. The Beatles evolved from A Hard Day’s Night to Sgt. Pepper’s in THREE YEAR’S TIME. (Plus they recorded and released their two best records ever; Rubber Soul and Revolver, as well as some stand-alone singles, in between.) By three years after Sgt. Peppers they had put out Magical Mystery Tour, the double-record set White Album, Abbey Road and Let It Be. Nowadays everybody from major pop and rap stars down to your average piddly little jagoff "alternative" band routinely takes three years between albums.
　
It was the 1960’s. You shoulda been there.

© 2012 Ricki C.

The Move on English T.V. in 1967. The Move were kind of a junior-league Who in 1967. (They smashed up televisions and sometimes cars onstage instead of their gear.) They were one of those English bands that just never quite crossed over to America. (But you know Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick had to have loved them.) When bass player Trevor Burton succumbed to LSD mania (how come those limey lads like him and Syd Barrett couldn’t handle their acid?) he was replaced by Jeff Lynne. Lynne later booted founder, lead guitarist & main songwriter Roy Wood out of his own band and went on to front the terminally lame Electric Light Orchestra, who enjoyed enormous success in 1970’s America with their disco-besotted pop-crossover drivel. (He atoned for some of that with The Traveling Wilburys, though.)

ps. I fully realize it's kinda blonde on blonde for me to hype a blog hyping my blog, but Colin Gawel of Watershed and The Lonely Bones has a great piece plugging Growing Old With Rock & Roll on his website, www.colingawel.com. It's great, you should check it out.

The Transistor Radio

2012-01-31T22:56:00.000-05:00

In the cyber-dark ages of the mid-2000’s when I had a MySpace page (grandpa, what was MySpace?) I started a series called A Life Of Rock & Roll. "The Bathtub" (blog entry January 2nd, 2012) was the first story in that series. This was the second.

May 1966, later in eighth grade. I’m feeling a little better. I’ve inherited my big sister’s transistor radio as a hand-me-down and it’s pretty much my constant companion. (For those readers under 40, the transistor radio was the Walkman or the Discman or the iPod of its day. No headphones, though, you just had to press it up against your ear.) It’s difficult for me to convey how shy I was at that point in time. I was shy to the point of invisibility. I STROVE for invisibility. I clung to anonymity. I was shy to the point of mental retardation. You kinda had to be there. I was a mess.

Anyway, during recess and lunch every day of eighth grade I would stand on the playground outside the cafeteria door with my back against the fence and listen to my transistor radio. One fateful day a song called "Girl In Love" by an Ohio band called The Outsiders (their big hit was "Time Won’t Let Me") was playing when the four prettiest and most popular girls in my class walked by. "Oh, I love this song!" one of them beamed, "Could you turn it up, please?" "Girl In Love" was the current slow dance favorite at the eighth grade dances at which I would blend seamlessly into the shadows of some dark corner. (I HAD to see the bands.....)

I managed to turn the volume up and hold the radio at arm’s length while being otherwise paralyzed by this recognition of my existence. When the song ended the girls started peppering me with questions: "Do you know who sings that song?" "Is this your radio?" "How much did it cost?" "How many batteries does it take?" "Do The Outsiders have any other songs?" I swear to God I have no recollection of any of my answers. I somehow managed to stammer out replies and the girls actually seemed interested in what I said. When the interrogation (as I perceived it) was over one of them touched my arm and said, "Thanks for letting us listen, Richard."

This girl knew my name.

These girls were the four most popular girls in eighth grade. They were true teenage royalty. In the caste system endemic to American elementary school, probably to this day, I was one step above leper or one step below outcast, but no higher. How could this girl possibly have known my name? At the cafeteria door, they stopped, twirled, and one of them asked, "Will you be out here tomorrow?" "I guess," I managed, my voice cracking. They smiled and went into school.

That had to be the moment, the moment I made the connection. The moment I realized that if I PLAYED music, encounters like that one could be repeated. The moment that my universe opened up and a host of possible futures appeared on the horizon.

If I could just get a guitar.
　
　
　
　
© 2012 Ricki C.

Linda Finneran and Scoring Heroin

2012-01-30T10:40:00.000-05:00

My senior year of high school I was a hotshot journalist on my school newspaper at Bishop Ready on the West Side of Columbus, Ohio. The faculty adviser for the paper (Excalibur, no less, our sports teams were dubbed the Bishop Ready Knights. It WAS a Catholic school in the 1960’s, let’s not forget.) was Sister Ann Mary. (She was affectionately known to us on the paper as SAM, as she will hereafter be referred to in this story.) SAM was great. She and another nun named Sister Paula Clare (my junior year English teacher) essentially made me the writer I am today. (Possibly more on that later in Growing Old With Rock & Roll.) Thanksgiving weekend of 1969, in the middle of a high school journalism convention field trip to Chicago, SAM got me into a Jimi Hendrix show at the Chicago Armory by telling the ticket office people that I was an orphan in her Catholic foundling home and could they possibly see their way clear to let me into the show for free? I looked at her and whispered, "I have parents, you know." She fixed me with a steely glare on that cold Chicago sidewalk and snapped, "Do you wanna see Hendrix or not?"

The other great thing I got out of journalism class was Linda Finneran. My senior year SAM forced me to become the feature editor on Excalibur. As such, I was supposed to copy-edit, nurture and tutor the freshman and sophomore writers on the paper. What it amounted to was babysitting and having to plow through bad teenage boy science-fiction stories and adolescent schoolgirl poetry to fill out shortages in column inches. When SAM found out I was just rewriting everything that came across my desk instead of mentoring the underclassmen and instructing them on how to do their own rewrites, she made me sit down with the individual writers.

As I was redlining Linda’s first submission to the paper that actually showed some promise her glasses repeatedly fell off her face onto the copy desk. She blushed red the first two times this happened, making her bespectacled but pretty face somehow even prettier, and stammered out embarrassed apologies. I was not the most patient of editors and the third time it happened I picked her glasses up, jammed them back on her face, tucked them behind her ears and said, "Could you please ask your parents for new glasses, I don’t have time for this." (You’ve gotta kinda picture a teenage Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory here, I was THAT kind of geek.) How we got from that testy exchange to dating I have not one clue. But I do think that some part of me fell in love with Linda the exact moment I pushed those glasses onto her face and looked past them into her lovely brown eyes.

Linda was the only girl I ever dated who lived close enough to school that I could walk her home. Walking a girl home held a powerful attraction for me because so many of the rock & roll songs I had been listening to and loving since I was 5 years old in 1957 glorified that American tradition. I always carried her books. I was a nice boy.

I don’t remember how many times I had walked Linda home, how many nights we had talked on the phone, I’m pretty sure we had never actually been on a date, but one afternoon we were playing around in her kitchen and I was tickling her with her back up against the refrigerator. We were both laughing and out of breath and I leaned in to kiss Linda for the first time. It was a really romantic moment. Or at least it would have been a really romantic moment if Linda had realized I was going to kiss her. Instead I just kinda bumped my mouth against hers, totally humiliating both of us. I sighed and took a couple of steps back as Linda, wide-eyed behind her glasses, said, "Oh, you were going to kiss me." "That was the general idea, yeah." I replied. "Okay, okay, I get it now, let’s kiss," she said a little breathlessly. "I think we kinda missed the moment there," I said, just as her mom got home from work and walked into the kitchen with groceries. We both looked so guilty and embarrassed I can only wonder what her mom thought was going on that afternoon, against that refrigerator.

Oddly I don’t remember our actual first kiss, but I surely remember that miss.

Linda’s and my time together was almost entirely in the winter of 1970, from sometime after Christmas 1969 to sometime in March. My dad was still alive, I was in a band, I had a girlfriend, it was one of the five best times of my life. Linda and I would make out in her warm living room, listening to side one of Linda’s favorite album, Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel. I hated Simon & Garfunkel. My previous girlfriend – a pretty, perky, popular blonde majorette and compulsive liar who shall remain nameless – had dropped me like a live grenade for a pseudo-hippie piano player who could play "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" perfectly and harmonize in dulcet tones with his Folk Club geek friends. I, as a rock & roll kid, truly disdained Folk Club. Linda liked Paul & Art though, so there you go. I don’t think we ever got to side two of that record because neither of us wanted to stop kissing long enough to get up and turn the record over. Was this why CD’s were invented decades later?

A rule that was established pretty early on by Linda’s parents was that we weren’t allowed to be alone in Linda’s house unsupervised. (It seems like this came up fairly quickly after the mom-comes-home-with-groceries-refrigerator-incident, so that seems fair.) (That rule also once caused Linda to send me out in a snowstorm to die, but that’s a different story for another day.) The odd thing was that Linda’s little sister, who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old at the time, counted as supervision. Some days Linda and I would settle in the family room when little sis got home from school. We would make out like fiends three feet away from that girl and she never batted an eye. Part of this was due to what I term "The Sesame Street Effect." That show had just debuted in 1970 and Linda’s little sister was absolutely riveted by it. Man, that show was hypnotic to kids. There were days even Linda and I got hooked. Linda’s mom would get home from work and all three of us would be sitting together in the family room, staring at the TV screen in rapt attention at whatever Big Bird and Ernie were teaching us that day. I think Linda’s mom was enormously comforted by that.

I would leave Linda’s house when her family was getting ready for dinner and sometimes meet my high school history teacher to score heroin for his 19 year old cousin. (Bishop Ready had hired student teachers from the education department at Ohio State University that year to help cut costs. They were great, but they were only four or five years older than us, basically SDS college anti-establishment-types, and entirely radicalized those of us already prone to radicalization.) Matt’s (not his real name, although there must be some kind of expired statute of limitations by this time) cousin was a beautifully frail, pale strawberry blonde coed at a private school in Columbus. She couldn’t possibly have been further from what I imagined a heroin addict would look like. I read Life magazine. I watched after-school specials about marijuana leading directly to heavy drugs. I knew about jazz musicians and Vietnam vets. I did have some notion of The Velvet Underground by 1970 (though I didn’t worship them then as I would come to later) so I had a vivid mental picture of junkies. Junkies looked like Lou Reed fans, or like Lou Reed, or both.

Matt and I would cruise the dirty grey snow-ridden streets of the near East Side in his VW bug, searching for a connection Matt thought he could trust. (It sometimes seemed like it snowed every day of that long, long winter.) When we couldn’t find a trusted dealer Matt would settle for whoever was on a street corner who looked like we had a 50/50 chance of not getting shot in the face by. His cousin NEEDED that shot. We’d troll past hookers strolling in the snow, girls not much older than me. I remember thinking, in all my Catholic high school naïveté, "Those girls are just NOT dressed for this weather." Those Parsons Avenue and Mount Vernon Avenue streets couldn’t possibly have been further from Linda’s Stephens Drive, and I’m not talking geographically. I think I might have learned more riding around in that Volkswagen that winter than all the rest of senior year put together.

Never in my life to this day have I experienced a bigger juxtaposition of utter warmth to bitter cold, of simple joy to utter degradation, of innocence to experience, as I did that winter. Sometimes I look back and wonder why I went along on those cold trips with Matt. And then I realize: It’s because I thought I was hotshot teenage journalist and that I had to learn about the ways of the world no matter what it took. Oh yeah, and because I was stupid.

One month later I had senselessly broken Linda’s heart, my father had died of a heart attack, and my world essentially crumbled. Much of April and all of May 1970 are gone from my memory, I think I may have had a little nervous breakdown somewhere along in there.

But to this day, when it’s been snowing every day for a week, when there’s a foot of snow on the ground and I’m shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, and I need a shot of warmth, I’m back in Linda’s living room, Sesame Street is on in the family room, Simon & Garfunkel are playing softly somewhere, and everything is all right.

© 2012 Ricki C.

The Dictators (Bonus Video Friday)

2012-01-27T10:10:00.000-05:00

All of my standards of rock & roll professionalism are based on The Who in 1969, nature’s most perfect rock & roll organism EVER. That unifying factor is going to hold us together through a BIG BUNCH of digressions in this edition of Growing Old With Rock & Roll. (author’s note; the whole Who/Dictators thing got so out of hand so quickly that the other two digressions – "Why were late 70’s punk bands SO unprofessional?" and "Why are the young supposed rock & roll bands of 2012 SO puny & bloodless?" – will be postponed to a later date. Somebody remind me.)

Digression One – Why has there never been an American version of The Who?

I truly feel that The New York Dolls were a pretty damn good stab at an American version of The Rolling Stones. I further feel the original Patti Smith Group circa 1976-1978 might also be a contender in that Stones sweepstakes, but I think you kinda hadda be there for that one, so I’m not going to press it. And a lot of you might question (based on scant recorded evidence) my pick of Buffalo Springfield as America’s answer to The Beatles, but I stand by it. Buffalo Springfield boasted three great songwriters and lead singers (Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Richie Furay), great instrumental interplay, great personalities. If only the Springfield had gotten a great producer, or indeed, even a REAL producer for their first album and if only they could have learned to coexist as a group with three strong writers. (But then again, that’s what split the actual Beatles, but not until they recorded 12 albums and many, many singles from ’63 to ’69.) (This actually brings up a whole ‘nother digression, i.e. How quickly rock & roll transmorgified itself between 1963 and 1969.) Plus I realized as I was typing this that America’s version of The Beatles was probably actually Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but that band got so horribly self-righteous and hippie-fied after the Déjà Vu record they even lost me, and I loved ‘em in their heyday. (In one of the truly terribly naïve moments of my childhood I was glad when CSN&Y got huge because I thought it would give them enough money so that Stills & Young would leave and go back to reform Buffalo Springfield with Richie. Oh, little Ricki C.; you were so innocent, so cute, and so wrong.)

The Who, however, are another animal entirely. I can’t think of a single American band that ever came anywhere close to touching The Who for songwriting genius, instrumental power, and just flat-out charisma. I guess Cheap Trick might’ve come somewhat close circa Live At Budokan and Dream Police in 1978, but that might have been a little too calculated: Goofball/offbeat songwriter guitarist, Pete Townshend = Rick Nielsen; pretty blonde lead singer/screamer, Roger Daltrey = Robin Zander; dark-haired brooding/invisible bass player, John Entwhistle = Tom Petersson; zany drummer Keith Moon = Bun E. Carlos. If you try to convince me Rick Nielsen didn’t build that model with airplane glue in his garage in 1969 you’ve got another think coming.

The Dictators, though, mighta been a contendah a couple of times. Great rock & roll songwriting from Adny/Andy Shernoff (if "Steppin’ Out" from 1977’s Manifest Destiny isn’t a stab at the greatest Who song Pete Townshend forgot to write, I don’t know what is), great searing lead guitar from Ross "The Boss" Funicello/Friedman (my good friend & rock & roll brother Hamell On Trial thinks there were TOO MANY guitar solos in The Dictators, a point I must diametrically dispute), and the perfect blend of genuine rock authority AND A SENSE OF HUMOR that I always loved in The Who. If, indeed, there was one thing The Who completely lost after Keith Moon’s passing (apart from rock & roll’s greatest drummer EVER, of course) it was that sense of humor. Think about "Pictures Of Lily," think about "I’m A Boy," think about "Sally Simpson." All of those songs were simultaneously heartbreaking AND hilarious because the band contained both Pete Townshend AND Keith Moon in constant yin/yang pendulum action. (Plus there’s that great scene in The Kids Are Alright where The Who are sitting around a conference table and Pete Townshend is expounding/pontificating about how "The Who have to change and progress and stop being such a circus act," while Keith Moon initially nods in supposed agreement until he is compelled to do a headstand in his chair to undercut the pretentiousness inherent in Pete’s diatribe. Townshend, then, is left to try to balance a drink on Keith’s boot heel to save face. I never liked Led Zeppelin much, but at least they had the good sense to break up when they lost their drummer and he was never as integral or indispensable to the band as Keith Moon was to The Who. Pete, you shoulda had the good goddamn sense you were born with and broken up The Who for good when Keith left this mortal coil.)

Right, right, right, we’re supposed to be talking about The Dictators. I guess we gotta face facts: If I’m gonna claim godlike Who-status for The Dictators we have to deal with the Handsome Dick Manitoba question. No way am I gonna be able to claim to you, dear readers, that Handsome Dick could ever go one-on-one vocally with Roger Daltrey. As great and charismatic a frontman the Handsome one is, he really didn’t sing that great, did he? And Andy singing his own tunes was shaky at times. But what I respect immensely was that Shernoff could undoubtedly have found himself a blonde pretty-boy David Lee Roth-style lead singer, but he didn’t. Andy’s from Brooklyn, not L.A. Plus, owing to my friendship with Hamell On Trial I was privileged enough to meet Handsome Dick Manitoba in person at his namesake watering hole in N.Y.C. in 2004 the night before The Dictators’ triumphant performance at Little Steven Van Zandt’s International Underground Garage Festival, and let me say this: That man is the living embodiment of a rock & roll lead singer. Rock & roll isn’t a paycheck to Handsome Dick Manitoba, it’s not a way to get his mug into People magazine, it’s not his ticket to sell out his entire rock & roll heritage to become clown judge on American Idol, it’s a way of life. (And how many rock guys are better-looking in their 50’s than in their 20’s?)

Andy Shernoff, Handsome Dick Manitoba, Ross "The Boss" Friedman, Scott "Top Ten" Kempner, Mark "The Animal" Mendoza (for a little while) and the entire Dictators drum corps; Louie Lyons, Stu-Boy King, Richie Teeter, J.P. "Thunderbolt" Patterson, I salute you. Dictators Forever, Forever Dictators.

The Dictators rockin' Spain in 2008. inspirational verse; "June 1st, '67 / Something died and went to heaven / I wish Sgt. Pepper NEVER taught the band to play." - Andy Shernoff, 2001
also, is "My Generation / Is not the salvation" a not-so-subtle dig at Pete Townshend for dragging the rotting, bloated corpse of The Who around concert stages all these many years, or am I just projecting?

The Dictators are often lumped in with punk, as a kind of afterthought/missing link between The New York Dolls and The Ramones in the history of New York City rock & roll, but they were WAY more than that. They never laid low, slinking around CBGB’s or The Mudd Club, trying to score gigs and/or heroin. They went out and played for kids. They went out and opened arena shows for the likes of Uriah Heep, Styx, Kiss, and other bands of that ilk. (Sorry, Colin.) (Adny Shernoff had this great quote back then along the lines of, "We could never sell out as bad as Peter Frampton and sell 13 million records, but we could certainly sell out as bad as Aerosmith and sell 2 million.") The first time I saw The Dictators live they were opening for AC/DC at Columbus, Ohio’s, Agora Ballroom in 1977 and they more than held their own against Bon & Angus and the boys. Punk poseurs? Skinny-tie new wave wimps? I don’t think so, pal, these guys were a rock & roll BAND. This is a postcard Andy sent to my rock & roll fanzine, Teenage Rampage, in 1977 from some Holiday Inn somewhere on the road.

Bonus Friday Bonus Video clip - The Dictators live 8/14/2004

This clip comprises The Dictators entire set at Little Steven’s International Underground Garage Festival August 14th, 2004, on Randall’s Island in New York City. I was at that show. (In fact at the 5:17 mark, the guy with brown hair & a black t-shirt next to the white-haired guy wearing a red & white baseball cap, that’s ME.) The clip takes FOREVER to buffer on my computer, but it’s worth the wait. (Go get a cup of coffee from the kitchen while you’re waitin’. Run around the block, get some exercise.) Spin magazine’s review of the festival had a great quote – "With a combined age of around 250, The Dictators almost carjacked the show with their NYC-proud gutter-punk anthems." – that I initially resented until I did the math (5 members times 50-some years, I guess it does come in at 250). As I find myself growing old with rock & roll I now take it as a badge of honor.

Watershed and Kamakaze's

2012-01-25T21:49:00.000-05:00

another Watershed road story, for a full intro see Colin and the Stairwell.....

First off, let me set the scene and make a statement: Only Watershed could have two gigs spaced a distance of an hour and a half apart, allow six hours for the drive, AND STILL BE LATE! How, you might ask? I’ll tell ya.

It was 2005, Watershed was on a short run of shows opening for The Clarks, a popular Midwest band that hails from Pittsburgh, Pa. After a killer show the night before, we left the hotel in Morgantown, West Virginia, at noon. (That was a minor miracle in itself, since a noon checkout time to Watershed generally means sometime vaguely before 3 pm.) It was an unseasonably warm 69 degree November afternoon so we decided to hang around and explore downtown Morgantown since we couldn’t imagine that Chester, West Virginia, our destination for that night’s show, was going to be a thriving metropolis. In that we were correct.

Everybody scattered, I found a really great comic book store where I killed a couple of hours. I also ran across a passable used CD store in the back room of a neighborhood bodega, but managed to not spend any of my tour money. We all met back up at 3 o’clock, and a back road "scenic route" was mapped out to take full advantage of the fall foliage. (I realize that makes us sound like hippies, but we’re just Midwest boys with a Kinks-inspired songwriter’s respect and ache for autumn.)

Van discussions/arguments for the day included Pooch seeing Ted Nugent on T.V., talking about surviving after Armageddon and whether we thought we could kill a deer for food. Pooch expressed profound doubts about our city-boy capabilities in that field. That was when Biggie pointed out the fifth roadkill dead deer we had passed that day and said, "There you go, Pooch, I have to go out of my way NOT to kill a deer on this road and you think we’d have trouble hunting one down?"

Anyway, after meandering through several tiny West Virginia hamlets (which seemed to consist almost entirely of churches, bars, and cigarette stores) we were within one mile of that night’s club when there was a traffic accident that culminated in a pickup truck resting on its roof on our left and a couple of cars in the ditch on our right.

Six or seven police cars, ambulances and fire trucks converged on the scene and we came to a stop right outside of a bar called Kamakaze’s. (For all of my fellow World War II Japanese Divine Wind suicide pilot buffs out there, I fully recognize and acknowledge the misspelling. It was a bar on the outskirts of Chester, West Virginia, after all.)

A large sign outside Kamakaze’s advertised "exotic bartenders." That sign launched a full 10 minute discussion as to what constituted an "exotic bartender." Were the bartenders topless? Were they dressed in Playboy bunny outfits? Were they women dressed as birds like in that old Goldie Hawn movie Protocol? Indeed, were they women at all?

Finally, as befitted their position as leaders of the band, Colin and Joe asked Biggie’s permission to get out of the van and explore the bar. We were now almost late for load-in, but it was painfully clear we weren’t going anywhere soon, so Biggie grudgingly granted permission.

Joe and Colin walked across the parking lot, entered the bar and not two minutes later Colin returned breathlessly to the van and proclaimed, "The bartenders are TOTALLY NUDE. They’re hot chicks and they are TOTALLY NAKED." Many, many doubts were expressed about this fact and Dave, Pooch and I were given leave to confirm said report.

Sonofabitch if Colin wasn’t right on the money. The bartenders at Kamakaze’s were, in fact, totally naked. Wait, let me correct myself – the girls were, to be 100% accurate, wearing flip flops, so as to not stick to the floor I would presume. And let me say this, these girls were not middle-aged present or former crack whores, my friends, they were really fairly attractive young women in their mid-twenties. Let’s say they were cuter than girls you see working in WalMart, but not as cute as the girls pole-dancing topless at your local strip joint. Imagine the West Virginia cousins of Miley Cyrus’ or Lindsay Lohan’s entourages/posses, and you kinda get the picture.

Anyway, not unexpectedly, the bar was packed, and not just with local working-class joes. (Though, to be fair, there were a fair amount of tractor-ad baseball caps in evidence on the clientele.) There were probably as many women as there were men in Kamakaze’s and nobody, other than probably the Watershed crew, was openly gaping at the nude bartenders. It seemed like everybody in the town had come to a kind of accommodation with the nudity factor and the atmosphere was fairly light. There was certainly no heavy-duty strip-club vibe.

After about ten minutes my inherent Catholic-boy "I must be doing something wrong" guilt kicked in and I walked back out to where Biggie was sitting in the van on the road outside the bar. I filled him in on the nudity factor, we ascertained the cops were making no headway in clearing the road, so Biggie pulled the van in the parking lot and checked Kamakaze’s out for himself. At some point we realized the drummer of The Clarks was also inside the dimly-lit bar, which took a lot of the pressure off being on time for soundcheck. (In point of fact, it was not said drummer’s first visit to Kamakaze’s. He wasn’t a regular, exactly, but he sure seemed to know his way around the place.) I walked back out to the van, settled in with my book, and after about an hour the police finally cleared one lane for traffic. Biggie and I collected the band from bartender-ogling and we drove the remaining one mile up the road to the club. We were then almost two hours late for load-in after leaving six hours early. Just another afternoon on the town with Watershed. Just another day on the road.

postscript; A couple of weeks later I was at a party at our friends Danya & Mike’s house telling the Kamakaze’s story when a drummer friend of ours (who shall remain nameless) walked in on the tail end of the story. Drummer-guy was pretty smashed, possibly as drunk as I’ve ever seen him, and he seized on the "nude female bartender" part of the story, seized hard. He started asking/demanding/slurring, "WHERE IS THIS PLACE? HOW CAN THE GIRLS BE TOTALLY NUDE IF THEY’RE SERVING ALCOHOL? "WHERE IS THIS PLACE!?!" I tried to explain that it’s in West Virginia, I don’t think Ohio topless bar laws apply there, and our drummer buddy did everything short of grabbing my lapels and shaking me, saying "WHERE IS THIS PLACE, EXACTLY? I expected him to grab a pen & paper, write down the name of the town, jump in the car and light out right that moment for the Ohio/West Virginia border. The entire time his immensely patient wife was sitting right next to him, just kinda sighing. Another Saturday night. Another party.

© 2012 Ricki C.

The Best Of Everything (part two)

2012-01-22T15:37:00.001-05:00

I’ve had multiple requests for addendums to "The Best Of Everything" post, most notably for rock & roll movies. Here is my rock & roll movie list, divided into two categories; Rock & Roll Documentaries (including flat-out pure concert movies, i.e. Rust Never Sleeps) and Movies About Rock & Roll.

The first category listed here – Worst Rock & Roll Bands – was inspired by the car ahead of me in traffic the other day that was adorned (disdorned?) by a Dave Matthews Band bumper sticker. Readers, please be advised; THE DAVE MATTHEWS BAND WAS/IS THE WORST ROCK & ROLL BAND THAT HAS EVER EXISTED! BIOHAZARD! BIOHAZARD! PLAGUE! AVOID AT ALL COSTS! (But I didn’t have to tell you that, did I? You all knew.)
　

Worst Rock & Roll Bands

1) The Dave Matthews Band
2) Kansas
3) Styx
4) Journey
5) Foreigner

dis-honorable mentions; Stone Temple Pilots, Alice In Chains, Blink 182, Sum 41, many, many other 90’s & 00's bands

a rock & roll truism; if you were a 70’s band with a one-word name (the exception that proves the rule being Aerosmith) or a 90’s or 00’s band with a number in your name, there’s a very, very good chance that you sucked.
　

Top Five Rock & Roll Documentaries/Concert Films

1) Gimme Shelter / The Rolling Stones
2) The Kids Are Alright / The Who
3) The Future Is Unwritten / Joe Strummer
4) Don't Look Back / Bob Dylan
5) Hail! Hail! Rock & Roll / Chuck Berry
6) Live At The Isle Of Wight Festival 1970 / The Who
7) Rust Never Sleeps / Neil Young
7) Stop Making Sense / Talking Heads
8) Live At The Astoria London 2005 / Ian Hunter & The Rant Band
9) The Ballad Of Mott The Hoople
10) Under Blackpool Lights 2004 / The White Stripes

honorable mentions; The Essential Clash, The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights, all Bruce Springsteen DVD bonus discs in the Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town box sets
　

Top Ten Movies About Rock & Roll

1) Almost Famous
2) Rock & Roll High School
3) A Hard Day’s Night
4) Help!
5) The Commitments
6) This Is Spinal Tap
7) Sid & Nancy
8) Hard Core Logo
9) Cotton Candy
10) Purple Rain

honorable mentions; Get Crazy, The Buddy Holly Story, One Trick Pony, Walk The Line, Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist, That Thing You Do
　

author’s note; There are many truly awful movies about rock & roll (Tommy, Pink Floyd: The Wall, anything featuring Elvis Presley as a race car driver, a carnie, an underwater demolition expert, etc.) but maybe the worst of all of these was 2010’s The Runaways. I’m not sure what makes it the worst rock & roll movie of all time but I’m convinced that it is. I can’t get any of my rock & roll best friends to go see it or rent it, however, because I constantly lead with the fact that it is, indeed, the worst rock & roll movie of all time. Maybe it’s because I knew too much about the band The Runaways going into the film, maybe it's the glaring factual errors (not portraying lyricist & early driving force Kari Krome AT ALL, changing bassist Jackie Fox's name), maybe it’s because the band has a really interesting story the filmmakers totally squandered, maybe it’s a combination of those and other factors. But here’s all I know for sure: This is a movie in which Kristen Stewart & Dakota Fanning (portraying Joan Jett & Cherie Currie, respectively) MAKE OUT ONSCREEN and the director still found a way to make it boring. Mind-boggling.
　

further author’s note; There’s a truly great book by Marshall Crenshaw (one of the five best purveyors of power pop ever, by the way) from 1994 called Hollywood Rock: A Guide To Rock ‘n’ Roll In The Movies that is invaluable to any student of or lover of rock & roll and movies. Crenshaw came up with this great classification system of separate star ratings for music, attitude and fun that sets this apart from any other rock movie book ever. Classic.

Bruce Springsteen (Bonus Video Friday)

2012-01-20T11:15:00.000-05:00

There’s a longer Bruce Springsteen testimonial coming in this blog that I couldn’t complete for today. (It got out of hand.) So let’s just say this for now: Bruce Springsteen is my Number One Rock & Roll Hero of all time. (Replacing The Who’s Pete Townshend for many, many reasons.) This video is from the Passaic Theater in New Jersey in 1978, when the E Street Band were, quite simply, the greatest bar band the planet Earth has ever known. I have seen every Bruce Springsteen tour since 1976, the shows in 1978 were by far the finest. Enjoy.

By the way, the tickets to my first Bruce show in 1976 at the Ohio Theater were $5 apiece. The service charges totaled 70 cents. In the words of the immortal Long Island poet laureate, Lou Reed, "Those were different times."

　

Hamell On Trial

2012-01-17T23:59:00.000-05:00

I have been lucky enough in the life of rock & roll that I have led since I was 13 years old to have known personally and befriended four people I would consider geniuses – Dave Blackburn in 1968, Willie Phoenix in 1978, Ed Hamell (aka Hamell On Trial) in 1997 and Joe Peppercorn in 2001. (Hey Ricki," some of you might ask, "you single out Joe Peppercorn? What about your buddies Colin Gawel and Joe Oestreich from Watershed?" My answer to that: Colin and Joe are extremely talented, really hard-working rock & roll guys who write great songs, but I have had conversations with Joe Peppercorn that I imagine are like speaking to a young Brian Wilson, circa "Good Vibrations," before Brian went off the rails and train ‘round the bend.)

I served as road manager for Hamell On Trial for 10 years, 2000-2010, before knee surgery for a torn ligament sidelined me and made it infinitely more difficult to traipse around the U.S.A. hauling amps and making nine and ten hour drives between gigs. But have not one doubt, dear readers, for those ten years I worked every night in the presence of greatness.

Rock & Roll Geniuses I Have Known, part 1 / Hamell On Trial

I first encountered the phenomenon that is Hamell On Trial at the South By Southwest Music Convention in Austin, Texas, March 1996, at a huge outdoor Mercury Records showcase (10,000 people in the street on a gorgeously warm Texas afternoon/evening). Ed was signed to Mercury then, Big As Life had just been released, and they were using him to keep the crowd occupied between the other performers' sets (God Street Wine, The Refreshments, and Joan Osborne - for those of you scoring at home). While roadies scurried around changing out amps, drums, etc. Ed would play from the very front of the stage, maybe five songs at a time, three sets in all.

From the very first dive bomber kamikaze guitar strums and the staccato spitting delivery of the best lyrics I had heard in years it was rock & roll love at first sight. The next day I lucked into seeing him at a really, really small coffeehouse in his allotted South By Southwest slot. I was there to see the act following him and had arrived early to snag a good seat. While Ed was setting up I thought to myself, "Cool, this is the guy I saw yesterday at the outdoor show, but how the hell is he going to play this tiny coffeehouse? He'll have to tone the act down so far it won't work."

Only he didn't tone it down. He played a fifty-seat coffeehouse at exactly the same manic intensity and nearly the same volume he played the huge outdoor show. People walked out of the place holding their ears during the first song. I, of course, was in six-string sonic heaven. This was everything I had been looking for since I quit playing in bands and started doing solo acoustic shows: extreme volume and attitude, great lyrics, a sense of humor. This was fiercely intelligent rock & roll played on an acoustic guitar with no hint of lingering folkie kum-ba-yah-ism.

He played for about a half-hour at that breakneck go-for-broke pace, doing a lot of the same songs he had played the previous day. And just when I was almost ready to write him off as really, really good but as something of a punk novelty act, Ed paused, looked at the audience and said very simply, "This is a song for my mother." He strummed into "Open Up The Gates," one of the warmest, most beautiful sentiments I have ever heard anytime, anywhere from any songwriter, let alone from this bald, sweating punk madman.

I was floored. I looked at the total stranger next to me whom I had been talking to a little before the show and his mouth was literally hanging open. I said, "Can you believe this song from this guy?" and he just shook his head no, he couldn't even speak. Then after the song (which, kinda typically for Ed, manages to threaten God in the midst of a heartfelt tribute to his mother) he roared into "The Meeting" and it was over. I tell you all of this just to point out that, as transfixed as I was by the music, I was cringingly afraid to go up to the guy to tell him how much I had enjoyed his set. The Hamell On Trial stage act is that of a madman and Ed plays that part well.

I saw him again in March 1997 at South By Southwest and he had a whole set of new songs potentially even better than the ones I saw him play just a year earlier (including "The Vines," the song that ended my 20-year career of warehouse work and sent me into music full-time.) In August of '97 he played Columbus and I cadged my way onto the bill as the opening act. I got to the club early, watched his soundcheck, screwed up my courage and walked up to him as he was packing up his guitar. I held up my CD covers to Big As Life and The Chord Is Mightier Than The Sword and said, "Hi, I'm your opening act and I just wanted to get the gushing fan stuff out of the way. Could you autograph these for me?"

I was fully poised, balanced back on my heels, ready to take off if he growled, "Motherfucker, do you think I don't have anything better to do than sign your little CD's?" Instead he smiled and said, "Ah, you got my CD's. Do people know who I am here?" I said, "Yeah, you get airplay on our local NPR station, I think it'll be a good crowd." I thanked him and started to walk away after he signed and he said, "Hey, come on back to the dressing room and we'll talk." I replied, "No, I don't wanna bother you." (First rule of opening acts: Never ever, under any circumstances, bother the headliner.) Ed said, "I'm in that car eight hours a day, every day, by myself, I never get to talk to anybody, come on back." I looked around. "Don't you have a roadie?" I asked. Ed replied, "Do I look like I can afford a roadie?"

It turned out we had bought all the same records in all the same years (Lou Reed, MC5, The Stooges, Mott The Hoople, The New York Dolls Patti Smith, Jim Carroll). We'd both witnessed nature’s most perfect rock & roll organism – The Who in 1969 – fifteen days apart, November 1st (me) and November 16th (him) when Keith Moon ruled the universe. We lived very similar rock & roll existences, i.e. played in bands for years, then went solo acoustic. We had the same kind of working class reprobate rocker friends; him in Syracuse, New York, me in Columbus, Ohio. It was like we were brothers who grew up in different zip codes.

When he was going onstage that night I said, "Hey, I've seen you play before, I know you're gonna break strings. Why don't you show me where your extra strings and tuner are and I'll switch them out for you if anything goes wrong." He just stared back at me and said, "Really?" I said, "Yeah, doesn’t your opening act offer that wherever you go?" Ed said, "No, nobody ever offers anything, anywhere, anytime."

I played roadie that night. I helped out around the Midwest after that. When the Ani Difranco tours came up in 2000 I got a tryout and made the grade. I stuck around.

postscript; two quick Hamell On Trial road stories for ya…..

Gettysburg, PA / October 1999

It's the second night of Ed's first tour with Ani Difranco. It's a little 3-date audition of sorts that leads to longer tours with Ani and eventually culminates in Ed being signed to Ani’s label, Righteous Babe Records. (By the way, for those of you scoring at home, I've been involved in music as either a guitarist or a roadie since 1968 and have never met anyone in the music business nicer than Ani Difranco.)

We're sitting in Ed's dressing room after his opening set. Ed's toweling off sweat and I'm making a peanut butter sandwich for dinner before I head out to the merch table and I suddenly feel very unglamorous and un-rock & roll.

"Somewhere right this very minute Oasis is snorting cocaine off groupies' stomachs and I'm making a peanut butter sandwich." I say to Ed, "I'm not sure this is how big-time rock & roll tours are supposed to go."

"No, I like this." Ed replies, "We're not cool."

I'm enormously heartened. I go back to my sandwich.

　
Santa Barbara, CA / April 2000

(Before the next story, I'd like to explain a little about my duties on the road. On tours of theaters and auditoriums when Ed opens for another artist, like this one with Ani Difranco, I would be at the merchandise table when the doors first opened, selling Hamell On Trial CD's and t-shirts. Of course, to audiences that have never seen Ed perform, it's a little hard to move merch. However, sometimes kids are nice enough to stop and talk, maybe ask questions. (To define terms: at my advanced age, "kids" refers to anyone aged teenager to mid-20's.) This tour was when I invented my one-line explanation of the Hamell On Trial experience; "It's a four man punk band rolled into one bald, sweaty guy." The kids would laugh, somewhat condescendingly, and go into the show. After Ed's set they would return raving and I would be vindicated.

During Ed's opening sets, Ani's merch girl Heidi (the second nicest person I've ever met in the music industry) would watch our table. I would be at the side of the stage tending to technical screw-ups, broken strings, knocked-over microphone stands, etc. I would then strike Ed's equipment from the stage and head back to merch, where I would remain until the end of the night, selling fantastic amounts of product, hopefully.)

Santa Barbara is in Reagan country. The downtown area is quiet and very ritzy, Gucci shops and small exclusive jewelry stores. It's a Republican blueblood stronghold. We should have expected trouble.

The show that night is a raver. Ed's on top of his game; he's berating latecomers to the front row, there are jokes galore, and "The Meeting" is a blazing finish. I'm feeling really good back at merch and CD's are selling briskly. All of a sudden one of the ushers, an extraordinarily well-dressed woman in her mid-60's wearing more jewelry than any volunteer usher I have ever seen, actually shoves the kid I'm helping out of the way and demands, "Are you with this person?" She taps one of Ed's CD's with a bejeweled finger. I reply that I am and she launches into a highly animated tirade about how Ed's performance was, "One of the most foul-mouthed exhibitions of obscenity she's ever witnessed in the Arlington Theater." I tell her "Thank you," that I'll communicate her concerns to Ed, and go back to conversing with the nice kid she just shoved.

She muscles the kid aside again and says, "I don't think you understand me, young man, I said that is one of the most obscene displays I've ever seen. A young girl set off pepper spray in the restroom in protest." At this point I have severely lost track of the conversation, especially the pepper spray protest segment. I have to move some merchandise to the crowd before Ani comes on and they split for their seats, so I again thank the woman and tell her I'm sorry she didn't enjoy the show.

She starts right back in about obscenity and that she can't understand what I'm thanking her for. I finally cut her off with, "Ma'am, I'm thanking you because I didn't come 2000 miles from Ohio to fight with ushers. It's the nicest way I can get you to move aside and let me do my job, which is selling CD's and you're interfering." She starts back in about the pepper spray and I say, "Ma'am, I'm gonna say this the nicest way I know how, in the immortal words of Hamell On Trial, could you please just go fuck yourself?"

We've drawn quite a crowd by now and the kids start to whoop and applaud. Her eyes go wide with rage and she spins on her heel. "I'm getting the police and you're going to jail." she spits back over her shoulder. Kids are shaking my hand, high-fiving me, telling me the ushers are always a pain like that, they hate rock & roll shows in their precious theater, nobody ever stands up to them, etc. I'm a local hero. I'm selling CD's right and left.

Sure enough, the usher returns with an off-duty Santa Barbara policeman working security for the concert and tells him she wants me arrested for obscenity. She starts telling the cop the pepper spray in the bathroom story and waving her arms around and he finally breaks in and says, "Lady, what are you talking about?" She goes back to ranting about obscenity and the cop turns to me and asks, "Do you have to be here?" I reply, "Yes, this is my appointed place to sell merchandise, I have to be at this table. Tell her to go back where she belongs."

The cop asks the usher where her station is and she tells him the balcony. He tells her, and I quote, "Lady, get your ass back to the balcony and leave this guy alone." Wild applause breaks out from the assembled throng, I'm a god.

By this time somebody has told Ani's crew I'm getting arrested out in the lobby. Ed and his manager rush out from backstage to see what's happening. Ani's on by that point, the crowd has gone to see the show and Ed says, "What's up?" I tell him I almost got busted for defending his honor and he grins, "Nice job."

My credit on Ed's live CD recorded during that tour reads; "Ricki C. was my roadie, he's from the West Side of Columbus, Ohio, he takes no shit." I fully believe that credit was derived from that Santa Barbara night.

The Neighborhoods (Bonus Video Friday)

2012-01-13T20:40:00.000-05:00

I have this matchbook. It’s from the Terrace Motel, 1650 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. I used to stay at that motel on weekends all through the early 1980’s when I worked at Ross Laboratories in Columbus, Ohio. Ross Laboratories was simultaneously the highest-paying AND easiest job I ever had. It was so high-paying I used to fly to Boston on weekends just to see bands. I’d leave my stockroom job on Friday afternoon, go directly to Port Columbus, fly into Logan Airport in Boston, grab the Red Line subway, transfer to the Green Line, and settle in at the Terrace Motel, my home away from home. (In retrospect I find that extravagance and sense of motivation amazing. Nowadays I often find it INCREDIBLY difficult to get myself off the couch to see bands at clubs as close as four miles away. Sometimes I hate growing old with rock & roll.)

But I digress, let me repeat; I USED TO FLY TO BOSTON ON WEEKENDS JUST TO SEE BANDS!
Fortunately, during that time an airline called People’s Express had one-way fares to Boston for $38. YOU COULD FLY ROUND-TRIP TO BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, FOR $76. ON THE WEEKEND! Life was good. Admittedly it wasn’t exactly luxury travel, more like Greyhound if buses could fly. One Friday night, and I swear to God I am not joking or making this up, a gentleman of middle-eastern persuasion tried to bring a live chicken on the plane. After much animated discussion he was dissuaded. He left the waiting area, went out to the parking garage for about two minutes, returned sans chicken and boarded the flight. I don’t know to this day what happened to that animal and I don’t want to know.

Wait, wait, I digress again. Once more; I USED TO FLY TO BOSTON ON WEEKENDS JUST TO SEE BANDS! Most of those weekends involved a band called The Neighborhoods. How did I love The(e) Neighborhoods? Let me count the ways: I loved them musically, I loved them sartorially, I loved their attitude, I loved that they wanted to be rock & roll stars, I loved that they went out and toured in shitty vans where people didn’t know them. (As hometown Columbus favorites The Toll found out when The ‘Hoods blew them off the stage at Stache’s one night in 1986. The Toll were given the choice that night of opening for the out-of-town rockers or keeping their top-billed slot. They learned a little too late that you DO NOT want to follow The Neighborhoods on a rock & roll stage. Brad & the boys got taken to rock & roll school that night.)

I must have first read about The ‘Hoods (as they were affectionately known to their fans) sometime in ’79 in Doug Simmons’ New York Rocker column about the Boston rock & roll scene. Then when Boston Rock started publishing in 1980 and put The ‘Hoods on the cover of their first issue I sent away to Newbury Comics for the "Prettiest Girl / No Place Like Home" single and a rock & roll love affair began. The Neighborhoods spoke to me in a way that other bands didn’t. I loved The Clash when they sang about English youth’s lack of job prospects in "Career Opportunities," but in 1980 I was 28 years old and had already been working at one job or another since my Dairy Queen stint at age 12. I was dying for some unemployment. And yeah, The Ramones were great but lyrics about chicken vindaloo and pinheads only take a rocker who reads too many books so far, ya know? But when David Minehan hit the bridge of "No Place Like Home" and sang – "First grade, straight A’s, I was a good boy / Grade six, grade’s slipped, I was losing interest / Fun time, grade nine, fools for friends & cheap highs / Grade twelve, expelled, never learned my lesson." – I knew I had found my new favorite band.

I never saw the original Neighborhoods with John Hartcorn on bass, but did see a couple of shows in 1982 when Tim Green was in the band. That was the band’s "noise" period when it really seemed they were going out of their way to alienate the old fans. They almost lost me, but once bassist Lee Harrington came into the fold it seemed like they found the perfect balance of punk, pop, aggression and melody. For some rockers in the early-80’s it was The Replacements articulating the stories of their lives. For me it was The Neighborhoods.

After the band broke up in 1992, David Minehan went on to play lead guitar in Paul Westerberg’s first post-Replacements touring band in 1993 and you’d best believe that was that a dream matchup for this Ohio rocker. I saw that band in Cleveland that same year and have a great bootleg of them playing at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey. You should hear it sometime.

The ‘Hoods reformed in 2004 and rock to this day. God bless The Neighborhoods, and all that they stand for.

The Neighborhoods on Boston cable TV in 1979, I believe neatly beating their most obvious influence (The Jam, at that point) at their own game. Inspirational verse in song two, No Place Like Home – "First grade, straight A’s / I was a good boy / Grade 6, grades slipped / I was losing interest / Fun time, grade 9 / Fools for friends and cheap highs / Grade 12, expelled / Never learned my lesson." – David Minehan, 1979. Easily the story of my life.

The Best Of Everything

2012-01-13T01:51:00.000-05:00

January 12, 2012

some best-of lists, for my obsessive/compulsive brothers & sisters, some parameters so everybody knows where I’m coming from in this growing old with rock & roll game…..

The Best Of Everything

Top Five English Rock & Roll Bands

1) The Rolling Stones

2) The Who

3) The Kinks

4) Mott The Hoople

5) The Beatles

honorable mentions; The Clash, The Yardbirds, Fairport Convention

Top Five American Rock & Roll Bands

1) The Velvet Underground

2) Buffalo Springfield

3) The MC5

4) The New York Dolls

5) The Lovin’ Spoonful

honorable mentions; The Dictators, The Stooges (original band w/ Ron Asheton on guitar),

The Modern Lovers, Aerosmith (in the 1970’s only)

Top Five Singer-Songwriters Backed By Killer Rock & Roll Bands

1) Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band

2) Elvis Costello & The Attractions

3) Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

4) The Patti Smith Group

5) David Bowie & The Spiders From Mars

honorable mentions; The Jim Carroll Band, Lloyd Cole & The Commotions

Top Five Singer-Songwriters

1) Elliott Murphy

2) Lou Reed

3) Bob Dylan

4) Neil Young

5) Richard Thompson

honorable mentions; Leonard Cohen, Steve Earle, Dave Alvin,

Lucinda Williams, Alejandro Escovedo, Hamell On Trial

Top Five Individuals Without Whom Rock & Roll Would Not Exist

1) Chuck Berry

2) Buddy Holly

3) Elvis Presley (there you go, cousin Catherine)

4) Little Richard

5) Jerry Lee Lewis

honorable mentions; Alan Freed, Johnny Cash, Leo Fender

Top Five Wastes Of Talent In All Of Rock & Roll

1) Elvis Presley (sorry, cousin Catherine)

2) Brian Wilson

3) Rod Stewart

4) Syd Barrett

5) Alex Chilton

Top Ten Albums Of All Time

1) Aquashow / Elliott Murphy

2) Who’s Next / The Who

3) A two-record set Velvet Underground import from Germany I bought used for $3 in 1973

4) Kick Out The Jams / The MC5

5) Get Your Ya Ya’s Out / The Rolling Stones

6) The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle / Bruce Springsteen

7) The New York Dolls (self-titled first album)

8) Catholic Boy / The Jim Carroll Band

9) This Year’s Model / Elvis Costello & The Attractions

10) The Modern Lovers (self-titled first album)

Top Ten Live Shows Of All Time

1) The Who / Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium, Columbus, Ohio / Nov. 1st, 1969

2) Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band / Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium, Columbus, Ohio / Sept. 1st, 1978

3) Romantic Noise / Columbus Riverfront Amphitheater / May, 1978

4) Bob Dylan & the Hawks / Veteran's Memorial Auditorium, Columbus, Ohio / Nov. 19th, 1965

5) Mott The Hoople, Robin Trower, and Aerosmith (bottom-billed!) / Mershon Auditorium, Columbus, Ohio / Oct. 19th, 1973

6) Brownsville Station / Valley Dale Ballroom, Columbus, Ohio / Summer, 1970

7) Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Rockpile and Mink Deville / Wilson Audoritorium, Cincinnati, Ohio / May 17th, 1978

8) T-Bone Burnett (solo, opening for Elvis Costello) / Ann Arbor, Michigan / Easter Sunday, 1984

9) Blue Oyster Cult / Ohio Theater, Columbus, Ohio / June 3rd, 1975

10) Watershed / The Basement (opening night), Columbus, Ohio / Feb. 5th, 2005

author’s note: Admittedly this was my toughest category to pick. Some of you are going to say, "Ricki, you saw The Doors in 1968, you saw Jimi Hendrix TWICE, in ’68 & ’70, you saw Cream, and Janis Joplin and now you’re going to try and tell us Brownsville Station and Watershed were BETTER than them?" Well yeah, I guess I am. The Doors and Hendrix shows at Vet’s Memorial probably do belong on this list, but The Doors and Hendrix have become so legendary to succeeding rock generations that I now can’t separate the myth, legend & hype from the shows I witnessed. The Who, on quite the other hand, just a year later were so monstrously amazing & rocking that I remember every ear-splitting moment of the show. (I couldn’t hear anything clearly for three days after that show.　 I essentially went through three days of high school like a deaf mute boy out of Tommy.　 Maybe that’s what Pete & Keith were going for.) And while we’re on the subject of 60’s acts; Janis Joplin was kinda weepy & weak, rock-wise, and Cream BLEW the Sunday night I saw them. I resent Eric Clapton to this day, find him hopelessly overvalued as a rock guitarist after their non-performance that night in ’68. Even as a child I KNEW they just wanted their show in little Columbus, Ohio to be over with so they could go on to a big city.

Fuck Eric Clapton.

Top Five Celtic Rock & Roll Bands Of All Time

1) The Pogues

2) The Pogues

3) The Pogues

4) Shane MacGowan & The Popes

5) The Pogues

author’s note; Chris Clinton, I might need some help with this category.

additional author’s note; Can someone please explain to me what in the name of Cuchulainn The Pogues’ "If I Should Fall From Grace With God" has to do with hockey moms and Subaru SUV’s?　 I fully realize that quality dental work is expensive these days, but come on, Shane, Subaru?

Top Five Twenty-First Century Rock & Roll Bands

1) The Strokes

2) The White Stripes

3) Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros

4) The Avett Brothers

5) Green Day

Five Bands That Started Out Great And Ended up Horrible

1) Pink Floyd

2) Eagles

3) REM

4) Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

5) The Strokes

Top Five Authors

1) F. Scott Fitzgerald

2) John Steinbeck

3) Kurt Vonnegut

4) Joan Didion

5) Larry McMurtry

Top Ten Movies

1) Tender Mercies

2) Taxi Driver

3) To Kill A Mockingbird

4) Night Shift

5) Caddyshack

6) Nashville

7) The Godfather part 2

8) Used Cars

9) Pulp Fiction

10) True Confessions

honorable mentions; all Woody Allen movies before 1980, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Children Of Men, Lost In Translation, Superbad

author’s note; Kyle and Debbie, you might wanna e-mail me a list of movies I’ve forgotten, this list doesn’t look right even to me, and I compiled it.

that story about yellow springs

2012-01-13T01:31:00.000-05:00

January 11, 2012

I suppose if I ever write a rock & roll novel it will either be called After The Second Set or I Love Distortion. Here’s another chapter of that rock & roll novel.

Flyaways

Nicole and I never actually flew on an airplane anywhere together, but we had little outings we called flyaways.

Our main and favorite flyaway destination was Yellow Springs, Ohio. In 1978 Yellow Springs was a tiny town housing a small liberal college. Actually, "liberal" might not be a strong enough term. "Radical" might have more accurately fit the bill. The first time I visited Yellow Springs in late 1969 or early 1970 with my high-school best friend and band mate Dave Blackburn, we signed up for a course at the Student Union called "Making Molotov Cocktails." I am not making this up. At Antioch College, utilizing wine bottles filled with gasoline and detonated by oil-soaked rags to set fire to things or blow things up was a legitimate college extension course at their New School. I loved higher education in those long lost hazy hippie halcyon days.

When Nicole and I first landed in Yellow Springs (after an abortive trip to Dayton, Ohio, where a Greg Kihn Band show had been cancelled) in spring 1978, it still seemed to be 1969 there. This was heaven to Nicole, who at 18 years old desperately longed to be a part of the 60’s counter-culture and "The Revolution" that she felt she had missed. I might say that was a large part of my 25 year old former college revolutionary and rocker appeal, but that would diminish my then still-smoldering dark good looks, so I won’t. That first night, as we wandered the Antioch campus, we happened upon a perfectly laid-out miniature Japanese garden. A Japanese garden in the middle of a small town Ohio college campus, we felt it had been put there exclusively for us.

The building that housed Antioch’s music department had these cool little rehearsal rooms with pianos in most of them and truly great acoustics. Nicole and I often went there to finish songs and work out arrangements before we presented new tunes to our somewhat deficient rhythm section. (Bass & drums were sometimes a problem in our band. We were essentially trying to play punk/pop music with a heavy-metal grounding, neatly anticipating grunge by about 12 years.) So one truly gorgeous early summer Friday evening we headed to Yellow Springs with five new songs I had written that week. I had actually written three of those five compositions in one day, something I had never accomplished before that and now 34 years later have not accomplished since. And these weren’t throwaway tunes, they were really good, strong songs we added to the set the weekend after that. Nicole and I were running on inspiration then, rock & roll meant everything to us, we felt we could do no wrong.

We were running through the new songs in one of the rehearsal rooms, working out harmonies, melodies and arrangements. It was really warm out and at one point I was sitting in the open window of the room playing guitar while Nicole sang. A group of about ten kids had gathered on the front steps of the music building to listen and started yelling up at us to come down and play for them. I wasn’t really up for that. I was a rock band guy, I felt like we required our amps, bass & drums. I needed volume, only folkies played acoustic. Nicole, however, also sang in a country music close-harmony four-piece family band with her mom & dad and younger sister, so she was all for it. Plus she was a born performer, craved those stages and lights, even when it was only the front steps of a college lecture hall under shimmering summer starlight. Everywhere anytime was a show for Nicole.

Over the next hour or so we wound up playing just about every song we knew together as the crowd on the little plaza grew to more than a hundred students, townie kids and faculty. Looking back it was probably the largest audience we ever played to. And we killed ‘em. It was like we could do no wrong. I never would have believed we could have sounded that good with just one unamplified acoustic guitar and Nicole’s lovely voice ringing out through the velvet summer night air. We debuted the new songs we had just arranged that night. One of those tunes, Go West, Young Man, with its chorus of "Go west, young man / At least as far as Yellow Springs," was a natural to hook that audience. Nicole turned it into a sing-along at the end, used that patented rock & roll stage bit of dividing the crowd up into competing halves, and having them sing against one another. It was great.

Finally, somewhat inevitably, around 11 pm the Antioch campus cops – who to that point had been standing unobtrusively around the outskirts of our impromptu little music happening – came up and asked us to move people along. There was some desultory shouting at the cops, pretty obligatory at Antioch, but no molotov cocktails got thrown, thankfully. The cops even let us pick our ending song. We finished, as we always did, with I Love Distortion, our set-ender, our theme song, our anthem, but it wasn’t quite the same on acoustic guitar, in soft warm moonlight, with no feedback, no crashing drums, no punk-rock heavy-metal thunder, as it were.

A bunch of people shook our hands or high-fived us before they melted away into the gorgeous June night. They thanked us for playing, a couple of people gave us hugs. It was truly heartfelt. We never played better than we did that night. It never occurred to us to play in that configuration again, just Nicole & me, acoustic pure & easy. We went right back to the rock & roll grind for as long as it lasted.

I remember us making out later, leaning on Nicole’s car kissing. I came up for air at one point and the streetlights on that quiet campus street were glowing all hazy. I said out loud to Nicole, "Is this love or oxygen deprivation?" She just grinned and brought her mouth back up on mine.

"this town’s got you spread all over it
like a fine layer of art
made to break my heart"

from that song about yellow springs © 2001 Ricki C.　

After The Second Set

2012-01-13T01:26:00.000-05:00

January 9, 2012

Essentially, everything in After The Second Set is autobiographical and true but when I wrote the original short story in 1984 (hence the Lloyd Cole & The Commotions reference in paragraph six) I played with the chronology quite a bit. The Christmas album story is basically something that happened to Dave Blackburn and I sometime really early after high school. Dave got kicked out of the session for suggesting that he could, at age 18, arrange and conduct the assembled musicians better than the 30 year old producer who hired us could. And then I got booted for pretty much exactly what I detail in the story. That session took place in the early 1970’s.

"Nicole" is a pseudonym for the girl with whom I broke up my marriage in 1978. We didn’t really meet this way, we met rather more prosaically, definitely less romantically, while working together at a K-Mart store on West Broad Street. I did, however, actually fall in love with her the very first time I laid eyes on her, that part is absolutely, unfortunately, painfully accurate.

I began my solo acoustic rock & roll act in 1990, 12 years after the action in the story, not the six weeks I portray here. Some things just take longer to get over than any one of us ever really wants to admit, or believe.

AFTER THE SECOND SET

I have this theory.

I have this theory that God creates new stars in the universe so that babies who die before the age of three months will have something bright, shiny and warm to play with. And while I acknowledge that this theory has precious little to do with currently accepted scientific fact I really don't care, I still believe it. I don't come up with these theories because I want to, it's because I have to. I live in Ohio. I play the guitar. Not because I want to, because I have to. I have to.

I used to be married.

My ex-wife and I go way back. The Velvet Underground was still a functioning rock & roll band when we first met. They'd broken up by the time we got married though, so we couldn't get them to play at our wedding reception. The reason I'm not married anymore is because one time I played loud distorted electric fuzztone guitar on a version of Frosty the Snowman.

Perhaps I should explain.

This one cool September wine bottle kind of day I was sitting in my apartment listening to Lloyd Cole & The Commotions' first album when I got a call from the manager of The Rollercoasters, a band I used to be in, and he wanted to know if I wanted to play a session for a Christmas album. "A Christmas album?" I asked. "A Christmas album." he repeated. Now it's true, I know my way around an electric guitar, I could make some noise, but I didn't see how that qualified me to play on a Christmas album. Extreme volume and the Nativity just don't mix.

I took the gig. I needed the money.
　
I didn't really need the money, but people always think they need the money, you know how money is. It's like the eternal Biblical prophet Robert Zimmerman once sang, "Money doesn't talk, it swears." On the way to the session I stopped at my buddy Greg's house to pick up my amplifier. Greg was the "road manager" of The Rollercoasters until we broke up. I place quotes around the term road manager in Greg's case because we never actually went on the road and he didn't know anything about changing strings or tuning guitars but he was 6'5", weighed about 280, was a former biker & semi-pro football player and could keep us from getting beat up when we played in bars we shouldn't have, which was often.

I had stored my amp at Greg's house ever since my upstairs neighbor at the apartment building where I lived threatened to, "Make my face look like Hot Ralston the next time I make noises like that." one night when I was writing a song called I Love Distortion. I took said neighbor at his word. He was a large, ugly human being with much hair, some of which was actually on his head.

Greg owned a house because he made relatively good money working at General Motors in the daytime and made great money selling relatively harmless drugs to teenagers at night. It always made me nervous to be at Greg's house for any period of time though, because his living room always resembled a pharmaceutical factory more than it did a living room. There was always somebody kinda slumped over on the couch, there were baggies and scales and different colored capsules strewn around on the coffee table and a fine patina of pot dust all over everything. I don't know if that's how your mom kept house when you were little but mine didn't. We were Italian.

I grabbed my amp and hit the road quick. I knew the studio address, it was in one of those industrial parks by the outerbelt. It was nicer and more expensive than anyplace I'd ever gotten to record. Not that I'm an audiophile by any means, I'm not one of those artistes that has to have his every shading and nuance captured on tape. Nick Lowe's production credo for the early Elvis Costello & The Attractions records, "Bash it down and we'll tart it up later." is much more my cup of tea, as the English would say.

When I got there I left my amp in the trunk and just took my guitar in with me. I figured if I didn't like the scene I could always tell them that my brother was choking to death on a chicken bone in the car and I had to take him to the emergency room, so I couldn't play the session. But then as I scanned the room where there were 15 or 20 musicians hanging around – horns, keyboards, strings, the whole nine yards – I focused in on the group of singers gathered around one of the vocal mikes. One of them was the loveliest girl I had ever seen in my life. In blue jeans and a Carlene Carter t-shirt this girl portrayed more grace and elegance than an Audrey Hepburn film. This girl was a vision. This girl was a daydream.

She glanced over at me and smiled. I stayed for the session.

While I was setting up my amp and pedals and trying not to stare at the singers every spare moment the engineer for the session came over. "Hey man, weren't you Sean that used to be in The Rollercoasters?" he drawled in a marijuana haze. "Actually I'm still Sean that used to be in The Rollercoasters." I replied, but he didn't laugh. He just nodded blankly, stroking his almost-bearded chin. He stuck out his hand and I tried to shake it but he went into some bizarre Masonic soul-shake and we ended up just kinda bumping hands. I could never keep track of those trendy secret musician handshakes. I guess I'll never be in the club. Or in the union.

"So what year Stratocaster is this," he asked, running his hand over the neck of my guitar, "are these the original pickups?" I groaned quietly. I knew these guys. Just about every engineer and soundman I have ever worked with are people whose mothers were frightened by a Sony Walkman when they were pregnant with them and the poor guys never recovered from the experience. They know everything about cycle & hum & rollover and nothing whatsoever about music. They always want you to come over and see their $8000 stereo DVD/CD 12-disc changer surround sound set-up and when you ask what they have to listen to it's always inevitably something truly horrific like Creed and Radiohead.

The engineer noticed me staring at my daydream girl, stopped asking stupid questions about my guitar and started babbling, "Hey man, that's Nicole, she's a babe and a half, isn't she? She sings great, too. Voice like an angel, pure and clear, I set up a special vocal mike for her. Don't bother talking to her though, man, she's a real cold fish, I tried for her myself, she just cut me off flat." "What'd you do, ask her if she wanted to go out in your van with you and smoke a joint?" I said. His red eyes widened as he replied, "Yeah, man, did she tell you about that? I thought you just got here." I was about two seconds away from smashing my Strat into his temple over and over and over until he looked like something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie for even daring to speak to the woman I loved when I realized that I was contemplating murder, hardcore homicide by deadly weapon/blunt instrument guitar over a girl I had first seen 20 minutes ago, to whom I had yet to speak a word.

It hit me hard. I'd fallen in love. It was just that quick, just that easy.

Have you ever been so miserable in your life that you don't even know you're unhappy? You just go through the motions every day, numb to the possibility or even the existence of joy? I didn't know it yet but a bright light was about to be shone on that shadow world I lived in. My wife was a shy little girl when we got married too young. Now she wanted babies & a house and I wanted dark, loud bars and guitars. I wanted a daydream.

I live in Ohio. I play the guitar. Not because I want to, because I have to. I have to.

The producer walked over and jolted me out of this reverie. He introduced himself and told me, "I've known your manager Grant since we rowed sculls together at Harvard, you come highly recommended to our little project." I would imagine I came highly recommended since the Grant I knew was more apt to be snorting coke off his large oak desk at the law firm where he worked than rowing sculls on some foggy Cambridge morning. Time passes, pastimes change.

The producer was one of those people with time on his hands and money in his pockets who was usually found directing community theater groups out in the suburbs. He was wearing a blazer with a crest, for Chrissake. But apparently the guy had a musical bent as he enthused, "I think the people of our United States here in the new millennium want and need a Christmas album with an up-to-date theme, something that celebrates the proud new financial barons of our proud new age."

I thought he was joking and started to laugh just as the musical director handed me the sheet music to Frosty the Snowman, only "Frosty" was crossed out and "Bill Gates" was filled in. I was going to be playing guitar on a song called Bill Gates the Snowman. I stared at the page in front of me. The original lyrics were all crossed out and new ones about Puget Sound and the Microsoft Corporation were filled in. I knew it was indecent but was this even legal? There are copyright laws in this country. I looked over dumbfounded at the bass player, a big guy I'd seen playing with jazz groups around town, and he read my mind. He laughed ruefully and said, "Yes, believe it, my man, a tune we already cut is now called Donald Trump Is Coming To Town. Only somehow I don't think old Donald would mind replacing Santa Claus. That cat’s got an ego. He'd eat this shit up."

I was about to walk over and introduce myself to Nicole, but I was struck so shy by the sight of her that I couldn't seem to get my legs to move when the session was called to order and I didn't get a chance. My job on this song, as it was explained to me by the producer over the studio PA talkback, was, "To create a fairyland of musical dissonance, a psychedelic overture to Frosty's, I mean Bill's, arrival." In other words they wanted about 30 seconds of distorted drivel at the beginning of this piece of crap. The bass player stifled a laugh as I stared at the producer behind the control room glass.

The next 45 minutes were a nightmare. Every take of a three-minute song was cut off because of something I played: I was too fast, I came in at the wrong place, I played too psychedelic, not psychedelic enough, it was too menacing, not Fantasia enough, the litany went on and on. My personal favorite though, was "You're too loud." I was always too loud. My amp was set on two, I swear to God. I played as softly as I could and I was still too loud. After the twelfth take was cut off with a curt, "It's still too loud." from the producer I lost it and yelled back at him, "I'm mixed below the fucking oboe player and I'm still too loud?" Nicole burst out laughing at this, a fact I was enormously heartened by, but nobody else did. The producer glared from the control room and said in a strangled, fake patient voice, "You have one more chance to record this tune correctly, young man, and then perhaps we'll have to rethink our direction and bring in someone with some musical talent."

No one had actually called me "young man" since the vice principal of my high school each time he suspended me. I didn't like it then and I didn't like it now. Take 13. As the song was counted down and my part came up I leaned back, ran my amplifier up to ten, stomped on my distortion pedal and launched into a free-form solo that was an ear-blasting combination of the Jimi Hendrix version of the Star Spangled Banner, The MC-5's Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa and the more ragged moments of The Patti Smith Group demolishing My Generation in 1976. I mowed down the horn section with a brace of Pete Townshend windmill leaps and took out the strings with a firestorm burst of feedback. My feet got tangled up in my power cord and just at the point where I hurtled into the drum set with a truly inspirational crash of cymbals and hardware somebody pulled the plug on my amp.

As the din died away I looked around. Grown men were actually holding their ears and crying. The oboe player had fainted and was being fanned with sheet music by the music director. They had to physically restrain the producer from getting at me; he was red in the face, screaming, spitting, his blazer was ripped at the shoulder. As I started to untangle myself and my Strat from the drum set a hand came up in my view. I looked up and it was Nicole staring down at me with a look of real concern on her face. "Are you all right?" she said, as our hands touched. "Wanna go out?" I asked, looking up from the floor.

Nicole grinned.

The first time I ever kissed Nicole was on a bridge.

It’s that one by the river student union on campus. I could show you the spot sometime.

If this was a classic novel instead of a rock & roll short story I would go into exacting detail of everything that followed that first kiss. I would tell you how I left my wife and moved in with Jeff, the bass player from Rave-Up, the band I had before The Rollercoasters. I would tell you how Nicole and I found Jake, a hot new drummer, by prowling campus bars like Café Rock & Roll night after shining night. I would tell you about Niki & The West Side Rockers, the band the four of us had together. I would tell you how we played live like fire. I would tell you about the first songs I wrote for Nicole; That Girl’s A Daydream, I’ve Never Heard A Quiet Girl Sing. I would tell you about the songs Nicole and I wrote together – I’ve Got My Favorite Action, Lonely Lonely Rock & Roll, Rise From The Suburbs – how she wrote the words, played rhythm guitar & sang lead and how I wrote the music and burned Stratocaster contrails on stages all over Ohio & Michigan. One time we opened for Sonic's Rendezvous Band in Ann Arbor. I still have the poster from that show. I could tell you how after the second set we used to leave the equipment breakdown and load-out to Greg & Jeff & Jake and float out of clubs arm in arm, her head on my shoulder, our ears ringing, poetry in our heads and peace in our hearts. I could tell you how we brought a rewritten I Love Distortion back into the set and ended our shows with it while kissing deep and simultaneously rubbing our guitars together at groin level in what one local rag described as, "A crass display of simulated sex." We were so proud of that review we hung it on the fridge.

I suppose I could tell you how soul-deep the actual sex was with Nicole, but I'm not Roman Polanski. I could tell you how her head would toss in the dark and her hair would fall in slow motion short perfect brunette waves over her lovely face. Let's just say that making love with Nicole felt just like Bruce Springsteen’s Candy's Room sounds and leave it at that. I could tell you about hazy summer nights in Yellow Springs. I could tell you about sunny Sundays by the river. I could tell you how I once wished we could be just like Richard & Linda Thompson and how I learned firsthand the lesson of that Chinese proverb, "Be careful what you wish for."

I could tell you how Nicole stayed with me just long enough to finish my marriage but not long enough to postpone her own. I could tell you how she left me without a goodbye, quit the band, married a fireman, moved to the suburbs and became a housewife. I could tell you how she broke my heart, but that wouldn't be strictly true, I broke my own heart on her. I could tell you how I took over center stage and kept the band together as a trio until the songs Nicole and I wrote & sang together began to burn a hole through my guts from the inside.

I could tell you how on the last night of the gigs we had to honor I smashed my Stratocaster to kindling at the end of I Love Distortion. I walked away that night and quit the music business forever.

Six weeks later I bought a black Alvarez acoustic guitar and started playing solo gigs at coffeehouses and bookstores. I live in Ohio. I play the guitar. Not because I want to, because I have to.

I have to.

original short story © 1984 Ric Cacchione

updates & rewrites © 2012 Ricki C.

Mott The Hoople (Bonus Video Friday)

2012-01-13T01:19:00.000-05:00

January 6, 2012

This is installment one of "The Five Best Bands That You Never Saw" segment of Growing Old With Rock & Roll.

(Those of you who know me well might realize that this classification may grow to include seven, to ten, to 37 "Five Best Bands That You Never Saw.")

Mott The Hoople

I first saw Mott The Hoople on June 13th, 1970, exactly one week after I graduated from high school, at the Cincinnati Pop Festival. (Other bands on the bill that day: Alice Cooper, Traffic, The Stooges, Mountain, plus down-the-bill acts like The Damnation Of Adam Blessing, SRC, etc.) (I fell over a fence and split my head open within 20 minutes of getting out of the car that morning in Cincy. It was a banner day for rock & roll. There may be an entire Growing Old With Rock & Roll entry on that festival someday, but not today.)

Anyway, Mott The Hoople was one of the best live acts I ever saw that day and it kick-started a love affair with the band for me that persists to this day. Ian Hunter was a GENIUS front man, pulled out his entire Jerry Lee Lewis bit that summer afternoon; pushing over his electric piano, playing it behind his back, generally raving & looning like a rock & roll madman. But Mick Ralphs (later of Bad Company, bad move, Mick) on lead guitar, Overend Watts on bass, Verden Allen on organ and Buffin on drums were not some hired-hand back-up group, Mott The Hoople were a BAND, Jack. Those five guys played live like a burning bush out of some Biblical vision.

The fact that Mott The Hoople has never been nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, let alone inducted, to me invalidates the very concept of that Cleveland landmark. Ian Hunter wrote the song "Cleveland Rocks" and put our North Shore Ohio cousins on the rock & roll map, for Chrissakes, what more should it take? (And before any of you rock aficionados out there point out that The Band’s "Look Out Cleveland" predates Ian’s tune, let me say; 1) "Look Out Cleveland" was not a very good song, and, 2) The Band were hippies and Mott most definitely were not. So, advantage Mott The Hoople, Mott The Hoople wins, Mott The Hoople RULES!)

HAPPY BONUS VIDEO FRIDAY AFTERNOON, EVERYBODY!!!!!

I saw Mott The Hoople do this "Sweet Angeline" stage bit (bringing a woman out of the audience for Ian Hunter to sing to) twice, in 1973 and 1974. It went great both times; the participants were in their twenties, loved being serenaded by Ian, loved being onstage with the band. The teenager in this video, however, is THE MOST uncomfortable person I have ever seen in a rock video. I've seen prison footage where people appear to be having a better time than this girl. Hilarious and rocking.

© 2012 Ricki C.

Colin and the Stairwell

2012-01-13T01:11:00.000-05:00

January 4, 2012

I joined the road crew of Columbus, Ohio’s pride & joy rock band, Watershed, sometime in February of 2005. At that point the band consisted of Colin Gawel, lead vocals & lead guitar; Joe Oestreich, lead vocals & bass; Mark "Pooch" Borror, guitar & backing vocals; and Dave Masica, drums & backing vocals. Mike "Biggie" McDermott was the road manager, my boss, and was, and is, sometimes the brains of the outfit.

Colin and the Stairwell

When Watershed hit the road we stayed in a really nice chain of national hotels (which shall remain nameless) because we used to stay for only $35 a night, owing to a family connection to one of the band members (who shall remain nameless because I don’t want said family member to lose their job). Only two members of the band would actually register at the hotel, but all six of us would pile into one room to sleep and cadge the free hot breakfast buffet the next morning. The first four guys asleep shared the two beds, Dave always slept in a sleeping bag on the floor owing to a bad back, and whoever was the last to crash would just lay down on
whatever was left (room couch, two chairs pushed together, rolled up in a blanket on the floor, wherever).

One of those hazy nights somewhere in the South I awoke sometime before 6 am to find Colin standing over me in the dark saying, "Ummm, we might have to leave the hotel early." There was a hotel security guard standing in the doorway of the room, surveying the murky scene of five band and road crew members strewn around the room, and he didn’t look happy. (I don’t think the profusion of beer bottles and guitar cases lightened his mood either.) Colin told me that he got really drunk and disoriented, somehow left the room in the middle of the night, couldn’t find his way back, and wound up falling asleep in the stairwell of the hotel. He got kicked awake by the hotel security guard and against all odds remembered our room number, now we’re probably getting booted out.

I just kinda murmured, "Oh, Colin," rolled over and went back to sleep because I figured I could get at least twenty more minutes of rest before we were thrown out. Amazingly, either the security guard never reported us or the management of the hotel decided to give us a break because nobody ever came to kick us out. All six of us ate breakfast in the hotel dining room later that morning, I cadged my usual yogurt and banana for lunch in the van and we rolled out for the next gig. We were never blacklisted by the hotel chain and nothing ever came of the incident.

Thank you, Mr. Security Guard, wherever you are today.
　
　

© 2012 Ricki C.

The Bathtub

2012-01-13T01:03:00.000-05:00

January 2, 2012

many of you already know this story, but it seems so integral to the theme of
growing old with rock & roll I feel it bears repeating here…….

　
The Bathtub

I was 13 years old in October 1965. Eighth grade just was not working out. I had been a shy, book-reading child, now hormones were kicking in. I loved rock & roll but I just knew I was NEVER going to know how to talk to girls. (This was years before I got a hold of a guitar.) One really bad Saturday night I decided to kill myself. I had it all worked out. I had seen a movie just that week about a guy getting electrocuted when a radio fell into the bathtub he was in. (I was a very impressionable child.)

After everybody had left for the evening (my mom and dad were working their second jobs, my sister was on a date, my brother was at the bar) I went around the house and found a radio with a cord long enough to reach the bathtub. I ran the bath, plugged in the radio, settled into the warm water, said a little prayer for forgiveness, and let the radio drop. What I hadn't factored in was that although the cord was long enough to reach the tub, I hadn't filled it full enough. Right when the radio hit the water the plug pulled out. I got a nasty shock, I was seeing big purple and black blobs in my field of vision, but it didn't kill me.

I lifted the radio out and laid there in the water a few minutes to let my head clear. I got out and ran some more water in the tub until I was certain I had the right water level for the job at hand. I plugged the radio back in and what was playing? "Get Off My Cloud" by The Rolling Stones. I stood there naked, dripping and chilly, eighth-grade skinny, and listened to the whole song. Right at that moment I quite literally loved that song more than I loved life itself. And then a thought came very clearly into my head – "What if the next Rolling Stones single is even BETTER than this one, and I never get to hear it?"

I set the radio down on the sink, got back in the tub, took a bath and went to bed. If "Danke Shoen" by Wayne Newton or "Roses Are Red" by Bobby Vinton had been playing at the moment I plugged that radio back in I'd be dead now. Long live the Rolling Stones. So began a life of rock & roll.
　
　
© 2012 Ricki C.

Introduction

2012-01-12T14:53:00.000-05:00

January 1, 2012

In exactly six months (June 30th, 2012) I will turn 60 years old. I do not mind telling you, dear reader, that this thought terrifies me. I don’t mind telling you, I am not going to have an easy time with 60. I will not have an easy time turning 60 years old because when my first rock & roll best friend Dave Blackburn and I planned out our future rock star lives at the end of the 1960’s when we were 17 or 18 years old Dave projected us dying in an airplane crash the day before our 30th birthdays. (Though Dave never explained to my satisfaction HOW that was going to be possible since we were going down on the same flight but had wildly different birthdays.) Anyway, I never had any plan beyond 30 and have basically been making it up as I go along for the past 29½ years.

So, this chronicle will attempt to communicate EVERYTHING I currently know about rock & roll music in that six month span. It will be part autobiography (real, mis-remembered, and imagined) part journalism, part best-of lists, part video-shares of bands I love, part geographical on-the-road stories, some song lyrics and/or song uploads and whatever else I think of along the way and damn well feel like sharing. This memoir will go out as a series of e-mails to a carefully selected list of my contacts, but feel free to forward it to anyone you like. It will not appear on a Facebook page because I don’t believe in social media. (All of my first and second grade report cards noted pointedly, “Richard does not play well with other children.” That has never changed or gotten any better.) At some point we may upgrade to a blog format once my I.T. Department (i.e. my lovely wife Debbie) figures out how we, meaning she, would accomplish that.

And trust me, you won’t be getting deluged with e-mails. They definitely won’t be coming every day, perhaps not even every week; though I hope not more than 10 days will pass between posts. If I go over 14 days, somebody please write and badger me for additional material, someone please keep me honest & productive.

This introduction was written with pen & paper in the Baltimore Airport just after Christmas, 2011. I appreciate the ease and facility of writing on computers, but man do I love buying notebooks and pens.