Ladies & gentlemen, here’s the deal: Over the past couple of weeks there’s been a Perfect Storm of circumstances that have led me to consider taking a little break from blog-dom, or blog-icity. (I refuse to call it "the blogosphere.") First; I’ve started playing out again in my solo acoustic rock & roll format and have discovered that the part of my brain responsible for songwriting is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT & FOREIGN to the part responsible for producing prose pieces. (See Throwin' Red Meat To The Base, March blog entry.) Second; my editor and I.T. Department (aka my lovely wife Debbie) is taking a little East Coast trip to serve as the I.T. Consultant for her mom and aunt as they get new laptops. Third; my boss at my day-job is heading to Florida for his mother’s memorial service and I will be working open to close at our beloved little indie record store for the next two weeks. None of these circumstances bode well for new blog entries being written, let alone posted.
I promise that this will be no more than a two-week hiatus. (And who knows, if we get our Sound Cloud process together, we might start posting some Ricki C. tunes during that time along with the lyrics and the literary pieces that accompany them.) In the immortal words of Adny Shernoff – "Steppin’ out, steppin’ out, steppin’ out for a little while….."
The mighty Dictators performing "Steppin’ Out" in 1977. Great clip that would have been SO much better if those damn San Francisco hippies could’ve figured out that the lead vocals switch back & forth between drummer Richie Teeter and songwriter Adny Shernoff. (Put down the joint, Mr. Camera Man, please put down the joint.)
inspirational verse; "Hey Lord, I’m reaching right up to ya / Touch me or I’m just another crooner / This love’s gonna be written down in history."
author’s note; First reader who writes & identifies what song the line "This love’s gonna be written down in history" is quoted from by Adny wins a prize from Growing Old With Rock & Roll.
ps. Bonus Video Friday will very likely continue uninterrupted.
The Dressing Room is installment seven of A Life Of Rock & Roll. Parts one & two – The Bathtub and The Transistor Radio – can be found in the January blog entries; parts three, four & five – The Guitar, The Band and Dave Blackburn – in February, and part six – The Apartment – earlier in March. This is the final section of A Life of Rock & Roll.
The story continues & concludes in the 12-part serial I Love Distortion in the 2013 section of Growing Old With Rock & Roll, in probably more detail than you would care to read.
THE DRESSING ROOM
1975 - 1977
And then the rot truly set in.
If I thought getting a band together in 1973 was hard, nothing had prepared me for the doldrums of those dreary days just before and after The Bicentennial. By 1975 Mott The Hoople & The New York Dolls had both broken up and by '77 Elliott Murphy, though neither he nor I realized it yet, had already released his last major-label record. My earlier naively rosy view that those three were gonna be The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan of the New Era of Rock & Roll was just not about to come true. By 1976 The Ramones’ first album was out, but punk was a long way from impacting the Midwest. And truthfully I had a working-class rocker mistrust of the artier side of punk rock. I didn't go for the "Look at me, look at me!" dress-up aspect of punk. I didn't trust The Sex Pistols and, as it turned out, I was right. Those art-poser sissies barely lasted out their first American tour. Aerosmith would have laughed at them, and I’m sure, probably did.
I had bands going all through those years, but nothing really all that good. I felt like I had the songs, but I never had the right combination of people. It's sometimes hard to remember in these days of the internet, Facebook, media overkill, etc. just how hard it was to find even three like-minded music people in those long-past, dull, grey days. Shows were few and far between. It was almost impossible to get gigs in West Side bars playing original music that derived from The MC5 and The Dictators more than from Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Allman Brothers, the Holy Triumvirate of low-life lunkhead rock. The ossification of rock & roll had begun. The idea that everything old was genuine & good and that everything new was scary & bad, all the precepts that engendered and defined classic rock radio, were taking hold.
Somewhere in all of that I got married. My wife never stood a chance against rock & roll. You will never hear me say one bad word about that girl. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was ultimately horrible to her. We started out great at 18 or 19 years old, the world was set out in front of us. It was ours to conquer. By our mid-20's all of her friends were settling down, getting married and having kids. She wanted a house and a baby. I wanted dark, loud bars and guitars. It couldn't end well and it didn't. Still, we're friendly to this day, 30 years later, so I guess it wasn't all bad. Time heals all wounds, or wounds all heels, one or the other, or perhaps both.
The nadir of my rock band existence was one night in December 1977 in the dressing room of a bar on Sullivant Avenue. The bar in earlier years had served as an airplane hangar when there was still an active West Side airport. My then-current band called, oddly enough, The Strokes, years before Julian Casablancas was even born, had played a typically dispirited first set to a scattering of equally dispirited drunks. I was sitting on a metal folding chair in the dressing room with my head in my hands, trying desperately to figure out WHY I was still playing music after all this time for so little return. That was the moment my lead singer, Cliff Phillips, chose to come in and proclaim, "Ya know, Ric, if you don't start writing me some songs where I can go out there and shake it for the ladies, we're gonna have a problem."
I raised my head out of my hands, looked up at him and said quietly, "Okay, Cliff, YOU'RE fired. Would anybody else like to join him?" The drummer tentatively raised his hand and I said, "Okay, you're also fired, but you have to finish the second set. Cliff, you get the fuck out." Cliff just looked down at me, read on my face that I was serious and slammed out of the dressing room. I sang the last set, badly, the bar owner paid us less than half the money we were due and as I drove home through the cold that night I said out loud to myself, "What about a girl lead singer? How much trouble could that be?" If Bruce Springsteen had called me up in 1984 when he hired Patti Scialfa to join the E Street Band I could have saved him a whole heaping helping of trouble. (See After The Second Set blog entry, January 2012.)
I fully admit it, I was lazy this week. Spring started, we had three 80-degree plus days in a row (many years, especially recently, there is stilll snow on the ground in Columbus, Ohio, when spring starts) and it was too nice to sit in the basement and commit memory to computer. So when spring starts, my mind turns to power-pop and when my mind turns to power-pop I begin at Sparks' "This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us." Enjoy.
In June of 1979 I was working in the warehouse of a K-Mart discount store on the West Side of Columbus, Ohio, and writing for a local rock weekly called Focus. My one and only cover story for the magazine came when they sent me to interview Bon Scott of AC/DC at a downtown hotel and then cover their concert that night. (Said cover story is reproduced below.) My boss at K-Mart, Jim Mills, gave me an extra long lunch break to go downtown for the interview, which was scheduled for 11 am. I thought that to be an unusually early call for a rocker like Bon Scott and I was proven correct. A few minutes before noon Bon staggered into the Holiday Inn conference room I had been ensconced in by an Atlantic Records publicity woman. She had run out of excuses for Bon’s tardiness about a half-hour earlier and had left me to my own devices.
Bon was great. He was already drunk at 11:55 in the morning, introduced himself and we got right down to the business at hand. By my third question – "Have you ever had an orgasm onstage?" – I think Scott had realized that it wasn’t going to be a pro forma interview. He grabbed my notebook away from me and demanded, "What else you gonna ask me then, if I ever fucked me mudder?" By 12:30 when the Atlantic Records woman came in to call a halt to the proceedings Bon and I were laughing along like old friends. I got him to autograph my baseball glove (I was big into softball from my 20’s to my 40’s) and then had to explain the entire concept of the sport to Bon, which he claimed never ever to have been aware of. "Sounds stoopid," was his estimation of The Great American Pastime, "doesn’t anybody ever get punched in the mouth like in rugby?"
Publicity woman said, "We’ve got to go now, Bon, lunch is ready." We shook hands as I stood up to leave and Bon said, "Where do ya go now?" I told him I had to go back to the store where I worked. "’Ave you had lunch, then?" he asked. "No, I’ll have something at work," I replied. "Well, stay and ‘ave lunch with us," Bon said. "He’s not having lunch with us, Bon," the Atlantic Records lady cut in. "Do you wanna stay and ‘ave lunch?" Bon reiterated. "Yeah, I’d love to," I said. Ms. Atlantic was now staring daggers at me, she was totally pissed at my lack of professionalism, but my only thought was that I was going to get a much better lunch out of this deal than the K-Mart cafeteria had to offer.
At lunch I was seated across from Angus and Malcolm Young, all the way at the other end of the table from Bon. I think that was my punishment from the publicity woman for cadging my way into a free meal. They had cordoned off a corner of the dining room for the band because back in the day you had to have a coat & tie to eat in the dining room of the Downtown Holiday Inn. (The hotel is still there, it’s the one right across the street from the Greyhound Bus Station. I’d be willing to bet that you don’t have to have a coat & tie to eat there anymore. And I also bet that nowadays you just might be able to get crack from room service, or at least from a bellhop.)
Angus and Malcolm never said a word to me. And I soon discovered that Angus couldn’t order his own meal. I just sat and stared as he perused the large, leather-bound Holiday Inn menu, then turned to his older brother Malcolm and slurred, "WhasshouldI’ave, Malcolm?" "Have whatever you want, Angus." came the curt reply. Malcolm didn’t even look from his own menu to answer his little brother.
Angus returned to looking intently at his menu, narrowing his eyes and hunkering down to make it abundantly clear he was really giving it his utmost consideration. "ShouldI’avebreakfussorlunch, Malcolm?" It was a plaintive question from the notoriously fierce little lead guitarist. "Have whatever you want, Angus!" was the testy, shot-back reply from Elder Sibling.
In the end, of course, Malcolm wound up ordering Angus’ meal for him. Just as inevitably, when the food arrived, Angus took one quick look at his plate, one longing look at his brother’s dish, and asked sheepishly, "Can I have some of your food, Malcolm?" Malcolm never replied, completely ignored his little brother, and the two never exchanged another word for the rest of the meal. There would be no sharing. It was genuinely sad to watch Angus pick at his food in that swank hotel dining room. He couldn’t have eaten more than four bites.
That was my first glimpse ever into the bubble that rock stars exist inside of on big-time rock & roll tours. To this day I don’t know whether Angus Young just couldn’t decide what he wanted to eat that afternoon or if he literally COULD NOT READ the menu. At any rate, the editors at Focus took out virtually all of my lunch story, as they thought it would piss off Atlantic Records if I implied in print that Angus Young was illiterate. (I had already caused RCA Records to pull all of their advertising for two entire issues when I suggested that Canadian metal-clowns Triumph "wouldn’t know rock & roll if it fucked them in a closet," in a derogatory live review earlier that year.) They also changed Bon Scott from already drunk at noon to hung-over.
Eight months later, February 19th, 1980, Bon Scott was dead from some combination of alcohol poisoning, aspiration of vomit or hypothermia, depending on which magazine you read and who you believe. At any rate, massive amounts of alcohol were involved. When I heard about it I thought back to that June afternoon. Bon Scott was the happiest pre-noon drunk guy I had ever or have yet encountered. Some rock stars just are not supposed to get old. Would I enjoy watching a 65-year old Keith Moon embarrass himself on some endless Who-reunion tour in 2012? Nope. Do I wish Pete Townshend had lived up to his hope and died before he got old? Sometimes.
editor's note: If the text in the reprint is too small for you, go to VIEW on your browser menu, select ZOOM, then select a number greater than 100%, according to my I.T. department.
Occasionally in my job as road manager for Hamell On Trial there were perks; genuine perks, once-in-a-lifetime perks. One of those took place in the summer of 2008 when I got to meet and hang out with Alejandro Escovedo.
For the uninitiated, I consider Alejandro Escovedo one of the five best singer-songwriters currently criss-crossing this great land of ours, trying to spread the gospel of rock & roll. (The other four, for those of you scoring at home are, alphabetically; The Avett Brothers, Hamell On Trial, Richard Thompson, and Jack White. Elliott Murphy would be listed here but he is normally found crisscrossing the European continent.) I further consider Escovedo America’s answer to Ian Hunter, in that he combines the same superior intellect with a passion for rock & roll power and the ability to simultaneously break your heart with a ballad and pummel you with an all-out rock onslaught, sometimes within the same song. (Regular readers of this blog will realize I do not throw comparisons to Mott The Hoople’s former frontman around lightly.)
That summer of '08 Hamell was playing an arts & music festival in Bowling Green, Ohio, at which Escovedo was also booked. Ed and Alejandro are friends from way back. When Ed first moved to Austin, Texas, in the 90’s he sought out Escovedo for advice, counsel and gigs, all three of which Alejandro was happy to provide. A genuine friendship ensued. Ed’s introduction of me to Alejandro backstage was, "This is my road manager, Ricki C., he saw The Stooges and The MC5 live when he was still in high school." Alejandro fixed me with a gaze, shook my hand, and said, "We have to talk later."
And so it was that I wound up sitting at a picnic table at The Black Swamp Arts Festival in Bowling Green, Ohio, talking rock & roll with Alejandro Escovedo.
Now you’ve gotta understand – Alejandro Escovedo is one of my big rock & roll heroes, one of my favorite songwriters of the past 15 years. Sitting and talking with him put me right back into my shy, quiet, 13-year old, eighth grade self (see The Transistor Radio blog entry, January 2012). As we sat and talked on that warm evening I found myself really wanting to shout to the other performers and crew members who were eating & hanging out in the backstage canteen area, "HEY, LOOK YOU GUYS, I’M TALKING TO ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO!!!" Luckily for any sense of rock & roll cool or decorum I had managed to accrue as Hamell’s road manager, I didn’t shout. (Out loud.)
We talked about Mott The Hoople and how the perfect mixture of deep feeling and loud guitars met right in the blood flowing through Ian Hunter’s heart. We talked about The Kinks and the battles between brothers in rock & roll bands, including Alejandro’s and big brother Javier’s fights in their 1980’s band, The True Believers. We talked about the aforementioned Stooges and MC5. I told Alejandro about pissing next to a smacked-out & wasted Johnny Thunders in the bathroom of the Second Chance club in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1979 during a weekend road trip to see Fred Smith’s mighty Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. Alejandro told me about offering a wasted Iggy Pop a ride in his car during one of Iggy’s down & out late-1970’s Los Angeles nights. (Strange how often rock & roll conversations turn to the wasted.) We talked about heroes for life, we talked about wins and losses, we talked about shared sonic love affairs.
I fully realize that there’s very little chance Alejandro would recall that late summer rock & roll conversation. I also fully realize that I’ll never forget it.
The first Alejandro Escovedo song I ever heard - on Columbus, Ohio's WCBE -
"Gravity / Falling Down Again" from his 1992 debut solo record, Gravity.
Alejandro & band playing "Castenets" from the A Man Under The Influence
album (2000) at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, GA, 1/10/2017.
(blogger's note, January 2022; I felt like I had to go back in time and add this video from
the Austin City Limits 7th Annual Hall of Fame show - from an Alejandro blog I did for
Pencil Storm, the blogsite I write for now - because it's SUCH an epic performance.)
The Apartment is installment six of A Life Of Rock & Roll. Refer to The Bathtub, The Transistor Radio, and the three-in-one The Guitar, The Band & Dave Blackburn earlier in this blog for installments one through five…..
THE APARTMENT
I joined my bandmate and best friend Dave Blackburn for awhile in Boston, our band couldn't make a go of it, I didn’t like starving, so I came back home broke to Columbus and got my first apartment. My total earthly possessions at that time consisted of a borrowed sleeping bag, a Sears & Roebuck record player, my sacred books & records, and my Stratocaster & Fender Twin Reverb amp. It was the greatest time of my life. I got a job at a parking lot at Doctor's North Hospital making $60 a week. My rent was $120 a month. There was a 24-hour-a-day donut shop on the corner and, for atmosphere, an active train track running barely fifty feet from my bedroom window. I was in heaven. I was underage to sign a lease and was in no way making enough money to qualify for the apartment. God bless the landlady who took a chance and rented to me, I thank her to this day.
I hunkered down in my little one bedroom rock & roll bunker and began the arduous task of teaching myself to write music for my lyrics, something Dave had always handled in the past. I had no idea how to even start that process. I was a decent guitarist & lyricist, but had never written a note of music. The breakthrough came when I found a German import double-record set of the best of The Velvet Underground in a campus record store’s secondhand bin. As "Waiting For The Man" boomed out of my cheap speakers, all the light bulbs in the universe came on at once, the heavens opened and the angels spoke unto me, saying, "Ric, you don't have to be King Crimson, Pink Floyd, or even Rod Stewart. You can just bash out two or three chords, fine-tune the lyrics to a laser pinpoint and come up with little twists & turns to serve as hooks." Lou Reed became my teacher, my mentor, my savior.
The songs didn't come quickly, but since there was barely enough money for even food and guitar strings, my little apartment at 68 North Sylvan Avenue became a songwriting womb. I set out to write a ten-song set from scratch, with a definitive set-opener (like Lou's "We're Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together") and a dedicated set-ender (a la "After Hours"). As I was writing those first songs, three 1973 releases became my touchstones: the Mott album by Mott The Hoople, the first New York Dolls record and, pivotally, Elliott Murphy's masterpiece debut album Aquashow. The first verse of the opening song on that record contains the lines, "I've got a feeling on my back like an old brown jacket / I'd like to stay in school but I just can't hack it." Finances being what they were, college and I were never to cross paths again. I was now enrolled in the School of Hard Knocks and Rock & Roll University.
My next course after Songwriting 101 was Becoming a Band Leader 203. Finding musicians to play with proved to be a nightmare. When I emerged from my six-string laboratory with my killer set of new songs I discovered that nobody wanted to play them. Musicians I had known since I was 16 in 1968 were now 21 to 23 years old and were either selling insurance or playing James Taylor covers and were aghast at the idea of playing originals. "You wanna play original songs?" I was asked more times than I care to remember, by former friends now sporting shag haircuts and spangled bell-bottoms. "Why do you wanna play originals when we could do covers at the Ramada Inn and make some really cool cash?" The younger kids that had come up after me seemed more interested in the pharmaceutical aspects of rock & roll than in the actual playing of music. Everybody I auditioned seemed too drugged out to master even ten new songs.
A lead singer was the most immediate problem. Until punk hit later in the decade and rendered the concept of pitch moot, I just was not a good enough or strong enough singer to put my own songs across. And since all of my standards of rock & roll professionalism were (and still are) based on the 1969 Who, I needed to find a Roger Daltrey to complement my Pete Townshend stylings. Danny Summers was my first thought and best bet. He had been the 14-year-old freshman wunderkind of my old high school drama department when Dave and I were in our first year at Ohio State. He sang great and had unbelievable stage presence. You couldn't take your eyes off him, he had genuine charisma. He was David Bowie on a Midwest level. The fact that Danny's best friend in high school, Greg, was a bass player also added to his allure. I had already lined up a solid drummer, if I could get Danny and Greg to come in I could complete my dream band in one fell swoop.
It took me more than a month to track Danny down. My thought that I would have to talk him and Greg out of whatever big-money band they were currently involved in, that I would have to dazzle them with the obviously superior quality of my new material, was immediately dashed. I found that Danny was mopping floors at a West Side hospital and hadn't played music in more than two years. The person I talked to in that hospital corridor was literally a pale shadow of the golden-boy rock star that I had watched blaze across stages just four years earlier. I'll never forget the wistful look in his eyes as I made my pitch for rock stardom for him and Greg. "Uh, Greg doesn't play anymore," Danny said quietly, leaning on his mop, "he got really heavy into drugs and became just a really sad guy." I'm not sure he was talking only about Greg.
I left Danny with tapes of the music and lyrics to the songs and made him promise we'd get together to work on them. I tried my hardest to make my case for rock stardom, I really did. We rehearsed a couple of times but never even came close to getting that band to a stage. I've since read in my high school alumni newsletters that Danny died young, I don't even want to know from what. Today in 2012 I have a song in my set dedicated to him. Danny, I miss you. We should have been great.
Possibly the greatest lesson I learned from my teachers - Lou Reed, Elliott Murphy & Ian Hunter - was to take a memory and make it into poetry, as Hunter does here in "Irene Wilde." inspirational verse; "In my mother's Sunday room / I composed so many tunes / They was all the same, just a frame / For her name, and just the same / I'm gonna be somebody someday." - Ian Hunter, 1976
I wrote this song over the weekend; partly inspired by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band on Jimmy Fallon's show Friday night and partly by Jack White tearing it up on Saturday Night Live the next night. I realize it's kinda obvious and broad but something about it brought out the Woody Guthrie in me and I thought, "What's the use of having a blog if you can't use it sometimes for a little Instant Connection, Communication and Dissemination?"
In an odd bit of timing and because the Board Of Elections needs an equal number of Democratic and Republican poll workers, I'm working at a polling station for tomorrow's Super Tuesday primaries. This is odd because normally I try not to think about Republicans very much. For a party that ostensibly wants less government intrusion in our day-to-day lives and seems awfully interested in less regulation of rich white men, they seem terribly preoccupied with regulating what women can and can't do with their bodies; especially in the areas of contraception and abortion.
At any rate, one thing seems clear; Republicans wouldn't know freedom if it fucked 'em in a closet.....
Throwin' Red Meat To The Base
A co-ed from Georgetown, she’s takin’ the pill Then I hear from Rush Limbaugh; he’s makin’ me ill I can’t stand to look at his corpulent face Spewin’ his venom, throwin’ red meat to the base
Red meat to the base Red meat to the base In matters of contraception Rush is on the case Red meat to the base Red meat to the base Please join us here, Rush, in the human race
A co-ed from Georgetown, he called her a slut We’re all whores to Rush; no ifs, ands or buts These guys like their women in crinoline and lace Barefoot and pregnant, while the boys throw red meat to the base
Red meat to the base Red meat to the base You can ask for some compassion They’ll respond with mace Red meat to the base Red meat to the base It’s basic women’s rights they’re tryin’ to erase
A co-ed from Georgetown, and you and you and you We’re all in this together or we’re all Limbaugh stew If you’re lookin’ for some goodness, some class or some grace Don’t look to Fox News, busy throwin’ red meat to the base
Red meat to the base Red meat to the base You can pray for evolution But they’re well off the pace Red meat to the base Red meat to the base Basic common decency, they don’t show a trace
Sometimes just as sure as Paul McCartney plays bass G.O.P. stands for Government's Own Patsies, ace When those guys are throwin' red meat to the base
"Welcome stranger, to the humble Neighborhoods." Thus sang Joe Strummer on the song "Bhindi Bhagee" from The Mescaleros' Global A Go-Go CD, in tribute to Boston, Massachusetts’ favorite sons, The Neighborhoods. And while I know full well that this isn’t true – Strummer was singing about his London Notting Hill neighborhood in the tune – I still choose to believe it. I believe a number of things that I know aren't true: that Rush Limbaugh is not a member of the human race, but a representative of a devolved, degraded, doomed alien species; that the Catholic Church - of which I am a member in good standing - might someday enter the 18th, 19th, 20th, or even possibly the 21st century; that sometime in my future I will get to appear on either The Colbert Report or David Letterman's T.V. show.
One thing I believe that is true: The Neighborhoods are one of the five best live bands I've ever seen, and one of the five best bands that you never saw live.
An edited version of the following piece was originally published in my hometown daily newspaper, The Columbus Dispatch, in a column called "First Person" in 2007. "First Person" was (and still is) an attempt by The Dispatch at participatory journalism. Readers send in 700-1000 essays on a topic of their choosing that they think will be interesting to fellow Columbus readers. At my most forgiving, I find it a nice, inclusive gesture on the part of the newspaper. At my most cynical, I consider it a really cheap way for the editors to fill up column inches without having to pay an actual columnist. After perusing the first couple of months of "First Person" – which largely featured stories about people’s beloved pets or what they considered amusing anecdotes about their children – I decided that if I couldn’t contribute anything better I had no business criticizing the submissions. Once I got involved in the process I discovered that The Dispatch was highly editing and, in some cases, largely rewriting the submissions they received from readers. They flattened out the prose, I suppose to conform to some eighth-grade reading level they aspired (despired?) to. (I will say, though, somehow they wound up not taking out my three best one-liners.) The whole experience left me wanting to apologize to all the previous "First Person" authors, for thinking they were unimaginative white-bread writers, when in reality all along The Dispatch was watering us all down from the same editorial fountain. The following is my original version..... COLUMBUS DISPATCH / FIRST PERSON COLUMN / PUBLISHED APRIL 21, 2007 I’m writing this in a Cheesecake Factory restaurant in an upscale suburban Washington D.C. mall. It’s a Sunday evening and I’m surrounded by well-to-do families. I’m wearing jeans and a black t-shirt and clearly do not belong here. Where I belong is Columbus, Ohio, working a warehouse job and dreading the upcoming work week.
I’ve worked a lot of warehouse jobs in my life – Service Merchandise, Buckeye Mart, Gold Circle, K-Mart, Ross Laboratories, to name a few. Some of them were temp positions, most were full-time 40-hour-a-week jobs. The Service Merchandise job alone accounted for 16 years of my life.
I liked those jobs. I had completed three years of college before I ever set foot in a warehouse and I think for a time I believed it was a short-term thing. I played guitar and I was headed for the big time. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.) Maybe I fancied myself like that character Tom in A Streetcar Named Desire, writing poetry on boxes. After 20 years of unloading trucks, stocking, receiving, and shipping merchandise, it occurred to me that this might not be such a temporary existence.
My father worked in warehouses. I think that might have been another reason I thought of warehouse work as sort of a romantic way of life. I looked up to my father. He taught me everything I know about work and life. He grew up in Chicago during the Depression and left school after the eighth grade to start working full time. He was the supervisor of a Columbia Gas of Ohio warehouse in 1970 when he died of a heart attack at age 56. I was 17 years old. He had always wanted to travel. He never got the chance.
By January 2000 Service Merchandise had gone out of business and I was working for a (now defunct) record store chain, Camelot Music. One Thursday night I was lying on my couch reading when a voice came very clearly into my head, "Hey, check your pulse." My pulse was 38 beats per minute. A couple of weeks later, following a lot of tests and after various monitors had been applied to my person, a cardiologist informed me that my heart was stopping entirely for 5 or 10 seconds at a time while I was sleeping. To make a long story short, by the end of that week I’d had a cardiac pacemaker implanted.
Awhile before that I had opened a show for a rock & roll act out of New York City named Hamell On Trial (aka Ed Hamell). We hit it off and I would tag along when Ed played gigs around Ohio, pretending to be a guitar tech, but always returning to Camelot Music for the day shift. In fact, two days before the pacemaker surgery was performed my soon-to-be wife Debbie and my cardiologist barred me from working a Hamell show in Bowling Green, Ohio, because they were both convinced I would have a fainting spell while driving home and be killed.
Three weeks later, after winding around the south and through Texas, Hamell finished that tour with a date in Cincinnati. I drove down for the show. It was my first big outing after the surgery and recuperation. I walked into the club and said proudly, "Wanna see my incision?"
That night Ed told me he’d just been booked as Ani Difranco’s opening act for a two-week tour of California. He told me the tour was in three weeks, asked if I could I get off work to go along. I have always been the kind of person to play it safe, to protect myself, to not color outside the lines, to work in warehouses. Against all odds I said, "When do we leave?"
I’m writing this in a nice restaurant in an upscale mall outside Washington, D.C., because it becomes much easier to make decisions once your chest has been sliced open. Over the past seven years as a roadie I have seen this country, from sea to shining sea as it were. We started one tour in Atlanta, Georgia, and traversed the entire nation in a rented Ford to wind up in San Francisco, California, by way of New Orleans, Austin, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas, among others. Everywhere we visited I pointed out sights to my dad that I think he would have liked, if he'd ever gotten the chance to travel.
When I was a child I believed I would never leave the state of Ohio, ever, in my life. By the grace of God and rock & roll I have. I will someday die of a heart attack, as did my beloved father. But not before I saw America, and not today.
I fell hard for punk rock in 1976, there’s just no two ways about it. I had dabbled with the margins of punk as early as 1974, sending away for Patti Smith’s mail-order-only single, "Hey Joe" b/w "Piss Factory." Then in ’75 I got Willie Alexander’s "Kerouac" b/w "Mass. Ave." (complete with a nice personal note from Mr. Alexander, reproduced below). (I also sent away in ’75 to Ork records for the first Television single, but on receipt my reaction was, "Christ, MY bands are better than this." I found "Little Johnny Jewel" slapdash, amateurish & arty in all the wrong ways.) And I have to admit, the concept of sending away for a single through the mail really threw me. My rock & roll world was built on million-sellers. I believed in rock stars. I loved the concept of Number One hit records. I wanted the bands I played in to have their pictures up on little girls’ bedroom walls. I was raised on Paul Revere & The Raiders and The Lovin’ Spoonful, baby; nothing short of the top of the charts for this populist rocker.
But by 1976 Mott The Hoople and The New York Dolls had broken up, Elliott Murphy was on his second record label in three years (soon to be on his third) and disco & Peter Frampton ruled the charts and airwaves. Where was a West Side rocker supposed to turn? What could a poor boy do, ‘cept to play for a punk-rock band? By 1976 I had completely bought into the entire Year Zero concept that changed New York City’s Joseph Hyman into Joey Ramone and London’s Joe Mellor into Joe Strummer & John Lydon into Johnny Rotten. (I’m not even gonna dignify John Ritchie’s transformation into Sid Vicious in this grouping.) (While we’re on the topic, why was everybody in punk named John or Joe?)
My biggest problem with punk was the sheer, rampant unprofessionalism rife in the movement. An oft-stated maxim of this blog is: All of my standards of rock & roll professionalism are based on The Who in 1969. Given that stance, punk-rock circa 1976-1978 was gonna present a whole host of problems. Two cases in point…..
1) I’m pretty sure it must have been the summer of 1978 when I went to see local Columbus band Screaming Urge, who were then the darlings, if not reigning kings, of the local punk-rock scene. They were playing an outdoor show on the Ohio State University campus, I believe for some hemp-related Legalize Pot movement. (Which was problematic to me right from the start: What was a punk band doing playing a hippie fest?) They were pretty sloppy, pretty ramshackle, the songs weren’t great; they weren’t exactly The Clash in matters of tightness or cohesion, if you get my drift. And then, maybe a half hour into the set one of the guitar players broke a string. I expected at that point for a roadie to come out with a spare six-string, fix the primary and return it next song. No, there was no roadie, there was no spare guitar, there was no string changing, the guy just continued short-stringed on his axe. Two songs later, the OTHER guitar player broke a different string. Now there was a few minutes of serious head-scratching and conferring between the band members on how to continue. Their solution, which boggles my too-analytical, too-professional, too-OCD mind to this day in 2012, was for the two guitarists to TRADE GUITARS! For the life of me I couldn’t and still can’t imagine what that swap was supposed to accomplish. Both guitars were seriously out of tune from the slack of the missing strings, what possible purpose could trading them have served? The band limped through three or four more ever-increasing out of tune songs until the bass-playing lead singer couldn’t pitch his voice anymore to the "chords" the guitar players were discordantly bashing out. They would have been better off taking a string off one guitar and putting it on the other just to have ONE normally-strung instrument, and played as a trio.
And that’s when I realized; I was trying to apply 1960’s solutions to 1970’s problems. Your band can’t play in tune? Just say, "We’re anti-tuning, man." Drummer can’t play in time? Just adopt the stance; "We’re incorporating free jazz into our music, man." Lead singer can’t sing? Sneer and intone in a haughty faux-English accent, "We’re into atonality in our vocals, man, get with the times." Witnessing the sonic debacle that was Screaming Urge that night, who were supposed to be the "top-of-the-heap" Columbus punk, just further validated my then new-found affection and committment to Romantic Noise. (Willie Phoenix’s "punk" band, who were actually probably more power pop.) (Much, much more on Romantic Noise and Willie Phoenix in future segments of Growing Old With Rock & Roll.)
2) My ex-wife Pat and I visited Boston the summer of 1977. I was really totally in love with the Boston punk scene. To this day I think it was far superior to any of the other nascent, burgeoning punk scenes, easily topping New York City and even London, England. (And Los Angeles? Please.) I had sent away (there’s that mail-order thing again) for the Live At The Rat double album as soon as I read about it in New York Rocker (the paper that replaced Creem magazine as my mid-to-late 70’s rock & roll bible). This was to be my first visit to the Rathskeller Club that gave the album its name and the Boston punk scene its locus. So here’s the thing; I had been going to the Columbus Agora, my hometown’s flagship venue, for shows since 1968, after discovering it on a class field trip to the Ohio State campus conducted by my journalism teacher, Sister Ann Mary. (See blog entry Linda Timmermin and Scoring Heroin.) The Agora was a 1300-person capacity club and it was packed every time I went. Even before being signed to a major label deal with Casablanca Records (home of Kiss, among others) local heavy metal band The Godz could sell out the Agora pretty much any Friday or Saturday night they chose to play there. In short, the Agora was my template for rock & roll success.
So Pat and I wound up wandering up and down Kenmore Square (an area I knew well from previous Boston trips to visit Dave Blackburn as far back at 1971) looking for the Rat. I had the address written down, but we walked right past it twice because I was looking for a venue capable of holding 1300 people; my thought process being, "If Columbus, a town of under one million residents (at that time) supports a club like the Agora, a city of Boston’s population (four million, in 1977), has to sport a comparable venue." Oh, how very, very wrong I was. Pat and I finally stopped in the Kenmore Square Strawberries Record Store location and asked where the Rathskeller was. The counter guy just looked at me like I was from Mars, "It’s right there," he said, pointing out the window to the left. "Where?" I persisted cluelessly, still looking for a movie marquee-sized sign advertising that night’s bands. "Right THERE, right where those stairs are," he shot back, totally frustrated with my Midwest naïveté.
Pat and I walked down the short flight of stairs into a basement club that couldn’t have held more than a couple hundred people. The only employees there were a janitor mopping the floors and a guy stocking bottles behind the bar. The Columbus Agora had a dedicated, fully-staffed box office all day, every day. "We’re not open yet, whattya need?" the bartender asked. "Uhhh, we were looking to get tickets for the show tonight." "Tickets? You don’t need tickets, it’s Third Rail playing tonight, doors are at nine o’clock, just show up after that." "What if it sells out?" I replied. (Third Rail were one of the bands featured on the Live At The Rat album and fairly popular in town if I were to believe my Boston fanzine reading.) The guy actually laughed, "It’s NOT gonna sell out, believe me. Come back after nine."
We dutifully returned right at nine, paid our cover and settled in at the Rat. By 10 pm there were maybe 20 other people in the place. A camera crew of some kind was setting up in one corner and about 15 minutes before showtime Richard Nolan, the lead singer & songwriter from Third Rail, was going from table to table telling people that a news crew from one of the local T.V. channels was filming a feature about punk-rock for that night’s news segment. Further, he asked if we could, in his words, "Whoop it up and act really punk," that night for the cameras. Now, let’s delineate just the top three or four problems I had with this interaction: 1) On my rock & roll planet the lead singer of the headlining band does not come out and rub shoulders with the audience. I fully realized that punk was supposed to be leveling the playing field and bringing rock & roll back to its roots, but Jesus, let’s try to retain a little magic & mystery in the presentation. I found glad-handing the paying customers more suited to middle-school cheerleader tryouts than to aspiring rock & roll stars. 2) Should the lead singer have to ASK the audience to "whoop it up and act punk?" Wasn’t it HIS FUCKING JOB to get us to that state? 3) What was "acting punk" supposed to mean, anyway? Were we supposed to spit on him? Throw up on the floor? Pogo? I thought punk was supposed to be throwing away restrictions, now it was already becoming just a play-acting fashion show. 4) Why were there only 20-some paying customers at what I thought was a popular club presenting who I thought was a popular band?
As it transpired, Third Rail’s performance was shaky at best. Nolan was a self-involved junior-league Lou Reed-wannabe and I walked out of the Rat that night with a fuckload of my punk-rock preconceptions seriously shaken, if not obliterated. How could the top punk-rock club in Boston, Massachusetts, not be much bigger than the bar area of my beloved Columbus Agora? What did this mean about CBGB’s in New York City? (Which I had imagined must hold around 3000 people, given N.Y.C.’s population of 8 million.) Did this mean that maybe punk-rock was not the broad-based, fanatical fan-supported movement that was going to wipe the likes of Styx, Journey and Foreigner from the airwaves and stages of America? Was punk-rock just the invention and wishful thinking of a few big city rock critics?
The answer to that last question is, of course, "Yes." Looking back, I have to figure that The Sex Pistols probably played to less human beings in their entire 18-month "career" than Eagles or Fleetwood Mac did in just one of their late-70’s sellout stadium shows. The Clash fared somewhat better until that built-in "regular people aren’t supposed to like us, just a fringe element of really smart people we would like to have as friends" aspect of punk-rock reared up and fucked with Joe Strummer’s head, the same way it would decades later with Kurt Cobain's. Punk-rock ghettoized itself away from "real rock & roll" more and more completely as time wore on – its own clubs, its own haircuts, its own rituals – devolving into the inevitable "alternative rock." I wanted 1976 punk-rock to wipe the planet free of Led Zeppelin, Queen, and disco music. Instead I was rewarded with synth-pop, hair-metal and (dare I speak its name?) MTV. It was not a good trade-off. So where does that leave us in 2012? On the one hand we’ve got pop stars Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. On the other we’ve The Black Keys and Kasabian.
God help us.
postscript; I never stopped loving punk, of course, as it settled into its little rock & roll niche, especially Boston punk. I was playing the CD compilation I made from my records by The Real Kids just this morning as I was showering. And The Neighborhoods and Mission Of Burma are seldom far from my turntable or CD player. But from 1976 through 1978 and a lotta years after that Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band and Aerosmith certainly rocked umpteen more hours of mine than Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Lydia Lunch or James Chance.
The Patti Smith Group simultaneously honoring and expanding the 60’s on Saturday Night Live, 1976. I've come to believe that this period of the mid to late-70’s was the last gasp of the 1960’s baby boom rock generation. Either you made the leap to punk & new wave and rode that crest through the 80’s with REM and The Replacements and then onto someone like Alejandro Escovedo in the 90’s; or you hunkered down and became comfortably numb with endless repeat listenings of Pink Floyd, The Allman Brothers and The Grateful Dead, sucking at the teat of classic-rock radio for your 100,000th fix/repetition of Bob Seger doing "Turn The Page" from Live Bullet.
