She said, “The Unband?”
“Shows what I know,” I said. “Three minutes ago I thought those were a total waste of money.”
I went down and out to hunt for food.
SUNDAY
Last night vanished without a trace in the Devil’s Triangle (Marz bar, Max Fish, and 2A form the points; it’s obtuse). Sifting through the black box over two-for-one happy hour drinks at the place on Seventh. It’s unfortunate that happy hour there coincides with an open mic that leans miserable. Matt and I had a couple rounds while a guy in a floppy hat read poems from a notebook that should be burned.
It was beginning to look like Matt’s leather jacket, the one with the racing stripe, fit like a glove, was beyond recovering. He went home with Wilma, who’s been around a lot lately, and had to leave the jacket behind doing a runner, executed via fire escape following, based on his patchy recollection and known local dating protocol, a heavy session of blackout sex and tangential vomiting. Wilma’s a freelancer. She does a bit of fetish modeling for magazines like Cleft, vibrator reviews in The Orafist—little o’ this, little o’ that, and comports herself accordingly. Hot pink lipstick, decaying rock tee, Spandex, wiggy white-blond hair in baby-barrettes, the raunchy babydoll getup you see around the Lower East Side a lot, especially at boozy, trashy rock shows, like ours. Smart, funny, drinks beer through a straw almost continuously (“gets you way more wasted, faster,” she says), otherwise not Matt’s usual type. Then again, if he’s looking for a poster girl for trashy, lowbrow New York rock and roll, who won’t get on his case about lifestyle choices—Eureka. Sometime during the proceedings at her place Wilma had given Matt a prize-winning shiner. He held his fresh vodka highball to his eye.
Another affected person in a hat, porkpie this time, got up with an acoustic guitar and played a song as maudlin as it was interminable. Coming out of the woodwork these days, these deluded weenies. Porkpie hats and “intimate” songs with faux-emotive vocal creaks. It was a perfect spring afternoon—every block up and down with sundress debuts and sidewalk socializing and bandannaed mutts and two-for-one drinks, the Lower East Side fanning out its peacock tail. What this flatulent twit was doing to it was a goddamn nightmare, and why we never ever go to Brooklyn. These types are hatching like nits over there.
When the bill came we unfolded it and there were no numbers, just a drawing of a cock and balls. As usual.
The mobile blinked and bounced around crazily on the bar. Matt flipped the phone open, a distorted caterwaul already shredding the earpiece. “THIS IS THE SOUND OF ME PISSING ON YOUR FUCKING JACKET, ASSHOLE!” Followed by—with compliments to the cell carrier—the sound of pee spraying onto leather, from a height of around fourteen inches.
SATURDAY
Agreed to be on a live Internet talk show, a call-in thing. Sean from the Toilet Boys hosting. Altogether a more professional operation than expected; multiple cameras, some on us while we played a couple of songs, some on the area of the studio where Sean was ball-gagged and chained backward to a chair while Miss Management, in full abuse gear, put him through a heavy bondage session. The S&M bit will never be my casket of snakes, but no good reason we shouldn’t play the card.
The interview segment came and Matt and Wilma sat down on the more than ample main couch, Eug and I directed to barstools behind, and not mic’d. Eug and I had accidentally gotten stoned beyond reason in the stairwell with a photographer we ran into and were a little too out of it to properly field viewer calls, but not so stoned that we weren’t aware that we were actually missing something, not just paranoid. Matt deferred questions about the band to Wilma while he drank beer and pawed her. As it went on Wilma and Matt groped each other, swilled Pabst intertwined, and ultimately resolved into this eternal, shambolic, dry hump that effectively ended the interview and continued straight through the credits, or where those would be if there are any on Internet shows.
Imperative to be up early in the morning and presentable for the video shoot, so we went downtown for drinks. We met Miss Management at the Fish, had our quick one (two, three, four). Carlo appeared and said, “Hey. Come meet Iggy Pop.”
We followed him next door to the cafe. The place was nearly empty except for Iggy Pop sitting on couch with a guy in business attire. He lightly abused the business-suited guy, a manager of some kind, looked like a Wall Streeter who jumped ship. When conversation turned to the video we were about to shoot, and someone mentioned the last one, with the chimpanzee, the animation, so forth, Iggy queried the suit, regarding his video budget, by pointing at us and saying little more than? What the fuck.
We agreed, it was madness.
The suit shrugged and said, something like, “Strange days.” And Iggy Pop responded with a blunt social critique, an area in which he remains unsurpassed. It continued for some time.
Nothing else that night would be as rewarding as tea and cocktails with Iggy Pop, especially for Eugene, who feels a kinship (there is a resemblence, beyond body type). He went to crash at Miss Management’s pad, Matt and I walked across Houston Street and over to 2A for a nightcap.
The place was packed. A vague costume party in progress. Clunky hats, iron-on T-shirts, military short coats with dingy epaulets. More than a few people were wearing plastic retro eyeglasses without lenses, just the frames; lots of jeans that looked like leotards and fat white belts, like rejected superhero sidekicks. It was a lot of visual information. Behind the bar everything was normal; Donovan was still Donovan. All lank, making and serving drinks as if he had six arms.
“What’s going on in here? A meeting or something?” Matt said.
“Is what it is, dude. A lot happening these days,” Donovan said. Our drinks were in front of us by the time he’d finished the sentence. “How was the tour?”
“Had its moments. There was quite a bit of drinking and drugging going on. Pretty much constant fucked-upedness,” Matt said. “Same ol’.”
“Yes. Had its moments,” I said. The spirit of it remains in line with Chaplin doing dancing potatoes, but these days our drug-taking m.o. would more likely remind someone of a toddler in a high chair smashing applesauce into his face. Time thing, mostly.
We related the key experiences as best we could around road syntax impenetrable to anyone who hadn’t been there. Donovan grasped at it. “So . . . the tour was good, mostly? Or—”
“Well—good is a funny word, D,” I said. The mobile spazzed around on the bar. Matt took the call outside. He’s recently begun making a spectacle of leaving rooms in long, cartoony strides that also employ his arms—he slaloms out. It’s all entrances and exits, life. Might as well do something with them.
The music was samey, incessant, blown-out sounding, not in a good way. I asked Donovan who it was and he indicated some dudes down the end of the bar with sculpted bedheads, failing to appear nonchalant. A girl wearing a beret and the empty-eyeglasses bit wedged herself in next to me. I didn’t catch her name—I caught-and-released her name. Donovan mentioned our band name, and she said, “Oh, yeah, right. You guys are supposed to be, like, funny or something.”
“Both, on a good night,” I said.
“No, but like, ironic.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Like, you’re not, like, serious.”
“We’re on the road about three hundred days a year, if that’s what you mean.”
“No, but I mean, about, all, like, ‘Rock and roll! Yeah, woo-hoo! Party!’” She made the maloik—threw the goats, goofily, as if she had no bones. “I mean, it’s a joke, right?”
“What is?”
“No. You know, ironic.”
“Sorry—do you mean satirical?”
“What is?”
“Camp? I don’t understand your question.”
“You don’t know the word ironic?” She was wearing a child’s iron-on pajama top, Thundercats!
“I don’t—are you saying iron-on -ic?”
“Um . . . yeah . . . okay. Whatever, good luck with all tha
t, dude.” She picked up her drink and walked off. “The hell was that?” I said.
Donovan plunked a refreshed drink down in front of me “Bah. Don’t worry about her, she’s like, thirty-five.”
Up at the crack of ass and in cabs. Through the waking city, morning edition stacks still coming off the trucks.
In a whitewashed photo/video studio downtown Lyle directed a crew setting lights and cameras. Models were being made up in a dressing area with globe-lit mirrors. Eugene among them, grinning in a barber chair getting a last-minute, platinum, mohawk, because he can. Label people came and went, seeing to their slice of the agenda, various other commotions mostly obscured by hangover.
Miss Management was conspicuously absent. Off playing paintball was the word. I don’t know if that’s code for something. Absolutely unlike her, until recently.
A vodka wet bar had been set up before we arrived. Triage.
None of us found a way to convince Matt that having Wilma in the video was not a good idea. I tried reminding him in a depersonalized, rule-of-thumb sort of way (it is inadvisable, always) when he introduced the Wilma proviso; I was blunt after a few dozen drinks last night, whenever that was. Hopeful he’d changed his mind. Then Wilma flopped into the room, wasted, Matt in tow. I freshened my drink.
“Prince Harming,” said Matt.
“Sir Drinksalot. Lady Getabeer.”
Refreshed my beverage about twice a minute, as needed. Wilma’s soused cackling as Lyle prepped her close-up. Framing the shot to de-emphasize her growing beer gut, relighting. His Albertan patience. . . . I went down and out for some air. A cigarette break without a cigarette. Smoking is not entirely a bad habit. However much time the chemicals shave off the end of your life, being routinely forced to step away from the lunacy of your day for ten minutes adds a few back.
In the elevator going back up was a random Aussie with a didgeridoo (this was a busy creative building, studios on every floor). When we got to our floor I’d told him he needed to be in our music video, and yanked him out and pushed him into the room. He was game (he was an Aussie), and Lyle obliged. Shoeless, cross-legged, sat against the white backdrop he fooed into his tube. Mmmmwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaooooowwwwwwwww-ow-ow-ow. At my insistence this went on and on, a pall of confusion and dismay in the room. I lay down on the floor and floated out of consciousness and Lyle looking at his watch and brrrrwwwwmmmyowwwwwwyowyowmmmm . . .
Some time later I woke, grunting and murmuring at whoever was shaking me awake with their foot. I opened my eyes—Billy Squier looking down at me. Wasn’t expecting him. Matt, Eug, and I talked with him for quite a while. He gardens a section of a plot in Central Park now, passionately, invited us to see it sometime. For as long as he was there, civility prevailed. Lyle shot him dancing with the models in front of the tornado fans. Good people, Billy Squier. Or in our, and his, native Bostonian: Billy’s a good shit.
SUNDAY
En route home, few days off. Blowback from the SXSW “debacle,” Lenny’s word, is not good. We played a music magazine launch, a big happening—where according to at least one established music mag we “sucked beyond compare.” A videotape has surfaced—bad for business, they tell us. We stopped in the office and Lenny and Jason showed us the resulting bounty.
In a few of the photos going around (Rolling Stone, others) there was someone else on stage with us, a total stranger, blackout drunk, rolling around on the ground playing Matt’s guitar. Eugene half-remembered him. Matty and I drew blanks. Smoking gun here is that we’d been doing press since 10 A.M. At bars. Our show had to be at, what—seven p.m.? Dunno—I knocked a glass of red wine on Nash from Urge Overkill’s white suit before he went on—so that had to have been around six o’clock . . . no, five?
It was bad. Then, all the wheeling and dealing and boozing, not paying attention . . . “Could’ve been worse,” I said.
“Sure,” said Lenny. “If you guys had dressed like Nazis and killed a puppy onstage.”
Consoli said, “Eh. We can work with it.”
“I didn’t say we can’t work with it,” said Lenny.
19
BOOK OF MAGICA
The truth is this. When a man is riding by night through this desert and something happens to make him loiter and lose touch with his companions . . . he hears Spirits talking in such a way that they seem to be his companions. Often these voices make him stray from the path, so that he never finds it again. . . .
—Marco Polo, The Travels
MARCH 20 / NORTHAMPTON
Departure to Seattle aborted. Van problems, mainly. We leave no later than fuck o’clock in the morning tomorrow and go flat-out we should be fine. Meeting here at the Compound for dinner.
MARCH 21
Long night. Dinner at the Compound was good but then people got upset and in the morning Matt and I had to go buy spackle. Matt can only communicate in insulting hand gestures. I’m okay so long as no one looks at me or talks to me or comes near me. Eugene is sleeping in the back, so he’s sorted.
Coming down Market Street to get Steve, a giant box of our T-shirts lands on the hood of the van. I hit the brakes, coffee goes everywhere. Shirts all over the street. Then another box, women’s “baby tees” this time, red. Steve was up on his second-floor porch holding a sleeve of CDs in each hand. “You want me to load these, or you wanna fucking come get ’em?”
In our defense: nothing. We’re four hours late.
Matt said, “This is bullshit. I’m going to get a taco.” He got out and walked off. After Steve had calmed down a bit and we’d collected the swag, we went to load everything into the trailer and discovered it was the old padlock on there, the one we don’t have a key for. Dealt with that (Ivan knew a guy with shears, Steve broke them, smashed the lock off with the pieces), got a table at the Mexican place for lunch, to save time stopping on the road. Then all we had to do was pick up some beer. And get coffee, and a map. Why that took an hour-plus is anybody’s guess.
Which brings us up to now. Just after 1 p.m., fifty-seven hours from showtime in Seattle, Washington. We’re on the side of the highway about nine miles south of Northampton, waiting for AAA to bring us some gas. “Girl from Ipanema” is on the radio, which is a fucked boom box bungeed to the console.
MARCH 22
At a Pizza Hut around Bismarck, Eugene and I went in to pick up the order and pooled our small change and split a pint of Bud whatever, quickly.
Making extremely good time through Montana; it’s uninhabited.
MARCH 23
Everybody thought somebody else had a valid driver’s license. Everybody was wrong.
Have devised a better way to sleep on the floor of the van: Egyptian pose lying down. Improves on sleeping sitting up pretzeled in the captain’s chair. Not more comfortable, really, just better. The sun’s coming up in a mountain pass somewhere in Idaho.
A shepherd in a small Sicilian village one day throws down his crook, comes down off the hillside, goes to New Jersey, marries a waitress, has three kids, in rapid succession, gets drafted, serves, is discharged, goes home, and soon after throws down his napkin and goes west, marauding Sicilianly across the fruited plain. Marries a waitress, more kids, buys a trailer home . . . and the trail goes cold. Several years later he resurfaces as the sheriff of Pima County, Arizona; spurs, buckles and boots, but still not much with the English. Two years after that he’s found dead in the front seat of a Lincoln at the bottom of a gorge in northern Idaho. That was the story. Dubious, but if the last bit is true, and if we are where the map says we are, that Lincoln might have been somewhere in the range we’re crossing now. I never met my grandfather, but if his last sight was from anywhere around here, he could have done worse. Though I doubt it mattered to him at the time.
MARCH 24 / SEATTLE
53 hours, 59 minutes from the AAA road service guy in Mass. to the door of the club, missing our soundcheck time by a hair. Lucky for us, somebody else screwed up—there was no sound system in the club yet, so we didn’t miss anyt
hing after all. Flubbing the PA is not a normal occurrence at the Dio level, and Dio’s people are in no mood. Ronnie James is unfazed; warm greetings (he is a conscientious Italian-American) and he apologizes for the “bumpy start.” All smiles. Dio is kind.
Around the corner for a Bloody Mary at the place that puts sardines in them. A TVT field rep met us. He says straight off that he doesn’t like our music, except for the Billy Squier number and the bonus track, “Cocaine Whore” (a late-night piano serenade recorded live to cassette intended only as a demo, but—fuck it). The rest of the album, he says, is “stupid beer-drinking party rock.” So it is.
The club is an old firehouse. Appropriately, due an architectural anomaly with the roof, the building itself looks like it’s sporting a mullet, variously known as the Kentucky Waterfall, the 20–80, Business-in-the-Front-Party-in-the-Back, numerous regionally specific other names. In our suburban youth the closest Registry of Motor Vehicles for us was a town over, in Watertown. By a trick of the light, when you got your picture taken at the Watertown RMV it always came out with a shadow on either side of your neck that made you appear as if you had a mullet, a serious one. Nothing you could do—you either waited in the endless lines at the downtown Boston office or you got a “Watertown Shadow” and lived with it. No shadow play involved here; the line outside is up and down with Pulitzer-class ape drapes.
A scrum of metalheads near our trailer debated whether Ronnie James Dio or Ozzy Osbourne was the better Black Sabbath singer. Moot. Dio is a fine-tuned virtuoso who could probably blow through La Traviata while eating ice cream and doing standing backflips; Ozzy is a vocalist who might or might not have spent his morning snorting ants and having his heart restarted. As to who is the better singer for Black Sabbath, it’s a trick question. Ozzy Sabbath and Dio Sabbath are two different bands.
Adios, Motherfucker Page 21