Adios, Motherfucker

by Michael Ruffino

  In the dressing room a little while ago, stringing up. Door opens and Steve pops his head in and says, “Jackyl canceled.” Jackyl had a minor hit eight years ago, a generic twelve-bar blues, the singer revving a chainsaw over it, singing about being a lumberjack. No shit they canceled.

  Showtime. We’re onstage behind the curtain. Guys checking things, professional hustle. Then a light, stage right, starts to blink. It’s a countdown. Blinking, blinking. House lights must be going down, the crowd reacts. Look over at Eugene and as usual—instantaneous laughing fit, for a hundred reasons, none in particular . . . Blink, blink, blinkblinkblinkblink . . .

  Curtains open onto maybe eighteen people. One guy yells “Fuck you!” and another guy yells, “Dokken!” People walk in, no idea what’s going on yet and already booing. By the end of the first song, the crowd emits a unified, continuous boo. Almost like an ohm. Later a waitress walks by and whips a pen at me. People throw change, bottlecaps. What made it all worthwhile was toward the end of the set. A couple hundred people in the crowd at that point and a guy a down front is trying to get my attention, motioning, come closer. When I do he throws onto the stage a folded-up corner of paper, a note. I pick it up and read:

  You should change the name of your band to “We Suck.” Soon.

  He waits until I’m looking directly at him again, and flips me the bird. I returned two, of gratitude.

  Plenty more where that came from. Two, three weeks of it. Compared to the other option—being stuck on a traveling nü metal, pop punk circus, drowning in energy drink and Clearasil—I’ll take this, gladly.

  From: XXXXX@XXXmanagement.com

  To: The Unband, and 4 others

  Date: May 8, 1998 10:41 AM

  Re: Unband Tour Rider

  Yo!

  A little drinky bird told me your [sic] not getting any love with your hospitality and tech riders on this White Lion (?) gig. Probably just wording—some of the venues at this level get pissy/stingy about openers. Shoot whatever you’ve been using over to me, I’ll give it a look-see & have my new ass. put it on our letterhead if you want. Might help.

  Btw Greg says he saw you guys getting cuffed and stuffed by NYPD on Fri?

  Keep it real,

  H.

  From: The Unband

  To: XXXXX@XXXmanagement.com, and 4 others

  Date: May 10, 1998 2:23 PM

  Re: Unband Tour Rider

  Three cops in baggy NBA shirts and bling-bling, Matty thought they were House of Pain, that wigga rap band, told them to “jump around” on his cock. Cuffed, but not stuffed, Miss Management gets the save, again. Hey to Greg. Our current rider attached.

  Thanks for help, much appreciated.

  TU

  From: XXXXX@XXXmanagement.com

  To: The Unband, and 4 others

  Date: May 10, 1998 3:23 PM

  Re: Unband Tour Rider

  Yo—

  Are you fucking kidding with this??? This is what your [sic] advancing shows with? STOP. You guys need to address the following before you send this ANYWHERE:

  On page one re “Premium vodka” request, “enough to kill a man in one sitting” is NOT a recognized unit of measurement. Never mind the SERIOUS RED FLAG re liability. A NORMAL SIZE bottle of liquor is reasonable, but don’t count on all venues honoring it.

  Same re a “wifebeater of Jack.” Huh? Do you mean Jack Daniel’s? Request for beer is ok but recommend downsizing if possible. How much beer is in “a dollhouse”? Suggest you clarify.

  I’ve never heard of items 3, 4, and 5, and re # 8 I assure you a “babyfist of primo gack” is something you will have to get yourself. REMOVE.

  “Boar bile”????????

  Page 2 you use the phrase “ass-eyed maniac,” repeatedly. WHY????? Also “bed-wetting fraud,” “cocksmoking hedge-pigs,” etc. Advise you use “Promoter,” “booking agency personnel,” etc. for obvious reasons.

  Page 2 item #17. Venues provide security as appropriate. If said personnel happen to have “three years Krav Maga, two years tap” and wear “crazy-ass jackboots” then lucky you. Delete, obviously. What the fuck, dude.

  page 4 (the drawing??). what is this???? ARE THE CUBES WITH PENISES AMPS? WHAT—BIPLANES? MERMAIDS? HUH? ARE YOU GUYS 5YRS OLD??? If you meant to include tech info here, or info of any kind, you didn’t.

  on p.5 re “Misc. Demands”. Demands?!?? # of these that are acceptable: O. NONE. LOSE ALL OF THIS. Including “consequences” for “noncompliance” is NOT standard on hospitality/technical riders. WHAT THE FUCK IS THE PEAR OF ANGUISH????

  Seriously guys. This is go time. Don’t fuck it up with dumbass pranky shit like this. Fwd me contact from the latest venue, I’ll try to smooth over.

  —H.

  From: The Unband

  To: XXXXX@XXXmanagement.com, and 4 others

  Begin forwarded message:

  From: Ron Giuffrio (rong@xxxxxxxxx.net)

  To: The Unband

  Date: Sunday, May 12, 1998 2:23 PM

  Subject: UPCOMING UNBAND DATE

  Unband,

  We have a standard rider for our opening artists. Some of your requests do not meet specifications included in our original offer regarding this date.

  Mgmt.

  14

  THANK THE LITTLE PEOPLE

  Where was it? Not Boise but somewhere our path crossed with a guitarist friend on his way out of town as we were coming in. Nice, well-adjusted studio guy, very in demand on the metal circuit for years. We went for a beer and he told me a story about a metal band he’d worked with a few years back.

  The band was shooting a music video, a typical fantasy motif—a token Tolkien, Bonehead the Barbarian piece with armored horses, torchlit ghouls, feral women in animal skin bikinis, and an evil dwarf. Times as they are, the band had to do this with considerably fewer funds for sets than they might have hoped, despite being on a big label. Down but not out, the band found themselves an actual underground cave to shoot in, some point of interest off a highway, rather than a soundstage—plenty of dripstone and moon-drool, glittery gypsum, eerie lighting, and other things crucial to the denouement that would otherwise have been out of budgetary reach. These are show caverns, for tourists, kooky weddings, “outside-the-box” corporate events, and the band finds it easy enough to rent the place for the overnight, on the condition that the shoot clears out by the time the cave reopens for business in the morning. The evil dwarf, and I refer to the role here—I’m not sure what we’re saying these days to correctly refer to people of smaller stature, or, incidentally, to anyone else—gets all sorts of downmarket prosthetics glued to him, the usual B-grade ogre junk—pointy ears, tweaker fangs, and a monstrous rubber nose.

  Cameras roll. The dwarf does his job, ogling costume jewelry, hunching and snickering and wringing his hands, terrorizing the virgin (I refer to the role), so forth. Due to various production snafus, Aqua Net shortage, malfunctioning dragon head, whatever, the shoot runs long and has to stop; the cave has to be reopened for tourists. Production negotiates to resume shooting after closing. The dwarf agrees to stay on; problem is, there are no resources—no money—to remake him up; once the prosthetics and the facepaint come off, that’s it, continuity goes out the window. The production team tells the dwarf he has to stay inside, preferably in the caves because the temperature and humidity change could affect the face glue, and, for obvious reasons, the dwarf going to sleep is problematic, unless he can do so standing up to maintain the prostheses, which he cannot. As the story goes, the dwarf is extremely pissed-off at all this and threatens to walk, but after flurried discussion he agrees to wait around in the caves and not sleep. Per the non-negotiable terms, he’s given a quantity of bottom-shelf liquor for his cooperation. Boone’s Farm, my friend said, or equivalent.

  As the story goes, the dwarf immediately endeavors to get fucked out of his skull on whatever aggro swill they gave him, and he’s a mean drunk, venomous, roaming the caverns with a bottle, abusing unsuspecting tourists, saying foul thin
gs to children, kicking stalagmites, and being a general nuisance, clearly putting the production in jeopardy. The director manages to somehow secure the dwarf and get the situation under control, then he tells the band to get the dwarf out of sight, anywhere, just so he’s gone, and the band does so. With the drunken dwarf gone, band gone, the director smooths everything out with the cave people—owners, park rangers, the provincials running the place—assuring them there won’t be any further trouble. The director, a respected British documentarian signed on for a one-day, cover-the-car-payment gig, now has to spend an additional day on an incoherent Krull rip-off with a wastoid heavy metal band with no money, is twisting at the end of his rope when he walks into the bathroom next to the gift shop and opens a stall to find the singer of the band holding the dwarf upside down by the ankles while some other member of the band packs coke into the dwarf’s upturned prosthetic nose so that an effective amount of powder will make its way into the dwarf’s real nose, the best way anyone on hand at the time could think of to keep the dwarf from passing out, a pressing concern and continuing struggle, as the band had gotten him out of sight by taking him to a bar and feeding him more drinks, to the point of stupor. The director snaps. He starts whaling on the singer, who is hopelessly trying to explain the situation, coke flying everywhere, while the dwarf, suddenly turbocharged and fully demented—the band’s plan, in the end, had worked—bolts out the door into the caves, half-unglued troll face and claws and plastic armor, and, dredged in cocaine like some medieval, fantasmagoric Tony Montana, starts bashing apart stalagmites with a broadsword and yelling about killing people. Dwarfing, so to speak, his previous disruption. Tourist panic, families scattering, bargain lighting rigs are going down, security people running around with no idea. Mayhem in the snottites.

  “Whatever you’re imagining,” my friend said, “double it.”

  It was hours before order was restored, and people got sued. Through my Twenty Questions my friend remained mum about which band it was, but said yes, if I watched enough Headbangers Ball it was likely I had seen this video, albeit heavily edited, with very little dwarf. In terms of screentime.

  For our video we went with an ape.

  The inspiration to hire an ape had to do with a party the label was planning to throw after we signed, almost like a debutante ball, our formal introduction to the industry. TVT expressed (voluminous) reservations about our original suggestion, involving an orangutan “hanging out, doing whatever,” at a SoHo restaurant called Balthazar (we were after the raw bar tower) and ultimately we had a more typical party at a nightclub called, ominously, Life, on the condition that when it was time for the video a monkey or an ape would come, whether it’s featured in the video or not. To be fair, I was really the only one dead-set on this.

  When music video time came around I stuck to my guns, and suggested a video trilogy in which the central character is a chimpanzee. Beyond that I was open to ideas. Personally I didn’t care if we appeared in any of it, so long as we could hang with the chimp. Gottlieb signed off with his usual degree of amusement and Lenny recruited Lyle Owerko, a Canadian who’d just done a successful video for someone or other and seemed to grasp the character of the situation. A few days later at the Compound, in a pastoral hill town north of Northampton, the fax machine whined to life and spit out a dot matrix photo of a chimpanzee sitting in an armchair wearing an ascot and a huge, shit-eating grin. Someone had scrawled, “Here’s the chimp,” and drawn an arrow.

  The shoot was in New York, early in the morning at a photo studio a couple of floors above the label offices. We arrived bleary from an unexpectedly long night out.

  The elevator doors ding open and there’s a guy in wraparound shades, heavy goombah jewelry, acid-wash denim, and so on, waiting. Stepping out of the elevator, no idea who this is. He launches into his thing, his pitch.

  “So I get heah and I’m sayin’, whoa! This is niiiice up in here. Not too bad, not too bad. And yoo dazerv it, yoo earnt dat shit. M’y right or am I right? Let me tell yoo sum’n, yooz guys. Yooz guys—yooz guys is a hundred and ninety percent. And that’s comin’ from me. Takes one to know one, right? Oh—excuse me. Johnny Production, of Johnny Production Productions, at your service.” He fanned out business cards, as if he were doing a card trick. “Go ahead, take two—seriously. You never know.”

  Johnny Production explained that he had heard our interview on Eddie Trunk’s popular hard rock and metal show (destroying any chance of airplay on it, ever—the opposite of the desired result) during which we’d announced an open call for female video talent. Johnny Production had leapt into action, and, female video talent in tow, had appeared at the studio, where he’d been waiting around for some time in the small reception area, making people uncomfortable.

  “Dina here’s an actress, my best girl. One of my best girls.” Dina was wearing a sequined bra, and a headband as a skirt. “You just tell her what you want her to do and—BANG! (Everyone jumped) She’ll do it. Don’ matter what. Right, Dina? Don’ matter, you do it. Right? Dina! Yeah, whatever, she don’t care. Okay, hey! Yooz guys mind if I have a little coffee from dat machine?”

  On the way over to the percolator, Johnny Production relieves the buffet of one of everything. He pours a cup of coffee. He looks at me steadily for a second, mashing his lips in thought. Sizing me up. “I got one word for yoo,” says Johnny Production, snapping his fingers and making a gun. “Stetson.”

  The chimp, named Chippy, arrived wearing a three-piece suit, escorted by his trainer, who had the social skills of Nurse Ratched, complete with a riding crop, a tool she employed without reserve. “Chimpanzees are vicious, vicious, beasts. Wild animals that will kill you if you give them the chance,” she said to me. (Nearby, Chippy gently brushed a PA’s hair, made himself a bagel . . . ) She went on. “And NO CHILDREN. If Chippy sees a toddler he’ll rip its head right off, no question.” (Chippy checked his teeth in a mirror, hugged people, played part of a chromatic scale on a guitar. . . . )

  I saw no indication whatsoever of bloodlust or murderous looming but if that’s only because I was not capable of detecting it, then the question was, why did this woman choose to incessantly nag and swat and yammer her nasally, staccato threats at an animal that could indeed flay her or anybody else in the room as easily as he peeled a fucking banana. Like anxiety-riddled, anthropomorphizing dog rescuers, I assumed the answer lay with some unresolved issue elsewhere. To me the continual harassment she called “directing” Chippy was unnecessary to begin with (I had to be taken aside and calmed down at one point); that someone might attempt to make the chimp do anything he didn’t choose to do on his own didn’t make sense. If we’d wanted human behavior we wouldn’t have hired a chimpanzee, at far greater expense.

  Once Chippy got comfortable and relaxed around us and was left to his instincts (hugging; gentle, protohuman curiosity), there was a subsequent reduction in nagging and whipping and things smoothed out. We drove around lower Manhattan in a limousine getting drunk with barely dressed women and a chimpanzee, as we would have it, while the remainder of the morning back in the studio was just as Johnny Production would have it. He networked ceaselessly, engaging everybody in his field of vision, down to a bike messenger who’d accidentally gotten off on the wrong floor. Girls, including his girl (Dina was nice, woozily), were photographed with a cigar-smoking chimpanzee in Armani, and there was much to spirit away from the catering table. As the afternoon wore on, however, Chippy ceased behaving in the middle of a scene. We were enduring another reprimand from our tyrannical boss (Chippy), pacing back and forth flapping his lips and waving arms in the air—his character choice, playing a record exec to the hilt—while we all sat on a couch. All of a sudden Chippy went blank, lost interest, wound down like a toy. The trainer’s diagnosis was immediate, relayed to Lyle with some urgency. Lyle cut. “Okay. Five minutes, everybody!”

  At this Chippy waddled off toward the lounge. He waddled back thirty seconds later, lumped himself onto the couch nex
t to us, opened his beer, and drank.

  After the shoot we were crapulent in the crap-filled van driving uptown, with too many people—the van was far too crowded to determine who was who, what was what, where we were or where we were going; a usual condition. We’d lost the chimp, unfortunately, but we’d picked up a British blue-blood called Anthony Haden-Guest who was completely off his tweed in the captain’s chair, pounding his fists against his knees demanding, “FASTER! FASTER! RUN IT! RUN THE DAMN LIGHT! UNBAND MUST GO FASTER!” No one knew who he was or how he got there but whoever was driving obliged. One of the production assistants said sotto voce, “He’s a writer,” as if everyone present didn’t know one when they saw one.

  We piled out of the van in front of the restaurant, Elaine’s, well uptown. There was a drawn-out noisy song and dance about our not having a reservation, by which something else was meant. They let us in eventually, and the waitress didn’t flinch when one of us—me, I’m told—handed the menu back to her saying, “No thanks, I’ll just stick with the cocaine for now.”

  Steamed pork buns. Walk into the Chinese bakery on the corner with a dollar, walk out satisfied every time, with change. More than once I’ve waited for the place to open after a long, wasted, night eighty cents short for a slice of pizza. Things haven’t been quite that desperate in a while—on tour with ten-dollar per diems, food provided by venues, promoters, strangers—but I had a flicker of nonspecific panic as I passed by the bakery window, and hooked right, walked past the closed Chinese markets that sell ground-up centipede knees, anti-polio goat dicks . . . At the end of the street I was buzzed through the reinforced door and descended the flight of stairs to HQ, where Miss Management, diminutive, jet-black pixie cut, was in a rubber bustier and spiked heels with a disciplinary prod of some kind under one arm, on the phone. “Oh, that sounds absolutely fucking lovely,” she was saying, jotting things down.