Adios, Motherfucker

by Michael Ruffino

  21

  ROCK! ROCK! (TILL YOU DROP)

  Def Leppard? Sure! Run the numbers. Basic music biz math.

  Theorem: Based on Soundscans, which track the number of units (albums) shifted (sold), and ticket sales during The Unband’s tour with Dio, a tour with Def Leppard will significantly increase sales of Retarder.

  Postulate 1: The majority of Dio ticketholders did not like The Unband

  Postulate 2: .02% of Dio ticketholders purchased Retarder

  Postulate 3: The majority of Def Leppard ticketholders will not like The Unband

  .02% of Def Leppard ticketholders will purchase Retarder

  Since the average venue capacity for Def Leppard on this tour is five times that of the Dio tour:

  If x = unit shift on the Dio tour

  Then 5x = unit shift on the Def Leppard tour

  Easy peasy.

  And estimating the band’s end (z) is simpler still.

  If j = jack and s = squat

  Then z = j (s)

  JULY 17

  Most of the venues are outdoor sheds, fifteen to twenty thousand seats. Maybe “dunderheaded” (to quote our most recent album review) but this puts us in front of around a half million people in the space of three months. Most of whom will hate us, but that’s just nit-picking, isn’t it.

  Steve isn’t fazed by the jump to sheds. “We’ll need a guy who can use a wrench, other than to smash shit,” Steve said. “And Trailer.” Our wrench operator will be Safety Bear, so named for his indiscriminate cautiousness. Good-natured Vermonter, familiar with all kinds of tools and their proper usages, signed on despite his recent marriage, last week. Steve got himself ordained by mail to perform the ceremony. Peeler is on board. He’s proven he can drive without sleep for days on end and properly tech the drums, in addition to a number of skills he picked up in juvy, back when, that have come in handy on several recent trips. Trailer is on a tour with a huge pop band, as usual—he’s at the top of his game these days—but has a week or so off, so he’s along for the first leg. No idea what we’ll do about FOH after he leaves; we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

  We’ve got an additional van but nobody’s seen it or knows where it is, so meantime we’ve rented a panel truck, for the Hand. The Hand is a custom stage prop that, like heavy rock’s best stage props, was manufactured according to a drunken scrawl on a cocktail napkin, instead of to the intended specifications. À la Spinal Tap, but maximized instead of miniaturized. Sometime between Lenny snatching the napkin with the doodle on it off the bar and a parade balloon company in the Midwest receiving it via fax machine, there was a mixup (my handwriting is physician-bad). A few weeks ago I happened to be in New York for a thing at the Russian consulate (sturgeon eggs, string quartet, coke-crazed Maldovian strongman dangled someone off the roof) and Lenny woke me up with a phone call saying you need to come down to the office ASAP, your hand is here. I got all freaked out and checked the end of both my arms, expecting a stump. I was still uptown; the Upper East Side is nice, if you can hack the paranoia.

  At the office Lenny and his assistant walked me upstairs to the skeletal third floor of TVT, hammers and power drills going, the sounds of expansion, of having a good year. In the center of the loft space, among the raw beamwork and prewiring, was a 5x5 foot black box on casters. Lenny kicked a switch on it and fans blew inside the box and a red right hand with the band logo on its palm like a stigmata heaved up, fingers bent against the ceiling, still inflating. “Sell some fucking records, man,” Lenny said, laughing. “We’ll get the left one.”

  Rendezvous at the Compound, and on the way to the gig we went to a music store to get ourselves outfitted best we could, presenting a business check with the band name on it, insisting our band name is as good as our bond—shot down everywhere locally. Finally we had to drive into Boston, to the store where our friend Ray was working; we called and he said he’d vouch for us with the check. Naturally there were questions from Ray’s superiors, who wanted us—me by default—to apply for a store credit card. No question how that would end, but I took an application and went through the motions, under Ray’s supervision. He noticed I paused at “Annual Income” on the application and indicated he understood why I hesitated. “Right, taxes. Doesn’t matter if it’s a little off. You can just put a hundred thousand or something.”

  I laughed. “That’s more than a little off.”

  His eyes widened and he said, sotto voce: “You’re shittin’ me. How much more than that do you make?”

  Lotta misinformation going around about record deals. You’d think that in a giant music store, full of supposedly professional musicians there’d be an understanding of. . . . No, you wouldn’t. In the end I had to kite a personal check. Rolled out of there with an Ampeg bass head and fridge, cymbals, drum heads, and a slew of other stuff, left our check to dive and swoop in the updraft, its aerial ballet. Ray said he could manage it.

  Should be just fine.

  JULY 18 / MANSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS

  No clouds, 80 degrees.

  The Tweeter Center. We knew it as Great Woods growing up. As close geographically as we’ve played to Boston since being tossed out of the Rat, seven years ago now. Two catering tents, one with beer and one without. I was brought in a golf cart to the correct one about twenty minutes ago, on a golden buggy.

  Phil Collen (guitar, Leppard) came by, stopped to chat. He needed more soy milk for the sober tent. Hitting the stuff pretty hard over there, evidently. Our room is a converted locker room with leather couches, clean carpet, nice lighting, showers, two bathrooms, and a massive catering table. There’s a lot of shrimp cocktail, fresh or close to it.

  Ivan arrived early. After half a dozen years of tireless patronage Ivan is a proud papa, now that we’ve “made it,” playing in the big leagues. I might have more of a sense of achievement had I not had to borrow money from my mother for bass strings, to play the fucking twenty-thousand-seat amphitheater with jumbotrons. But Ivan’s excitement is catching. Also he wants to start a magazine, “Cracked meets The Daily Worker.” His disappointment that we don’t know how to do that by now was brief. “How hard can it be?” he said.

  The dressing room This Is Your Life. Matt’s whole family is here: parents, siblings, his upstate contingent of cousins and an uncle (not the one who paints the dogs with eerily human faces, the genealogist). They’re all elated and appropriately confused. A Butterfield contingent including Tommy the Cannon (Hagar hair unchanged) and Tall Tim (quit smoking, more impressive than if he’d quit being tall), Mink was there, though he declined joining us onstage, didn’t really expect him to), Mal, couple new-gen Bay State regulars. Monahan is here, drinking fruit juice with no vodka in it, trying not to talk about his novel to the guy who’s not doing the video. There are Northampton people we brought along to help out (helping: guy offers to roadie and do lighting “or whatever,” gets a free ride here in lieu of an amplifier, band member, or some other crucial item, a random woman he wants to fuck gets guest-listed with her six friends, then he drinks everything in sight, eats the dip with his hands, insults somebody’s girlfriend, pisses off security, and passes out before we even load in). Old friends in various stages of liver failure are shotgunning a Bud suitcase every thirty minutes. The buffet looks less like it has been ravaged than like someone dropped a Buick through it.

  Someone in the Leppard crew came in awhile ago to ask the room if anyone wanted to put in an order for the cigarette run; everybody who smoked and anybody who’d ever considered taking it up put in an order, and now the runner has returned with a carton of each brand and nobody has any money. Now we owe Def Leppard three hundred dollars for cigarettes.

  On the loading dock, we tried to get our fireworks bit okayed by Def Leppard’s road management.

  “So it’ll just be that I light this fuse here. . . .”

  “And what happens, exactly?”

  “Something.”

  “What do you mean. What is that thing?”
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br />   “It shoots fire.”

  “Uh-huh. What kind of . . . fire?”

  “Chinese. We get them at a place.”

  “Right. You’re fucking kidding.”

  “It’s okay, it’s got duct tape on it. Watch.”

  The dock is showered by a twenty-foot, totally uncontrollable arc of dime-store napalm, which immediately ignites a plastic No Smoking sign, curling it into a charred tube. The whole dock smells like shit. Some guy doing things with boxes down the end goes what the fuck.

  “That looks like a ‘no’ face.”

  Our attention is drawn to a treated rubber pad that covers about 90 percent of the stage so that you’re standing on a twenty-foot Def Leppard logo that prevents splinters and grounds your band in an electrical storm. They are very touchy about it because it cost eleventy billion dollars. “Nobody lights any fucking fires on this. And what exactly does this ‘hand’ do, exactly?”

  Originally the plan was to be absolutely stone sober for this one, but instead we were absolutely high as jackasses when we got onstage.

  The crowd silent throughout. Crickets. (This is why it’s called the Tweeter Center?) Every once in a while someone way back on the lawn yells out “Faggots!” The only time we got any applause was by shouting “Aerosmith!” apropos of nothing, just to see. And there was a sort of horrified golf clap after we did our usual massacre of “Everybody Wants You.” You can’t go home again.

  Toward the middle of Def Leppard’s set, during “Photograph,” Tommy the Cannon wandered obliterated from the dressing room out onto the stage trying to eat a mangled roast beef sandwich through his hair. Security triggered, etc. As we were loading out, I saw a little bit of roast beef on one of the Leppard guitars.

  JULY 22 / DARIEN LAKE, NEW YORK

  Six Flags Amusement Park Amphitheater. Roller-coaster sounds: screaming, metal on metal. Took a pill (chewing them now, experimentally) last night just as we were getting on the road, got through a glass of scotch and not quite through the emergency wine before passing out against the window. Woke up here, in the van.

  Stepped out into the brightness in a huge parking lot behind the stage. The four Def Leppard buses and two semis, our van and our—the Hand’s—panel truck. Off in a corner the catering tent. Walked to it. Ate a peach while staring into space. Thumbed through an incomprehensible promotional magazine for the venue. Watched the lighting guys for a while, who were swinging around on ropes four stories up.

  Def Leppard is a huge machine, but a human one, welcoming. Joe Elliott stopped by our dressing room to say hello. Icebreaking, he warned us that though the weather looked okay right now, with Def Leppard’s luck (deceased band members, dismembered band members), “it’ll probably fucking rain for the rest of the tour.” He spotted our card table, some personal-size Dorito packages, and a banana with flies—most of our rider had been simply ignored. He said, “That. Forget you ever saw it.” When we got back from wandering around the amusement park our room was softly lit by a standing lamp, there was a better couch, and the card table had been switched out for a sturdier table covered with a white tablecloth. There were trays of fresh vegetables and meats, and the white wine had been put into ice buckets.

  And at the show the crowd was good for us, relatively speaking.

  At a rest area Safety Bear passed around a bowl. I took one hit and coughed myself into a different reality—forgot Safety Bear’s from Vermont, the Emerald Trapezoid, where they don’t screw around. He and Steve and Eug and I stood wordless making shadow puppets under a streetlamp. What started as kabuki dick jokes, wagging fingers and such, evolved into an elaborate and intense narrative about a swan king that required all our attention. Peeler watched for a long time. Unimpressed with a turn in the allegory, he said, “You guys are fucking high, hey.” (The hey is a Western Massachusetts interjection, like the Canadian eh, but not a question, and not intoned like one.) Had a bit of what the vending machine had to offer, along with the leftover, lukewarm, catering beer. Matt took a break from racking up the cell phone bill talking to Wilma so he could instigate another argument about the fictional money we don’t have. I made the mistake of changing the subject by telling the story of buying my couch back from a lesbian friend of ours who’s moving out west, for about a third more than I sold it to her for, even though it had been practically destroyed by riotous lesbian sex (cracked frame, springs boinged through the cushions), which, she argued, made the couch more valuable, though admittedly not much to sit on. The punchline, if there was one, was simply this: Northampton. And again, this was a friend we were talking about. But no. For Matt it was a matter of business acumen. He said so and everybody got quiet.

  Can’t begin to address how many things were wrong with that.

  JULY 24 / LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK

  No separate sober tent here and Lep’s management reminded us again today, pleasantly but firmly, that since Def Leppard are clean and sober now, we’re not supposed to be “drunk in catering,” which seems impossible and is.

  Joe Elliott has a tattoo of Ian Hunter on his shoulder and he means it. Def Leppard soundchecking a string of Mott songs, leaning into them. Sounded almost like a different band. Younger, with less to lose, in short. Hopeful about why they were going over Mott songs, and very happy to see Ian Hunter backstage a little while later, eating a piece of fruit. He sang with them, a massive-sounding rave-up of “All the Young Dudes” for the encore. We met him after the show, in catering. Drunk. What.

  JULY 25 / CUYAHOGA FALLS, OHIO

  Sitting in a dressing room like the common room at a hippie college. Orange couches, white cement walls, brown-gray lockers. Def Leppard is upstairs soundchecking. (Fa-Fa-Fa- Foolin’ . . . ) Unclear why the table covering and the cups and plates are for a Little Mermaid birthday party. One of the duplicated mermaids has coke smudges all over her face and several have been anatomized with a Sharpie.

  Band meeting re: it makes no sense to be here, should we go home—or, we should go home.

  On the one hand, I have to agree, being on this tour is hard to rationalize. But we knew all this, what this would be like. Why is there surprise? Is there another band named Def Leppard I don’t know about?

  Managed to get it to sink in with everybody, including Matt, I think, that we can’t dump off a high-profile, multimillion-dollar summer tour that half the people we work with stuck their necks out and, I would imagine, paid good money or did God knows what to get us on, then “go home” and expect everyone to apologize and hand us some preferable situation. Clearly this is not the ideal tour for us. It does, however, include a guy in a chef’s hat over there waiting to slice a fucking brisket any way you tell him to, and I don’t even remember what it’s like to carry an amplifier. Suck it the fuck up, and play the guitar like you’re paid to. I almost said.

  The cavernous hospitality room down the hall has a video arcade, the coin slots bypassed; Ping-Pong, a putting green, a jukebox, also free. None of that now. Here for some head-clearing.

  Outside the picture windows to my right is a staging area; Rick Allen, Leppard’s drummer, an amputee due to a car crash years ago, is doing lazy figure eights on a miniature, gold-sparkle circus motorcycle while smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone, looking less like he has one arm and more like he has three.

  On a nearby table is a parrot, belongs to one of the roadies. Mouth like a sailor and doesn’t care who knows it. People give him grapes. He’s frequently alone on one or other of the tables in catering, like he is now, with a paper plate of melon rinds in front of him, eating the rinds. Sometimes he just stares into space, thinking, I guess. He just flew over to the pinball machine, standing there looking at me now. Just cocked his head, like something occurred to him.

  Backstage after soundcheck, Joe Elliott came toward me laughing. “Was that ‘Metal Health’ you were just playing?”

  “An interpretation.”

  “You can say that again. Please, play that tonight. Special request. Please.”


  We obliged. Very few of the ten thousand people in front of us were getting any pleasure, clearly. Visible confusion. Plus the usual thousands of dudes sitting there fuming with arms folded, going, “I could fuckin’ do that.” Maybe. But you’re not.

  JULY 30

  Last night we were on the road, I was prone on the bed in the back of the van and Matt smugly passed me the mobile, with some bullshit remark I didn’t hear. It was Miss Management—Erin—quitting. Fed up, hurt.

  Not exactly out of the blue, she stopped taking my calls at least a month ago. All circumstances remain utterly confusing. Matt and Wilma in New York, Eugene and I out of the communications loop, that the funds are cut off doesn’t help. Setting aside a possibly lost friendship for the moment, the question is, who handles the managerial duties, which are considerable. I think I know the answer to that, unfortunately. There’s an explanation somewhere. Written on a butt plug bobbing in the Styx.

  Ryder truck disappeared, replaced by the rental van, finally. Except that as it turns out it was cheaper to buy it. A dodgy gray Dodge that shit the bed five minutes after it got here. Some risk involved with driving it, beyond looking like a scumbag, but Safety Bear leapt at the chance to take the thing to a local mechanic, miles away. After a week, Safety Bear cannot hide the fact that he needs a break. He probably hears what people say behind our backs, and I’m sure plenty of it is unflattering, can’t be helping. Mentioned this to Steve, who said, “I know, I handed him sort of a ripcord. Seen him reach for it a couple times. We’ll see.”

  So with only one vehicle now, we’ve got no space, something had to go. We were reconfiguring, determining what. Matt suggested my bass amp, and I countered suggesting his head—not his amplifier head, though that’s how it was taken. A couple of Leppard crew guys caught the gist of the problem (on several levels), and offered some room in one of their semis. The Hand, which was never on the chopping block, now travels in the semi with Leppard’s more precious tech gear, and the golden minibike. I know this pleases it.