I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

by Mike Edison

  By way of jumping into the abyss, I skipped the Internet part of the ritual mating dance and took a flyer on one of those “parties” that these cyber-yentas were always hosting, figuring the worst-case scenario would be two hours of free booze.

  Someone (I think it was Al Gore) once described twenty-first-century America as “a culture of narcissism and doom,” and it was all there at the event I attended. The place was lousy with brash whores and mousy little bitches. And the women were even worse. Louis Vuitton bags, French nails, and Atkins casualties bathed in sickly sweet perfume circled the room like vultures, while dickheads in khaki Dockers made snappy patter and tried to impress each other, reliving their frat-boy days at Zeta Beta Tau by ordering watered-down kamikaze shots at the bar.

  There are few things scarier than a thirty-nine-year-old single Jewish woman cruising a JDate mixer in four-hundred-dollar Manolo Blahniks that are slicing her feet into pastrami, except for maybe the forty-year-old male virgin sulking in the corner to a soundtrack of diluted hip-hop spun by a DJ wearing a tricolored Rasta yarmulke and in desperate need of a bath. I fled that scene like Moses hauling ass out of Egypt. But I am nothing if not compassionate, and it gave me the idea to use my connections at Screw and teach a class in how to haggle with a hooker with a minimum of hassle. (By the way, do you know why Jewish guys like to look at porn movies backward? They love the part when the hooker gives the money back.)

  Undeterred, I put an ad-for-self up on a slightly hipper dating website. I wrote “I am as comfortable in jeans as I am in a little black dress.” That’s how most of the women’s profiles read, so I figured what they were looking for was a man who felt the same way. Within a week my mailbox was filled with the dewy scent of hopeful responses.

  It’s amazing how many women there are in New York who just want to get drunk and fuck. Three. And they were really quite nice. We went out and charmed each other and got sloppy and went home together and then never saw each other again—I am assuming because we were both too embarrassed, although it could just as easily have been because they weren’t impressed with the rectitude of my moral compass after twenty-eight margaritas. It must have been all that salt.

  Even though I can be a little bit slutty when the mood strikes, I am hardwired to be a gentleman, and I always insist on picking up the tab on a first date. You know in the first five minutes (five seconds?) whether you are ever going to get together, whether it is that night or on the third date, but to bail capriciously on dinner after the first cocktail would have just been uncouth. Say what you like, but I’m no cad. People have feelings, and I never want to be in the position of hurting someone else, except, of course, on purpose.

  This ontology was costing me a couple of hundred dollars a week. At least the profile I posted was honest—I may have rounded up my height and rounded down my weight, but that was just for the sake of dealing in whole numbers. Some of the women I met had misrepresented their weight by entire zip codes.

  A good, steady job remained elusive, but one remaining benefit of the life of a freelance porn slinger was that there was time to get back into the music, and the Raunch Hands managed to pull together a two-week tour of Spain. Watching porn tapes for a living was making me a little edgy. Literally or figuratively, I was ready to throw the fireball.

  Chandler’s experiment with clean living was still on shaky ground. He had been bouncing dangerously between recovery and recidivism, but he assured us that he was okay to get back in the van. Mariconda and I had a little powwow before we left: we promised that there were to be no more bags of mystery pills on this jaunt, and no excessive day drinking, either, just our regular short beers for breakfast and however many bottles of Rioja were reasonably needed to wash down some typical Spanish lunch—say, four. Or maybe five, if it was paella day. And then maybe one, but only one, of those kooky coffee-and-brandy concoctions. But that was it until sound check. Unless we were holding some coke, and then perhaps a small line. But only as a digestif. After all, we weren’t animals. We made no promises that we’d stay sober, but agreed that we’d try at least to wait until the sun went down before we started to get seriously weird.

  Predictably, after ten straight shows, the wheels came off the cart and we defaulted to our reprobate instincts. When Norah from the Pleasure Fuckers joined us for a few gigs, we were doing shooters and bumps in the van at 140 kilometers per hour on the way to the club.

  It was a good tour, especially the show in Madrid, which was a spectacular homecoming for us. It seemed as if the whole city was there. But Chandler wasn’t ready to rejoin the Raunch Hands yet, and after the tour he wound up back in rehab. It would be a while before we saw him again.

  I had also begun my own band, the Edison Rocket Train.

  Originally, the concept had been to call the group the New York Sheiks. I was out from behind the drums, hollering and slashing away at the guitar, often with a bottleneck slide, and wearing a kaffiyeh, the traditional Arab headdress.

  My persona of the Original New York Sheik was based on a rich subculture of blues singers, matinee idols, and bad-guy professional wrestlers. Never mind Lord Zeppelin’s highbrow critical analyses— unifying these disparate strands of popular culture was clearly my greatest scholarly achievement. My personal string theory.

  Although the image of a sheik now all too frequently conjures waves of hatred, back in the 1920s and ’30s, to be a sheik meant to be a supercool dude, a ladies’ man, a player, a pimp, a badass mutherfucker, the very symbol of virility. That’s why prophylactics were called “sheiks.” In those days, Rudolph Valentino, as Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, was the most poweful potentate of the silent screen’s dreamy-eyed lovers, and that’s where the Mississippi Sheiks, a famous prewar country blues combo (who wrote “Sitting on Top of the World,” later covered by Howlin’ Wolf, the Grateful Dead, and Cream, among others), got their handle. As far as I know, they didn’t dress up like actual sheiks—they were a street band whose wardrobe would have fit in just as well in a cotton field—but Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs (“Wooly Bully”) loved to parade around looking like Egyptian acid casualties, and even Elvis took a sheik trip in Harum Scarum. It was a time-tested gimmick. Like I always say, if it’s good enough for the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, then it’s good enough for me.

  The greatest Sheik of them all, of course, was the original fire-throwing Sheik from Detroit—the most feared professional wrestler of all time—and in fact the first song we did was a stomping rewrite of “I Like to Hurt People,” the title song from a documentary about a movement to ban him from the ring. The weird thing was that when I put on the Sheik outfit, I sang better.

  But mostly we were a filthy blues band, albeit with punk rock tendencies. I was sick to death of what “blues” had become—shucking and jiving for yuppies drinking Lite Beer, a shopping-mall version of down-home Chicago, the soundtrack to an endless commercial promising “good times and good friends.” It’s what I call the Happy Horse-shit Hour, and it made me want to kill myself. The last time I was in a blues club in Chicago, the band was so slicked up, “soulful,” and “funky,” they would not have sounded bluesy if you ran over them with a hearse in a graveyard at midnight.

  With Satan mixing the sound.

  To whip the band into shape, we played every Thursday for months at Handsome Dick Manitoba’s bar. Manitoba was himself a former professional wrestler turned rock ’n’ roll legend, and he fronted the proto-punk heavyweights the Dictators. He fed us beer and cognac while we worked out our set in front of an audience of confused dipsomaniacs.

  Everybody loved the New York Sheiks, but after 9/11 it became very clear very quickly that any sort of Middle Eastern imagery was going to be a marketing disaster of New Coke proportions, never mind that our posters advertised “Terrorists with Telecasters” and asked the musical question, “If you have a bomb in your car, do you have to fasten your seat belt?” I lost the kaffiyeh in a big hurry and replaced it with a leopard-skin fez and fistfuls of Mardi Gras bea
ds. And thus, the Edison Rocket Train was born.

  When I was in the South chasing that devil weed for my blues story for High Times, I had spent a few days with T-Model Ford and RL Burnside, the last of the great Mississippi bluesmen. I drew a lot of inspiration from that trip, not least of all from eating goat sandwiches at Otha Turner’s picnic and drinking liters of moonshine corn liquor, what my friend Amos calls “the poor man’s LSD.” That ain’t no joke. Drinking that White Lightning will make you speak in tongues and see all sorts of crazy shit. It delivered unto me a great vision.

  The first thing I did was get rid of the drummer’s cymbals—I wanted to hear both hands on the drums—and I hired a full-time maracas and tambourine shaker who called himself Omar, King of the Maracas. He was a kickboxer slumming as a downtown rocker, and he was the only one I could find with enough stamina to shake maracas for forty straight minutes while I did the snake dance and wreaked havoc on my guitar, occasionally smashing it into a giant Chinese wind gong I had bought for no other purpose. The whole thing sounded like an overamped tent revival meeting, what we called Go-Go Gospel and the Shakin’ Beat.

  We forged our sound from field hollers, spirituals, work songs, New Orleans second-line dance beats, Fun House, and a new wave of Afro-Futurism I had instigated, based in part on World War I–era manifestos that advocated the destruction of all past art forms. I had begun experimenting with a two-string guitar of African design—played through a very aggressive fuzz box–echo machine combination—and spouting Sun Ra–inspired gibberish, spinning stories about black men in silver spaceships. This would be the basis of my solo show, which I would later take to Europe.

  When I had the idea to drip some retro-future space oddities onto the first Rocket Train record, Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!, I called Jon Spencer and asked him if he’d come on down and play the theremin on a couple of tracks.

  The theremin is a primitive synthesizer of sorts that is played without actually touching the instrument. It has one or two antennae, elements, and as you move your hands close to them, it begins to wail. It all looks very mysterious and dramatic. (Geeks take note: the theremin is based on the principle of heterodyning oscillators, triggered by the capacitance of the human body, kind of like the way radio reception can change when you move around the room.) The theremin is featured on scads of science fiction soundtracks, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, the Star Trek TV show, and a handful of pop songs. The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” is probably the best-known song featuring the theremin. “Hand Jive” by Lothar and the Hand People is a good one, too. Jimmy Page uses one in the psychedelic part of “Whole Lotta Love.” With his band the Blues Explosion, Jon had made the theremin one of his signature riffs, and he took it to new levels of showmanship and vindictive noisemaking, dueling the damn thing nightly in a ferocious battle of Man vs. Machine. I had always been a theremin enthusiast, but I didn’t want anyone to think I was ripping off shtick from the Blues Explosion, so I went right to the source. Jon said he’d be glad to come down to the studio and make a racket.

  I had met Jon a few years before in Madrid when he came through on tour with the Blues Explosion. We had been traveling in similar circles—Crypt Records was the label behind both the Raunch Hands and the first Blues Explosion disc—but for some reason we had never met before that. After I moved back to New York, we wound up being neighbors and became close friends. We had a lot in common, least of all that we were a couple of Ivy League dropouts who still clung with childlike optimism to the belief that in rock ’n’ roll there was salvation.

  I was frankly in awe of the Blues Explosion’s ability to mangle John Lee Hooker riffs and James Brown beats into something viciously twisted and still sound distinctly punk. Rock ’n’ roll had lost a lot of its swagger. Most of the stuff that people were calling indie or alternative was a load of self-consciously introspective, weepy, whiny crap, suspiciously Beatles-influenced melodies retro-engineered for alt-punk shlubbery. There was a lot of droning, navel-gazing nonsense cluttering the airwaves. Everyone had the same advantages of forty years of rock ’n’ roll before them to draw on, but the Blues Explosion stood out in sharp relief. They seemed to adhere closely to Ezra Pound’s mantra to “make it new.” Phil Spector used to talk about people who made good records and those who made contributions. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion was in the second group. Having Jon play on my record was the best thing that could have happened—I wouldn’t have traded him for Beck, Bono, and two Foo Fighters to be named later.

  The Rocket Train played a lot in the East Village, in bars like Manitoba’s and Otto’s Shrunken Head, a mutant punk-rock tiki bar on Fourteenth Street. I had a matching silver cape and shirt made for me—I figured if Elvis, Sun Ra, Mick Jagger, James Brown, Superman, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Dracula, Evel Knievel, and Liberace all had capes, I should probably get one, too. Our music spoke for itself, but I always like to shake a little glitter on the pie.

  I was never happier than when I was screaming the blues and generally making a spectacle of myself. We played at the Baby Doll Lounge, a topless joint in the financial district. We made it as far as Austin and New Orleans and did a string of shows at the Asbury Lanes, a rock ’n’ roll bowling alley on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where we actually set up on a stage in the middle of the lanes and people bowled around us while we played. Mostly we played in any bucket of blood that would have us. After the show it was always the same. The bartender would come over and shrug. “You guys would have made some money tonight, but you drank so much, you owe us.”

  We played CBGB’s thirtieth-anniversary show with the Dictators, a cherry of a gig, until _____ had the temerity to show up. I knew exactly when she arrived, because the temperature in the club dropped ten degrees in five seconds, and it was already winter, and bitter fucking cold. When she moseyed on up to me after the show, as if everything were just ducky, I felt like vomiting all over her designer shoes (her taste had changed dramatically since we lived together), and I cursed the day I met her. She was by far the worst hangover I have ever had, including the day after a particularly nasty evening of speed trials when I suffered a small stroke at a Yankees game and was blind for almost thirty minutes.

  I should have told her to fuck off, but I took the high road and was civil, bordering on nice. And then I walked outside of CBGBs to get some air and didn’t even notice it when I stepped in a giant, icy puddle, right up to my knee.

  The bad vibes didn’t end there. Screw was tanking, and I was out of another gig.

  Al always said that Screw had been a success not because of his talent and vision, but in spite of his tendency to fuck everything up. After years of flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants porno prosperity, it finally bit him on his gigantic ass. Sales were plummeting, mostly since free alternative weeklies like The Village Voice had become a major source for hooker ads. No one needed to cough up the three bucks for Screw to score a pay-for-play floozy. Even the Yellow Pages were taking ads for “escort services” and “out-call massage.” Of course the Internet had dealt the biggest blow to the print porn business, and Al, already an anachronism, was in no way equipped to ramp up Screw technology and compete in the twenty-first century.

  Screw still managed to sell ads, and cash was coming in. The World’s Greatest Newspaper still had a loyal following of readers who expected to see the usual hatchet jobs of celebrities and politicians bent over and taking it the hard way. Unfortunately, those joyous pages were being pushed out of the book to make room for Al’s endless rants about his son, who was about to graduate from Harvard and had disinvited Al from the proceedings, figuring that having a Fat Loudmouth Pornographer starring as the paterfamilias was not going to play well on their tony Cambridge campus, even if it was the very same FLP who had been sporting the hefty tuition tab for the past four years. Al was livid. He disowned his son as a bastard and began speculating vociferously in the pages of the magazine who the kid’s real father was: Osama bin Laden? David Berkowitz? Rosie O’Do
nnell?

  It was funny at first, but he was relentless, and sales continued to drop. No one wanted to read about Al’s petty family squabbles. He didn’t seem to care. He was like Lenny Bruce, obsessing his way to the grave.

  Screw was down to one part-time editor who was translating Al’s nearly incomprehensible rants—left late at night on the office answering machine—into the weekly editorial page. But that was about it. The guts of the book were being filled up with still pictures from freebie porn videos and articles picked up from past issues. No one wanted this crap. Lord Zeppelin’s career died hard.

  Al yelled and screamed like a classic paranoiac. Everyone was out to get him. Even if that were true, it wouldn’t have mattered. He was determined to destroy himself. He was spending as if he had won a shopping spree from a game show, buying giant plasma TVs in bulk, laptop computers, limited edition Nike sneakers, and humidors filled with Cuba’s finest, not to mention pouring money into the sizable restaurant, hotel, and plane ticket habit that kept him bouncing between his New York home base, his Florida compound, his Los Angeles pied-à-terre, and his “smoke-easy” in Amsterdam.

  He bought a dozen high-tech vacuum cleaners, and when he went to someone’s house for dinner, instead of a bottle of Chardonnay, he’d bring a vacuum with him as a gift. Beyond any Dada absurdity, it was just the latest sign that Al’s mental health was about to supernova.

  A former assistant, egged on by Al, filed a harassment charge. The trial was an enormous mistake, but it was Al’s last go-round in his favorite venue, the courthouse.

  What Al never realized was that this was not a First Amendment trial, it was a tawdry piece of shit, a misdemeanor that never should have seen a jury. Of course Al managed to turn it into a circus. His Free Speech laurels were unimpeachable, and the promise of his outrageous behavior pulled a decent crowd of reporters, but no matter how much he yelled and screamed and preened for the press pool in his red, white, and blue leather biker jacket, it was not for the noble cause. It was just about a foulmouthed nutcase in a beef with an assistant.