I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

by Mike Edison

  I was hired as publisher—with editorial responsibilities—a path I had gone down before with less than sterling results, but I could not say no to the money, 60K a year. I didn’t last that long.

  Peter was a white-knuckle ex-smoker. He still had a vicious habit, but now he satisfied his jones by chewing through boxes and boxes of extra-strength nicotine gum. Which may have done wonders for his lungs, but not so much for his blood chemistry. He always seemed on the verge of boiling over. Some very talented people were terrified to work for him. He was freakishly involved in the minutiae of the magazine, maniacally driven to tinker with every word until it hit some inexplicable note of Neoplatonic perfection. Production halted until he had his way with every caption, every hed, every blurb; even casting the table of contents became an endurance contest, a decathlon of short-form prose.

  I agreed with him about the level of precision he demanded, but since he was usually off in New Haven or at a gallery opening in Germany or Korea, he was never around, and the magazine just sat there waiting for his arrival, when he would freak out and start tearing up pages and screaming.

  To do my job, I had to brace him. I understood that he was overwhelmed with Yale and his art, but he was fucking up deadlines, and he was going to have to get it together or we were going to be missing press dates and there would be no one to blame but himself. The people at index worked twelve-hour days and weekends; there was no lack of work ethic there. I was as dedicated to the deity in the details as much as he was, but he had to learn when to let go and get the book out the door. Peter finally told me that I was too professional to work there.

  Well, now I had truly heard it all. For once, I had nothing to say. He invited me to contribute as a freelancer as much as I wanted.

  As a freelance editor I went from making five thousand a month to five hundred, but at least I was finally able to enjoy my job, mostly writing the front section of the book, six short interviews every issue.

  It was an incredibly diverse group of people whom I spoke with for index. Gus Van Sant was a bit tepid and didn’t open up until I started in with the geekazoid film school lingo, but John Waters was as witty and smart and observant as one would imagine. We talked about Phil Spector’s hair. Chatting with Udo Kier—one of my all-time favorite actors, who played Dracula and Frankenstein in Andy Warhol’s sleazy art-house horror films and speaks lugubriously cadenced English with a strong German accent—was like getting tipsy on really good, really sticky schnapps. I made frequent excuses to call him. Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle, gave me some hints on how to become an answer on his page (change my name to Eno or Ono), and offered his favorite palindrome, the longest one in English that makes “moderate sense”: T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating. Is sad. I’d assign it a name: gnat-dirt upset on drab pot toilet.

  Got that?

  I spoke with fashion impressarios Kate Spade, Norma Kamali, Hedi Slimane, and agnès b. Bret Easton Ellis, whom I had not been looking forward to interviewing owing to the nasty impression I had of him, left over from the era of brat-packing eighties cokehead clubbing when he came up, turned out to be wickedly charming, tremendously funny, and self-effacing. Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth told me a nice story about scaring some challenged schoolchildren by smashing up their instruments at Neil Young’s annual charity event. (Sonic Youth’s instruments, that is, not the children’s.) Björk was a snooze. Singer-songwriter Cat Power was sweet and shy, as you would expect. But storm-trooping chanteuse Diamanda Galás shocked me (shocked me!) with her wonderful and well-developed hatred of the Beatles. Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons told me “fuck the police,” but it didn’t seem to have a whole lot of tooth behind it. He was calling from his car while en route to visit his pal Barbra Streisand. The absolute highlight of this run was when Amy Sedaris invited me to her apartment, made me cupcakes, and introduced me to her pet rabbit.

  And then one day Peter killed the magazine. I guess he was overwhelmed by his painting and academic careers colliding with the various degrees of angst and stress he brought to the rest of his life. It was too bad; index was just one issue shy of its tenth anniversary. There was a big issue and a party in the works. And then, nothing. Over a decade, index had cultivated a very dedicated, very influential following. But it went out with a whimper, not a bang. Like so many other things in the magazine business, this made little sense.

  The year after I left my full-time gig at index, I made about fourteen thousand dollars, roughly the amount that I would put on my Master-Card that year. And I had burned through my savings. No one else wanted to hire a High Times and Hustler veteran, especially one approaching forty who had already made up his mind about how the world should be run.

  But I started to get called for an increasingly strange series of odd jobs, including creating a bio and press kit for the family of Frank Zappa, who were about to embark on a tour called Zappa Plays Zappa, featuring Frank’s kids Ahmet and Dweezil. The whole thing was designed to look like declassified FBI files, complete with black bars censoring the most sensitive material.

  While I was putting it together, I mentioned to Ahmet that I used to be the publisher of High Times and I remembered when he had his comedy radio show.

  “Oh,” he said guardedly. “Were you a guest? I remember we had someone from High Times . . .”

  “No,” I reassured him. “That was the editor, Steve Hager.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Ahmet sighed. “I thought I was going to have to fire you. We figured a guy from High Times would be a natural, but he was the least funny person we ever had on the show.”

  And then Frank from Soft Drinks & Beer called. Having failed as a car thief, he was now a big shot in the marketing business, and he wanted to hire me to help write a comedy show about a deodorant that was supposed to make young men irresistible to women.

  Frank had been working for a guerrilla marketing company, a logical enough leap after all the wisdom that was imparted to us at SD&B. One night he was in a bar telling someone about a campaign he had been working on, marketing toilet paper to college kids at rock concerts. It was a revolutionary departure from the old model of Mr. Whipple pitching two-ply to housewives. After all, who used more toilet paper than the dudes who went to Ozzfest?

  The guy Frank was telling this story to turned out to be some sort of literary agent who encouraged Frank to write a marketing book. And so he did. Now he had a book, which made him an expert, and being an expert, he was in demand and had landed a six-figure gig with some slick marketing outfit in Chicago. Their client, the deodorant that made men irresistible, had hired a Famous Comedian who “tested through the roof” on college campuses (Frank really said that, “tested through the roof”) to be their spokesman. He was going to go on a tour of colleges with a busload of “T & A” (and no kidding, that’s really what they call the models) and give a “class” in why everyone needed the product. Frank and I were going to take their existing ad materials and shape them into some kind of routine for the Famous Comedian. For this I would be paid a rate of a thousand dollars per day.

  Frank flew to New York and got us a hotel room. We barricaded ourselves in, began a decent drug collection—green buds, white powder, amber liquor, Xanax, Valium, Ambien, and a shitload of ice and beer— and sent down to room service for a large supply of grapefruits, club sandwiches, Snickers bars, beef jerky, and Gatorade. We weren’t leaving until the show was done. Apparently, there is a lot of money in selling deodorant to horny eighteen-to twenty-four-year-olds.

  I told Frank that if we were really going to do this right, I would need a piano. I was only joking. I didn’t really want a piano, but I felt as if we were trapped in some deranged Neil Simon set piece, and I wanted to see just how far I could push things. Moments later, Frank was on the phone with the manager of the hotel, demanding that one be sent up immediately.

  After three days, the room stank like a zoo, but we had a show written, which ended with a faux commencement
speech: “Friends, scholars, distinguished guests, horny, incompetent freshmen . . . Tonight, you are going to get laid!” The client loved it, the Famous Comedian loved it, and now, thanks to us, there is a whole new wave of fresh-smelling frat boys contemplating the finer points of date rape.

  It was around this time that I also began working for Jon Spencer and the Blues Explosion as their Minister of Information.

  Jon had distilled the essence of rock ’n’ roll—as performance, as rebellion, as the hellfired covenant of deliverance—into one semi-autistic outburst—BLUES EXPLOSION!—which he would shout at the beginnings of songs, in the middle of songs, on top of overwhelming blasts of rhythm and guitar noise, whenever he had the fever. It was his signature riff. My job was to get that shudder-and-shake rock action into print, something a record company publicist could use to blast through the clutter of a million other press releases and knock out jaded hipster journalists who were too cool to get excited about anything.

  So we just went over the top rope, yelling and screaming, testifying to the Knife-Twisting Gospel of the Blues Explosion, ranting about New Strains of Psychedelia and the Coalition of the Rocking. We worked dozens of e-mail blasts, Web postings, and press releases, and we got a lot of good hits. It would also get me into some hot water.

  Tom Waits had invited Judah and Russel, the other two-thirds of the Blues Explosion, to back him up for an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman—without Jon.

  It was an inspired call. While Jon tended to use his guitar like a rocket launcher, Judah worked from a gritty formulary of razor-blade twang, Telecaster thump, and swampy Southern soul. Russell kept a monstrously huge big beat. And they were big Tom Waits fans. They would be joined by Tom’s bass player, Larry Taylor, also a musician of tremendous depth, who had been in the original Canned Heat.

  The plan was twofold: get the message out and keep the underground hype machine bubbling by dropping a thermonuclear propaganda bomb on Blues Explosion fans; then grab a picture of Tom with Russell and Judah and send it out with a tongue-in-cheek press release (“Tom Waits Blues Explosion?”) to the mainstream press and see if we couldn’t get it picked up by some Big Rock Mag. Given the cachet of Tom Waits and the Blues Explosion working together, it should have been a slam dunk.

  Jon encouraged me to write a crazed conspiracy rant to use for the Blues Explosion website and as an e-mail blast to their fan list. This was at the same time, the run-up to the 2004 election, when Dan “I Know a Fair Amount About LSD” Rather was turning himself into a national laughingstock and about to be bounced from CBS (the network on which the show would air) for going hook, line, and sinker for false memos regarding George W. Bush’s dodgy military record.

  Why is Jon Spencer being replaced with Old Man Waits? One CBS staffer told us that “the network douche bags are running scared . . . and Letterman doesn’t want to take a chance on Jon blues-exploding anywhere near the studio . . . This goes a lot deeper than Dan Rather” . . .

  I’d like to think it was a model of gonzo paranoia and situation comedy. Except that the record company publicist—who was probably working for ten other bands that day as well and had little understanding of the Blues Explosion (she kept asking if they could play with B.B. King, you know, because it’s blues)—jumped the gun, grabbed the copy off the Blues Explosion website, and, without reading it, pasted it into an e-mail and sent it out as a straightforward industry-style press release. It took about five minutes after that for the Blues Explosion manager to call me, horrified. Tom Waits, or at least his people, were furious. We were going to have to “contain” the problem. I explained that it was just the usual fireworks, that it was written for fans who were in on the joke, and what sort of dimwit would have sent that out as a legitimate press release without reading it first? It was not our policy to call the network who was hosting us “douche bags,” at least not in official communiqués, and especially not before the actual taping. There were a few hours more of panicked phone calls—at one point the show was going to be called off—before things finally calmed down. But the photo op was shot to hell. There was no way Tom was going to have his picture taken with Judah and Russell, who were absolutely slamming playing behind him. Oh well. It was a cute idea.

  When my hand had finally healed and could withstand the impact of Throwing the Fireball, I was summoned to Austin for the Raunch Hands’ twentieth-anniversary show.

  It may have been our four millionth gig (I had been in the band for only fifteen years, so technically I was still “the new guy”), but it was a coming-out of sorts. Chandler was sober and had been sober, and it looked, brilliantly, as if this time it was going to stick. This would be his first show truly clean.

  Chandler had hit rock bottom so many times I am not sure how he ever climbed out of the abyss. It took a lot of strength.

  He had been beating the shit out of himself with a torrent of bad liquor and pills. He looked like hell, he made little sense, he smelled bad, and he was losing the battle.

  He stayed on my couch for weeks without moving, just pushing a pen hopelessly around the same clue in the same crossword puzzle for hours, drenched in self-doubt, vodka sweat, and depression. Then he left for a treatment program in Phoenix. He told me that before he went to Phoenix, he had experienced an odd moment of clarity, and he could hear the Death Rattle. He had a choice to make—you always have a choice—and he chose to live.

  Starting young, Chandler had romanticized a drinking life until it almost destroyed him. Fortunately, he discovered in time that he didn’t have to get loaded to bring the soul. He could devastate an audience with focus and raw talent. Chandler is a gifted singer, and when he starts shouting the blues, people line up and testify. Instead of emerging reformed and reenergized, he could have easily joined my other dead friends. Now he was regaining the respect and admiration of people who had written him off as a has-been drunk. There was an excitement about him no one had felt since the Raunch Hands were the Next Big Thing, eighteen years before. The good part of his mind was open, working at peak form, and the music started flowing through him like Big Water at a hydroelectric plant. This was rock ’n’ roll as Savior. Chandler didn’t need to drink, he needed to sing. It was the more powerful force.

  Also moving forward, George had a new fiancée, an especially interesting development, considering he was still technically married to Tomoko. In the eyes of Fat Elvis, God, and the state of Nevada, those Vegas marriages are no joke. After ten years, either George still couldn’t figure out how to negotiate a no-fault divorce across the international date line, or he just liked to keep the new wife-to-be walking on eggshells. He offered no clue as to whether he was practicing some sort of advanced relationship hoodoo, or if he was just being lazy.

  I was still single and still creatively unemployed. It was a good time to get to work on a new Rocket Train record. Jon Spencer had some time off from the road, and he generously offered to produce.

  It was during one of these sessions that the Big Blackout hit. No ordinary power failure, this was a complete collapse of the power grid that left not only New York but large parts of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Canada without electricity for days. Hundreds of flights were canceled. Cell phones didn’t work. More than fifty million people were affected. Detroit and Toronto were out for the better part of a week.

  In the studio, Jon and I were listening to the playback of a song when the lights went out. The emergency fire lights went on, and the tape went wha wha whaaa whaaaa whaaaaaaaaa whaaaaaaa . . . Had we been recording at the time, we would have had the blackout on tape.

  After we went out to the street to see what was going on and realized that not only was the neighborhood down, but the entire city as well, Jon headed home to take care of his family. My first thought was to get to the bar near my house. The ice would be melting, and I had some legitimate concerns about the beer.

  It was a real wingding of a blackout party. The entire neighborhood was there, along
with dozens of people who had been stranded after work when the subways stopped running. Everyone was in a great mood. Of course, by Day Two the novelty of the situation had faded like a cheap suit and even normally resilient New Yorkers were getting cranky sweating it out—it was the middle of August, and hot. Another big problem was that without power, no ATM machines were working, and everyone seemed to be running out of cash. Of course credit cards weren’t working, either, and New York could have easily turned into a city of hunters and gatherers. But the first night, spirits were still running high. Compared with what we had all been through in the recent past, a blackout was like a Swiss picnic. When evening fell, the bar was lit with candles, and I found myself sitting next to a Very Pretty Girl who had given up trying to get back to her place in Brooklyn.

  Meanwhile, I had a freezer full of food at home that was now involuntarily defrosting. A local grocery delivery service had been offering fifty dollars’ worth of free food as a bonus with your first order, and I had decided to take it in pork chops. Big ones. Double-cut monstrosities that looked as if they were drawn by Dr. Seuss. When it became obvious that the power was not coming back on anytime soon, I began to fear for those pork chops.

  There was no electricity, but at least I had a gas oven that was still working. I explained the gravity of the situation to the VPG and asked her if she would like to join me for a meat party. Fortunately, she shared my concerns.

  Sometimes the stars line up and I catch lightning in a bottle, and sometimes it takes a large-scale disaster to make the Top Secret Action happen. We spent the night cooking the pork chops by candlelight and generally making a mess. When day broke, there was grease everywhere.