Life on Planet Rock

by Lonn Friend

  I swallowed hard, took a deep, yogic breath, and flashed back to Sherman Oaks, the days in my room playing the records, singing the lyrics, forgetting about anything and everything except how much I loved the music and the men who played it.

  Sir Paul hugged Jon and Richie, chatted for an instant, and then came face to face with your humble narrator. I reached out my hand and we shook. It was one of those intimate shakes where one takes the hand that’s not doing the shaking and joins the hand that is effectively sandwiching the hand of the individual being shook. I wanted to bottle that moment and take it with me. Eye contact, an instant of pressed flesh, and he was gone. Hello Goodbye.

  I loved Paul in the innocent days of my childhood. But Lennon was the Beatle I yearned to meet, because as my life unfolded, he fascinated me more and more. As my journey got more complicated, John’s songs really began to resonate.

  The first Plastic Ono Band LP, Imagine, and Walls and Bridges are existential works, comprised of beautiful yet punishingly truthful songs that are as strong as his best Beatle efforts. But given that he was a solo artist for almost a decade before his untimely, violent departure at the hands of Mark David Chapman, Lennon’s musical output was relatively sparse. Nevertheless, he remains my most-beloved personal rock-’n’-roll hero, and the day he died, millions of fans—myself included—felt a part of themselves die too.

  I was home listening to the radio in my bedroom. The dial was tuned to the great old L.A. rock station KMET-FM. “A little bit of heaven, 94.7, KMET, tweedeedledee.” Luminary DJ Jim Ladd was in the middle of a set when he broke in and told us that he’d just heard the news today. Oh, boy. While most of America was watching Monday Night Football and getting the sad scoop from TV color man Howard Cosell, I was in my room, just like the Beach Boys song. In my room, where I’d spent hours spinning the Beatles, mourning the terrible loss of John Lennon.

  Later that night, I drove fifty miles southeast of Sherman Oaks to Anaheim, home of Disneyland, to join Terry Gladstone, a disc jockey for the Orange County rock station KEZY-FM. She was on air playing Lennon, angry and despairing, like so many of us were. I got to know Terry by calling the station when she was on air and talking about music with her. Our friendship was born over our mutual love of the Beatles.

  I sat with her in the studio until 2 A.M., selecting my favorite Lennon tracks to share with the audience of fans who were feeling the pain just like we were.

  When a legendary artist is taken, the fans have nothing left but the music to console them. That’s what I did after the death of Lennon. I went back and listened to the albums, more deeply this time.

  When we are faced with the challenge of darkness and loss, music can offer an explanation, comfort, a way out. So it was when the light of another Beatle faded shortly after Thanksgiving 2001. It was early Friday morning in Miami Beach. I was spending a couple days at the palatial estate of MTV/mass-media legend Les “the Garman” Garland, a mentor and friend since my RIP days. I was out on the back grass adjacent to the Garman’s pool, doing my morning meditation, when the perfect silence of a warm Florida sunrise was broken.

  “Bud,” said the Garman, using the name he’d given me almost twelve years ago when I first met this indefinable, spectacular fellow. “It’s George, Bud. He’s gone.” I didn’t understand. “Only two left, Bud. Very sad day. Very sad.” Recognition, like a bucket of ice water on a Buddhist monk. I sat in stunned silence, shaking my head.

  Gliding through the various cool environs of Club Garland, I passed through the billiard room and noticed the framed Beatles plaque with an original ticket stub from Shea Stadium. Went nicely with the photograph of him in the late ‘70s passing a joint to Paul McCartney backstage. Garland has so many magnificent mementos from an incredible career that began in radio around the time the lads landed in New York City. He cofounded MTV, The Box, and The Tube, and I’ve watched him do his thing since we met on a RIP road trip in the late ‘80s. On November 30, 2001—the day after George Harrison took off for the sun—Garland was simply a friend, a fellow grieving fan, and the afternoon‘s fabulous DJ.

  Upon returning to L.A. later that week, I played Abbey Road for Megan (who was then ten years old) for the first time. This was her virgin long-form Beatles encounter. I could feel it when I popped the CD into my car deck after picking her up from school and she took the jewel case from my hand to examine the cover. This was that moment I’d been imagining for years. The passing of the torch. I never pressed it. I had already endured countless hours of stomach-wrenching, corporate-pop crapola. Britney. N’ Sync. Pointless, purposeless, soulless audio nothingness. In the blink of a beautiful adolescent eye, the course was changed.

  “This is George, right?” she asked, pointing to his image, half knowing the answer already. “Was he the youngest?”

  “Yes, he was,” I responded. “This photograph was taken on Abbey Road in London, where the Beatles recorded—Abbey Road Studios. See how they’re all walking with their left foot first, except Paul? It was part of this ingenious rumor that Paul was dead.” I was in storytelling nirvana, my genetic reflection of beauty times ten listening carefully.

  “They scattered clues over several records,” I continued. “See the license plate on the car? 28 IF. Paul was twenty-eight when this album was recorded. At the end of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ on Magical Mystery Tour, you can hear John clearly say, ‘I buried Paul.’ And then, this was the weirdest, if you played ‘Revolution 9’ from the ‘White Album’ backward—you could do that with vinyl—it sounded exactly like ‘Turn me on, Dead Man.’ ” My daughter was fixated. I was on a roll.

  I tried to explain to Megan that everyone was a Beatles fan back then. The band connected us to one another. She didn’t really get what I was trying to say until I grabbed for a piece of Hollywood symbolism, recalling the mashed-potato scene from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which lots of people started seeing the image of Devil’s Tower—the landing spot for the aliens. I explained how these “touched” individuals were feeling something that they didn’t really understand. They just knew they weren’t alone in that shared sensation. It was beyond their control. That was the Beatles. They had landed and we all wanted to see them, feel them, and most of all, hear them.

  I wanted Megan to at least get a sense of how the Beatles were bigger than anything. “They were a thousand times bigger than the Backstreet Boys, who, by the way, will be completely forgotten in five years,” I lectured.

  “They’re already over, Dad,” she fired back, nonchalantly.

  Thank God, I thought.

  Elton John wrote in the January 17, 2002, issue of Rolling Stone, “George was the sage of the Beatles. He found something worth more than fame.” I was finding that, too, here in that time of professional and personal confusion.

  I didn’t actually see a Beatle in concert until April 5, 2002, in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the MGM Grand events center, when Paul McCartney launched his first solo tour since the Off the Ground campaign in 1993, which I also missed. Ditto for the Flowers in the Dirt trek of 1989-1990. But that was then and I had another chance, and this time, McCartney took not just the tunes to the road but the eternal memory of his fallen brothers, John and George.

  The night was magical. Paul played and played and we shook, rattled, and rolled with every divine musical punch. From the melancholy performances of “Here Today” and “Something”—tributes to his departed brothers—he and his band ran through “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Getting Better,” “Let It Be,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” and so many more, culminating with the main set closer, “Hey Jude.”

  Throughout my life, I’ve celebrated the music of the Beatles. So many songs, all so beautiful, the grandest, most untouchable catalog of melodies the world will ever witness. I was born with the Beatles. I will probably die with them too. In fact, I’ve already written them into my eulogy. I hope I don’t have to use it any time soon, but as the boys said, tomorrow never knows.

&nb
sp; 5

  The Amazing Journey

  I LEARN BY GOING WHERE I HAVE TO GO.

  —Theodore Roethke

  “Why are you flying to London?”

  Points two and three of the Friend family triangle knew they were asking a rhetorical question, but I reiterated for argument’s sake. After six months of unemployment and a dwindling bank account, they deserved an explanation. “I have $500 credit on British Airways,” I explained. “I found a sixty-dollar-a-night flat in Paddington.” Those were logistical adjuncts. I swallowed hard and coughed up the real reason. “I’m going to see the Who,” I confessed. “They’re playing the theater in Portsmouth, where the movie Tommy was filmed. I can’t explain. I just need to be there.”

  It was four months after September 11, and I was in a cataclysmic funk. Most of my days were spent sitting out back in the guesthouse, composing existential missives for distribution to my e-mail list. The only thing I hadn’t lost faith in was rock ‘n’ roll. When the Towers fell, I sought comfort in the bands of my youth. And one of the bands that made me who I am was the Who.

  They arrived in my life on the heels of the Beatles. The record that introduced me to these four new lads from “over there” was a mind-blowing double-sized concept LP simply titled Tommy. A year after John, Paul, George, and Ringo had ignited my senses with their double dose of psychedelic rock, the “White Album,” here was something even more ambitious because it had a theme, a thread, a story, that Ron Meyers and I could really sink our curious minds into.

  It was as if Ron and I had met an imaginary new friend, a deaf, dumb, and blind boy who would hang out with us after school in sleepy Sherman Oaks and take us far, far away from ourselves. The music was the spaceship and Tommy was the pilot. “Come on the amazing journey,” they sang, “and learn all you should know.” Our skinny arms did not need twisting.

  Looking back, I realize that “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” the closing anthem of Tommy, may have provided me with my first, unconscious experience with mantra. “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me,” cried vocalist Roger Daltrey He crooned like the man in the talus who sang the Hebrew prayers in temple during high holidays.

  Listening to you, I get the music,

  Gazing at you, I get the heat.

  Following you, I climb the mountain,

  I get excitement at your feet.

  Two Jewish kids from the Valley had no clue how big a picture the prophet Pete was painting. Rock stars weren’t human back then. They were mythological creatures who had no contact with real people.

  We read the liner notes and producer credits, and knew that some sort of process was taking place, but it was irrelevant to the end result—the music and what it was doing to us, where it was taking us, how it was changing us. If you had told me at age fourteen that someday, in the future, I’d not only meet the prophet but also break bread with the cantor, well, I’d have called you some kind of wizard.

  Elaine found me from across the Atlantic in 2000 while I was working as editor in chief of the streaming hard-rock Web site KNAC.com. She fancied herself a writer and began sending me intelligently scripted e-mails attesting to her devout love of music. I took Elaine under my wing. She came to the States that summer and interned at the online station, brightening the studios with her UK accent and headbanging enthusiasm. I had little doubt that when I got to Heathrow, Elaine would be waiting for me.

  “This is Jamie, Lonn,” she said with a shy smile. I’d gotten the advance profile via e-mail. New Jersey born, he was very good with computers, loved rock, and apparently, loved Elaine. The ten-hour flight from L.A. for me and the six-hour train ride from Glasgow for them were the main legs of the trip, but we still had another two hours by ground to get to Portsmouth.

  The damp, cold wind blew strong off the Channel as we disembarked at our seaside destination. It was 4 P.M. We didn’t know what time the show started, where the venue was, where we’d be staying for the night, or even if my friend Rod Smallwood, chairman of Sanctuary Group in London, was able to procure last-minute tickets. I’d sent the charismatic Cambridge graduate (who had built an empire on the managerial shoulders of one of metal’s most enduring institutions, Iron Maiden) an e-mail just the day before. He forwarded my note to his assistant, Dan McKinley with the accompanying directive: “Dan, the Who boys visit Sanctuary all the time. Suss Lonn out for the show.” The note was passed onto the company’s “it girl,” Angie Jenkison, who also happened to be a longtime friend of the Daltrey family. We had, as the Brits would say, “no worries.”

  “Where would the Who be playing tonight?” I asked the cabdriver who picked us up in front of the bus station. “Only one place, the Guildhall.” We got out of the taxi in front of a Tetley Hotel boasting “Single Room, 36 pounds per night,” which comes out to about fifty-five dollars. Worked for us. We secured two rooms, rested for a bit and rendezvoused in the lobby at 6.

  The three of us strolled out into the Portsmouth night. We cased the venue first, a brief ten-minute walk from our hotel. The Guildhall is a glorious old Gothic building in the town’s main square. It looked like a place where politicians rather than rock bands would perform. The steps in front were scattered with early arriving fans. A door to the right of the entrance appeared to be the guest window. “The list will be here at six-thirty,” reported the portly sir in charge of the gateway. “Let’s have a pint and some dinner,” I said. We agreed and floated into a pub across the road where I ordered the British Isles beverage of choice, the indefatigable Guinness.

  We were united in the kingdom of proof. The culture here is pub, not pop, where life is played out in smoke-filled, wood-paneled caverns where accents merge, genders collide, and the melting pot percolates in dialogue of a hard day’s work giving way to a hard day’s night. After dark is when Britain bristles. I take note of a blonde in tight leather pants with the sliced bells at the bottom, doing her dance for a captivated crowd of tweed-coated gents with pink-hued cheeks and yellow-tooth smiles. They’re not concerned what time the gig starts because they’re not going. This is the event—countless sips on flapping lips— like it is every evening.

  An occasional drink before a historical rock concert is one thing; making the pub your nightly stop on the way home from work is another. But who was I to judge? Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes and you shall know of their struggle. Rock a mile in mine and you’ll understand what I was doing half a globe away from home, broke and with an angry wife, waiting for the band to hit the stage.

  My glass was empty and showtime approached. An envelope with just my first name on it was waiting at the window. Tenth row. Dead center. The inside decor was ‘70s drab and drafty, complete anathema to the Gothic, glorious external architecture. I wondered if the architects were knocking back the ales across the street when they got around to the interior.

  “This looks like the place where my mum and dad used to go dancing when I was a kid,” observed Elaine, who was only twenty-two but possessed the wit, wisdom, and musical heart of someone years older.

  “The balcony is cool,” I observed. Then I glanced at the stage and saw the instruments laid out across the platform. Entwistle’s four-string machete caught my eye first. And next to it, the prodigious six-string wand of the Wizard.

  The lights dimmed and the crowd wailed. “I Can’t Explain” started it off. The set list was wondrous. This was the triumphant return of the Windmill, the single most significant demarcation of Townshend’s onstage rebirth.

  They smoked through several songs from Who’s Next. In the exhaustive and analytical liner notes for the twentieth-anniversary commemorative reissue of his seminal solo endeavor Who Came First—released by Rykodisc in the fall of 1992— Townshend explained the film project that inspired the recording sessions that spawned the tuneage perfecto that would eventually become Who’s Next.

  “The Lifehouse idea was very simple,” he wrote. “It was a portentous science-fiction film with Utopian spiritual messages into which were
to be grafted uplifting scenes from a real Who concert. I was selling a simple credo: Whatever happens in the future, rock ‘n’ roll will save the world.” I’m still not sure if rock ‘n’ roll is capable of saving the world, but as I watched that show unfold that night in Portsmouth, I was thankful that it had at least saved me.

  “How many of you were here in 1974?” Townshend asked the Portsmouth crowd. The band performed a free show in this building for the local extras that week as a thank-you. From the thunderous applause, one could assume everybody around me had been in the room that night. How magnificent for these hardworking, loyal local rock fans to relive the bells, buzzers, and whistles of that night. But beyond that—as Pete whirled into the cataclysmic opening riff of “Pinball Wizard”—how incredible that the strains off the stage were as strong and sweet as they’d ever been.

  The machine-gun intro to “Pinball Wizard” is cemented in rock culture. Townshend’s acoustic wrist play sucks us in like a vacuum, but the song—no, the ride—doesn’t begin until the first, bombastic bang of Entwistle’s mighty bass. It is so fat, so authoritarian, so goddamn heavy, it almost stops the song before it starts. But therein lay a critical fact about the Who: John Entwistle did not play the bass guitar, he invented it.

  The Ox in performance was a perfect balance of stoic beauty and blinding speed. Entwistle manipulated the instrument with digital precision while holding redwood stature. Once he took his position stage left, that is where he stayed; his feet never strayed from their spot. All movement took place at the ends of his insanely long arms, which ended in two of the most fluid, cantankerous hands to ever caress a four-string. He was “Flight of the Bumble Bee” fast, surgically precise, yet completely free form.