APRIL 18 / INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA
There is a little security person (security little person?) dressed in leather: boots, pants, vest, hat. He’s got beer. Pulling up I thought they were giant beers, until I realized. Personable as you like, while leaving no doubt that he loves few things more than kicking someone’s ass up and down the street, and that he’s perfectly capable of doing so. The other half of the security tag team is, it makes sense, enormous. Yeti. (Indiana Yeti, to avoid confusion.) Later we’re introduced to Bindle, a colleague of theirs. Bindle draws me out to the parking lot, saying he has anything I want. I assumed I was about to be in a drugs situation, but no. He’s got “videos,” he says. I said, “Yeah, thanks. Porn’s not really my thing.”
He says, stoned drawl, “No, dude. I’m talkin’ metal vids! You name it.” He slides open the door of his van, drags out a duffel full of videocassettes. “I got a Stryper rehearsal, dude. Not the one in Cincy, that’s got shit sound. This is at somebody’s fuckin’ house, dude. Megadeth in the studio, Halen in the studio with Gene Simmons. Priest, Maiden—you like Dream Theatre? I got assloads of Dream Theatre.” I’m a little saturated with the metal thing right now, so I said maybe later. He handed me a beeper number on a card and said, “Day or night, dude. Serious. I’m on call.”
Crowd was out for blood tonight. Some eyes with real violence in them. “Rosie” went over, saved our hides.
APRIL 19 / MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN
The Rave, again. Medium.
APRIL 21 / CHICAGO
The House of Blues, Chicago. Where everybody knows your name.
It gets to be less traveling, more like living everywhere at once.
APRIL 24 / CINCINNATI
A duo of metalheads approached me after the show. The tall one said, “I thought you guys sucked.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said.
“No, thought, past tense. This is a tough crowd but I know for a fact you guys changed a few minds. Just sayin cuz me and him are in a band, and I know we’d wanna know that.”
His buddy said, “Yeah, man. Totally inspiring, dude. Not the music so much, but.”
Guy we know from Noho who relocated here a few years ago appeared at soundcheck. He saw the article on us in the local paper that mentioned the show and said he had to come and see if it was really us, though the article was accompanied by a photo and our full names. Matt said, “And? Are we?”
“You guys look like you. I mean, yeah, you’re you, I think . . . Right?” The guy was genuinely flustered. Then I was. Until Matt said, “Yes. We’re us,” I felt like my brain was being attacked by squids.
APRIL 22 / DETROIT
For starters the place was oversold. Significantly. Doors had opened at five o’clock, at the work whistle—happy hour. Metal videos were projected onto a giant drop screen in front of the stage. A few hours later we’re setting up on the stage, and I peeked out from behind the screen. Matty said, “How’s it looking out there?”
The place was wall-to-wall with trashed metalheads shoving each other around, fighting, getting “pumped.” I said, “Should be fine.” What I used to say automatically, now it’s what we say when we’re pretty sure it won’t be. (Anytime fortune shines we say: “Dio.”)
When it was time we got into place and the screen retracted in front of us, prematurely cutting off a Static X video. The screen shook as the angry crowd pelted it with bottles. Then came the thunder roll of relief, and triumph—showtime, finally. Deafening crowd roar as the stage lights went up on . . . not Dio.
We made noise in A and most of the crowd down front turned their backs, as they do. A move I’ve seen from this vantage more times than I can count now. I don’t mind it. Something weirdly chivalrous about it; the metalhead equivalent of a glove across the face. But that was for the crime of not being Dio; we hadn’t started playing yet.
When the first bottle hit, before the first chord had rung out, I saw Simon (drummer) and Jimmy (bass) and the rest of the techs in the wings, amused. What was happening where we were was too confusing to form an opinion about until I saw most of camp Dio, band and crew, flanking the stage, and Ronnie James watching with concern, rather than doing his vocal exercises. Not good.
Projectiles came at us, and we did what we do in this type of situation (we are accustomed to this, this is normal—why?); we improvised a dumpy polka about metalheads. The crowd parried, thousands of voices in unison chanted, Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you . . . One guy and his girlfriend, front and center, jabbing all the middle fingers at their disposal at us, working them in the air to the one-two, one-two . . . Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you . . . Then the full attack came, from all directions.
Partial list of items thrown at us, in order of least to most surprising: empty plastic cups, empty beer bottles, lighters, coins, cardboard food containers, balled-up tinfoil, balled-up cigarette packaging, loose drywall (this was Detroit), hot dog, hot dog in bun, hamburger, complete nacho “meal” with hot cheesefood, a barstool, woman’s shoe (black stiletto), full and partially full pint cups, full and partially full bottles, empty paint can, full drinks, a banana, jerky, tennis ball, a work boot, screwdriver, PVC tubing, large rock, thermos, cordless phone handset, lightbulb, “D” cell batteries, balled-up paper products on fire, balled up T-shirt(?) on fire, beer bottle Molotov cocktail, and one-inch rebar—five feet of steel whizzed at us like a harpoon. It’s not surprising to find rebar lying around anyplace in Detroit—it tops the list for lethal intent.
We used our guitars as shields, racquets, paddles, bats. The crew scrambled and dragged Dio’s amps and racks off into the wings. The chant continued—Fuck you, fuck you . . . As the screen lowered, pounded by the unrelenting fusillade, a full beer in a plastic cup sailed past it. The cup arced over Eugene’s drums, toward the massive, bazillion-dollar Dio drum kit. The cup hit the snare drum upright and stuck the landing, hardly spilling a drop.
20
COMPOUND FRACTURES
MAY 12
The house we call the Compound, where Eug and I live with respective girlfriends, three greyhounds, and one or two cats, is a five-bedroom nineteenth-century Colonial in one of the hilltowns, eight or so miles north of Northampton, and twenty or so years behind it. Time-warped Texaco, post office, one-room library, meetinghouse for griping and bake sales; the nerve center a market specializing in obselete General Mills products and rural pleasantries that would get an eye-roll out of Norman Rockwell. The Compound also happens to have a swimming pool on a rolling green acre out back, abutting an 18th-century graveyard, so you don’t forget. Half of the graves in there have the same departure date, the day the dam up the road broke and roared through town and snatched children with unnatural precision, right from the hands of their parents. Just like that, gone.
When you’ve been bombing all over the planet stuffing yourself with free drugs and liquor and complete fucking nonsense for months on end, this is where you want to come home to. Can’t wind all the way up then only halfway down. No. What you want—what I want is a pile driver into normalcy. It’s a fiasco, of course, stumbling around a model New England village in leather pants and an exoskeleton of transdermal morphine patches, buying stamps and chatting about pickling, but nonetheless it’s real downtime. A rocking chair on the screen porch and a lemonade with maybe only a little something in it, a general ceasing and desisting. Not that we don’t light the Compound up from time to time, but the idea is to have a civilized, borderline—dareIsayit—adult refuge, and above all, quiet. And it’s quiet up here all right. Nighttime without the crickets, and the tinnitus, you’d think you’d gone deaf.
Matt and Wilma and her Chihuahua remain dug in down in New York, somewhere precarious, wherever it is. Not much communication lately. Eug and I, and concerned parties, are all in agreement that Matt being primary contact, first in the loop to whatever extent he can be, is the best way to ease his evolving fear that he’s not privy to information, and decisions are being made without him. The new MO is, for all meet
ings about band matters, all three of us have to be present. As if that’s ever happened any other way. Not at all comfortable with the implication, but let it go. Eug and I can be presentable in Manhattan within a few hours if we time it right, and he drives.
Last trip down was to shoot a TV ad for a bank of some kind, featuring Gottlieb, its quintessential client. Self-made, thinks-outside-the-box, running an independent and decidedly Twenty-First Century business, exemplified by—Gottlieb’s choice—us. However we’ll appear to the target audience, he still chuckles pretty much every time we see him. Amazing, considering thus far all we’ve done is incinerate his money. The commercial people had us pretend to record in a studio up at the Avatar, to be intercut with Gottlieb’s talking head and business philosophy in voiceover. The director instructed us to “do whatever we would normally do,” then right away blurted, “CUT!” and asked what the hell we were doing. Agitated huddles with his crew went on and on, out of earshot. Not sure what kind of recording session those people had in mind.
Departing for Canada. Couple weeks of shows. Usual routine.
JUNE 20
Still no word from New York on missing publishing checks, several now. Zero dollars coming in, getting very hairy up here with the rent and utilities. And between the DMV re-registration fees and sundry tickets, getting the van legal is nothing short of a pipe dream. Insufficient funds down there too, evidently. Somehow Miss Management has wound up going out of pocket for expenses. Bills for the phones, faxes, mailings, piling up. This part reiterated unnecessarily by a somewhat accusatory phone call from Matt. In general, everyone seems to think everyone else has the money. Without any idea of how much money anybody would have, if anybody had it.
JULY 1
Matt and Wilma are out of wherever they were staying in New York, coming up here in a week or so. We’ll get in at least a few rehearsals—probably wise, considering. The big secret that was being kept for fear of “jinx” is that we’re on as the opener for Def Leppard’s summer tour, officially announced. Twenty-thousand seat sheds, for three months. The plan is for Wilma to stay in the spare room here while we’re gone, in the hope that this will do her, by extension Matt, and thereby all of us, some good.
JULY 4
Clocked another two to three hours straight on the phone, tour bullshit, then went to some local fireworks thing that wasn’t up to snuff, so back at the Compound I broke into the pyro stash and went 1812 on the backyard. Good thing we didn’t end up using the big pyramid one, “the Aztec,” at that club in Texas. It goes off horizontally.
JULY 11
Rationalizing the Def Leppard tour in the TVT War Room centers on the idea that we’re arena rock as much as anything else, arenas just might be the ticket. Nothing against Def Leppard—High and Dry and On Through the Night are both in rotation in the van, and I don’t think we even know anyone who turns the radio dial away from “Photograph”—but by the initial budget proposal this will cost us $96,000 in tour support. Meaning, essentially, we’d be smashing the piggy bank for it, touring on our wits hereafter, until the new album funds kick in, whenever that will be, assuming that happens. Maybe another story if it were a more solid investment, three months in Europe, say, instead of the slogging and narrow escapes waiting for us in the Bible and Corn Belts—we already know too well that thirty- to-fifty-year-olds, the majority Leppard demographic in those parts, aren’t exactly money in the bank for us. Some disagreement on the money handling, how people feel versus math. Long and short is I protested, and took the liberty of recalculating the budget—now everybody’s upset. Matt called and went on an endless tirade (during “unlimited talk” hours, which was good, on the one hand) about how we ought to stick to making music and not get involved in the business end. I didn’t need to remind him that, seeing as he’s loath to set foot off of Manhattan, aside from a half hour of rote muscle movement while dodging fucking projectiles on metal tours, we haven’t been making music in any recognizable way for some time, and if we break the bank on tour. None of us is qualified to fuck with the money stuff, he said. Maybe so but if we ditch the bus and add a rental van, restrict accommodations to no-tell motels and campgrounds and then only when we have time to sleep, reduce band allowances from $25 to $20 per diem (there will be full catering services at every venue), and a few other minor sacrifices, we can do the entire tour for $54,500. Minus the $8,800 we’re guaranteed (our performance fee of $250 per show x 35 shows), our shortfall is only $45,700 out of the tour support budget, leaving enough in the kitty to get us through the rest of the album cycle, cautiously. And that includes the only legible item from our last vodka-drenched, Wilma-dominated, pow-wow—a bumped-up “contingency fund.” Though I don’t know why we call it that anymore. It’s not contingent on anything, it’s just, Fuck-ups: $3,500.
With the official, John Hancocked, champagne-pop-in-the-corner-office start of the legitimate “music career,” looking at the rundown, there in black-and-white: “ARTIST will receive the sum,” “scheduled payments of,” et cetera—there was some conjecture that if we kept our heads and avoided the well-known pitfalls of this sort of thing, there would be a relief from the continuous niggling of insolvency; the hand-to-mouth, the nickel-and-diming to make the rent and keep the lights on and so forth. That based on the actual numbers, in black and white, negotiated by professionals—you’d have to be a fool (or Wilma) to think people just start handing you money because you signed a recording contract.
For the record, as it’s a factor in the current state of affairs:
Our deal with the label, put very simply, was for just under a half a million dollars total, for everything—albums, tours, promotions, videos, etc., over four albums, with optional bonuses per album. Our advance, split evenly three ways after management and legal fees, netted us each $4,500. (Traditionally a sizable tribute has to be handed over without delay to Registry of Motor Vehicles, the Internal Ruin-You Service, the Commonwealth, various people standing around in the yard, the Tongs . . . )
Selling our publishing rights—a fifty-fifty split between TeeVeeToons Publishing and our Get All This Damn Money Away From Us! Music—seemed like a good idea at the time, but then good is a funny word, and music publishing is all fine print. Getting a grasp on your average publishing contract is like reading about particle physics in Mesopotamian, scrawled on a greased pig. Any random snippet from that meeting with our attorney down in SoHo will exemplify, we can jump in anywhere:
Attorney (responding to a basic question): “Well, yes, and no. (Doesn’t matter what the question was, answers all start the same way.) If it were an Optional Qualifying Album the Compliance Mechanical Rate applies, though any Schedule A compositions, or the non-optional qualifying compositions from Schedule B, would then be represented as the numerator, see, it’s flipped, so you would get fifty percent of the composing share, at the seventy-five percent rate, but minus the one-hundred percent publisher’s share, which is fifty percent of the original hundred, meaning seventy-five. Except for television, unless it’s overseas. Umm. Should we wake him up?
Matt: [snoring]
Me: You’re welcome to try.
That deal, whatever it is, split equally three ways, netted us $666 per month each for six months—yes, the Number of the Beast, our built-in monthly reminder—in exchange for rights to our music, extending by an L. Ron Hubbard-style ultimatum, a standard clause in the music business, “in perpetuity, throughout the known universe.” This says a deal’s a deal, until the end of time itself, no matter where the music comes out, whether it’s Uranus, or ours.
Typically a band’s primary revenue stream comes from touring. Performance fees are one source. In our case, our fee for performing ranges from zero to five hundred dollars, the average being around two hundred. The idea is that the merchandise is where the money is, really. T-shirts, CDs, what-have-you. Touring as much as we do, we might do okay with that—if we played to crowds other than ones that wanted to string us up from the nearest tree. Which, as
a rule, we do not. After almost eighteen months of touring, our merchandise sales average less than $50 per night. If it weren’t for the month in Europe, it would average less than that. As it stands, we do make a living playing our own music. Cannot complain. From purely a financial standpoint, however, we made a far better one slinging pizzas.
JULY 12
This morning watching that bear that’s been coming around to Tilly and Bert’s across the street, trying to get at their bird feeder over there, which seems to have been placed just right. When I came out of the house it briefly took an interest in me and my tea (ground poppies and honey), then resumed efforts. The branch the feeder is on can’t support the bear’s weight, so climbing is fruitless, and it can’t reach it from the porch to knock it off, even with a stick it found somewhere. This is America, friend. Keep swiping.
Lower tour budget was approved, but said funds remain at large. Eugene has exactly one and a half drumsticks, and I have no working amplifier. Finally managed to get this across to Matt, who suggested I buy whatever Eug and I need with money out of the “slush fund” we’ve been hiding from everyone. Somewhere along the way this particular item of deluded claptrap, among many, has become a fact for him.
Wait.
Bears do not use tools. Monkeys, apes, otters—but not fucking bears. And that bear this morning was most certainly using a stick—a tool. What the hell is going on? Does everyone know this already? Have I been that far gone that I missed an actual evolutionary development? When did this start? Since when do bears use fucking tools?
JULY 13
Saw Tilly and Bert on their porch with a banjo and a jug, respectively. As we discovered too early one Sunday morning, they have a jug band. Tilly, eighty-five, is the youngest member. Ringers, all of them. I mentioned the bear. Tilly says it knocked over a tomato plant and somehow got some wire and the bamboo stake it was attached to caught on his claw, it didn’t pick up a stick. I said, fair enough, but instead of trying to dislodge the bamboo stake, it deliberately used it to swipe at the bird feeder. “Oh yes, that’s true. Bears are very, very intelligent,” she said, too casually.
Adios, Motherfucker Page 24