CHAPTER 38
WE CAN BE HEROES
The long blond bangs fall over his mismatching blue and black eyes exactly the way they did in the posters. The posture is the same, a kind of excitable swishiness with feminine limbs and long fingers, his sharp chin and perfect Nordic nose. I’m a little surprised by the outcropping of gray stubble on his face, the odd effect of age and agelessness it creates, like talking to an oracle in some hidden cavern in the sky. But then it would be different than it was when I was thirteen. I’m a grown man now. I can’t just blurt out all the ways I wanted to be him, how much he represented an unattainable ideal for Jake and me. He’s an idea, not a person. So I can’t just hug him and hold on tight, tell him I’m trying to understand something and I need his help. It’s like speaking to the Wind. What do you ask the Wind?
I am nervous and jumpy. Palms sweaty. Heart pounding. Throat dry. An unsettled lightness in my stomach, a dizziness that has been with me since my editor told me that I would be here, sitting in a studio in Soho three feet away from David Bowie.
It’s like floating.
There is a beam of light washing over his face from the high windows of the studio. It engulfs him, like stage lighting in a high school play set in heaven. He is wearing blue jeans and a woven blue-and-white cardigan, his long blond bangs falling into his eyes as he raises an oracular hand over his head and proclaims, “There is no God and man is a fool and that has always been the creed I stand by.”
We’ve been talking about Andy Warhol and Nietzsche and he just blurted it out. I smile uncomfortably, surprised by how quickly he got to the point. We are a long way from the higher power at an AA campout.
I know my job is to play the role of journalist, to fire off questions about the guitar on song three and the “process in the studio.” But nobody really cares about these things. They can make up their own minds. All people want to know is, What is he like? Like, is he cool or a bit of a dick? And if so, is he cool about being a dick? Do you think he would like me?
And all I want to know is the Secret. I know it’s not that simple, but there is a sense I carry that he guards it like a treasure, that he knows something magical and I have this one heartbreakingly brief moment to ask him. So I immediately decide to ignore my proper role as journalist, my fear that he might be offended if I do, and just ask him about that Secret, how he writes songs.
I blurt out a short speech about 2:00 A.M. songwriting sessions and my now abandoned book and my deepest wish, which is to sing for an audience, and just ask him how he turns words into music, how he distinguishes between songwriting and prose.
He nods, a wry, flat smile forming on his British mouth as he stands in that perfect light (How did he know where to stand? Is there a mark on the floor or something?), as if he’s heard this speech before.
“I think a prose writer can articulate ideas in a more straightforward way,” he says. “But with a musician, the words are like a plaster that I lay on this armature of music. I don’t see the words as carrying thoughts particularly. It’s more like an array of feathers which produce a pattern. And the totality of that pattern set against this armature of music is enough to express what I’m feeling.”
It sounds so simple when he says it. The music is a framework, the words are a pattern, together their purpose is to express the precise thing the songwriter feels.
“Do you ever feel alone in the world?” I ask him, because I feel like I can since we are floating through space together somewhere near Mars in this studio in New York City.
He cocks his head sideways and gives me a look. Or at least that’s how I imagine it, that I am speaking to the Wind and the Wind is telling me its secrets, or isn’t, or might.
“I think now we don’t have a God. We are completely and totally at sea. So I think we feel a lot more content to accept that life is chaos. There is no structure to it. There is no plan.”
I write that down: Chaos is good. Structure is bad. “My generation doesn’t even see that. The absence of a plan. Because it’s all we’ve ever known. This absence. This chaos.” I try not to stare at him.
“I don’t know what that must be like.”
“It’s like dancing at ground zero.”
He stands up to pace in front of me, turning quietly in my direction. I sense this oddly paternal feeling from him as he looks at me bent over my notebook.
“I remember when I was sixteen years old,” he says. “I was such an idealist about what could happen in the future. I can’t read whether you younger people can feel the idealism we felt back in the ’60s.”
I think of Chuck, the Old Man, the Imperial Marines with their guns, the School, the violence, the shame we carry from living without parents, the broken marriages and broken families and broken hearts, the failed attempts at changing the world, all the ways that dizzy optimism turned to dread, to disappointment, the feeling we had like we were growing up in the bombed-out craters of the 1960s.
He says, “So I wonder if it is harder for you to feel that there definitely are things we should all abide by.”
“I think I did when I was sixteen. But I spent the last few years feeling pretty fucked-up. So many things I thought were good, including parts of myself, turned out to be more complicated, more broken. And I can barely remember having a thought where love is just love, where there is peace and I feel like I deserve it, before all this contradiction in me came about.”
“Yeah, that contradiction really fucks you all up, doesn’t it?” He stares at me, his fingers clasped in front of his mouth.
“Yes.”
The beam of light from the window has completely surrounded his face so that I’m seeing double, the polite Englishman in front of me and the oracle who answers the riddle, the sky man fallen to earth. He looks at me very seriously.
“Well, write about the contradiction then.”
He goes to the wall-to-wall glass that separates the control room from a microphone in a sound booth and the conversation falls back into the familiar territory of record making, processes, influences. Soon a publicist leans in and points at her watch, which is my cue to leave. We shake hands and he pats me on the back kindly. He tells me it was lovely meeting me. He wishes me luck. If there was a ring, I would kiss it. An altar, and I would kneel.
I walk out to the elevator, down to the street in a daze. It’s dusk. The taxicabs are turning on their headlights, the fluorescent twinkling of a thousand skyscraper windows illuminating the sky above me. A wind blows through my thrift-store scarf and moppish hair as I turn down Canal Street thinking about the moment alone with him. Write about the contradiction.
There was nothing about bridges, pre-choruses, hooks, or repetition, nothing about vocal range or guitar effects, all the mundane things I usually think about. The basic insight was to just ignore those things and write a song that expresses exactly how I feel, no matter how contradictory. It was both simpler and infinitely harder than what I imagined he would say.
* * *
SIX MONTHS OF writing and rewriting, scribbling, and struggling later, I am sitting in a tiny hotel room across from Central Park having a drunken conversation with a polite, middle-aged man in eyeliner and smeared lipstick named Robert Smith.
He still has the look, the one from my Cure posters. That’s the first thing I thought when he walked into the room at a quarter to midnight. The stubble and makeup, the rat nest of hair, like a butterfly drunk on absinthe.
There is a bucket of beer cooling in the corner and after introductions and small talk, after the perfunctory discussion of who played what and where on the new record, after three or four beers from that cooler, after a publicist walked in and he waved her away saying, “We’re extending, we’re extending,” after we are pacing the room like two insomniacs—he letting me smoke, me pretending not to notice his constant rambling, stream-of-consciousness sentences, the endless questions he utters aloud, asking himself about the nature of his career, his life, the private moments I kn
ow so well (or imagine to) that brought me here—he stops squarely in the middle of the room, looks over at the tape recorder I’ve placed on the counter and says, “You people always wonder what I think about. But I think it’s dead obvious. So I always think, Well, how far can I go?”
I don’t know how to tell him as he stands there staring at me, peeling the wet label from the bottle in his hand, that it is impossible to me to be here in this room having this conversation with him at 2:00 A.M., when he’s someone I grew up talking to, how he explained the world to me as I cried and longed for escape, to bridge the unimaginable gap between those two points on a map: a dingy room in Salem, Oregon, lost and sad and confused and alone, lips still swollen, head still spinning, stomach empty, mind reeling, and this one, here with him, in a rarefied space of earth across from him in New York City. And I think, Well, how far can I go?
I am dizzy from the late hours, trying not to stare too hard at him. It’s strange, this distance his presence in my mind has created. Fame does that to people: gives birth to butterflies, then wraps them in cocoons. Nobody loves a genius child. Kill him—and let his soul run wild! That’s how Langston Hughes put it.
“That was absolute shit anyway.” He cocks a thumb toward the conference room where a group of suits had gathered earlier as we listened to his new record.
“No, I thought it was fine. Though maybe kinda weird to be just standing there like that as people talked over the album you just made.”
“Someone told me I didn’t have to stand there like that. There were certain parts, songs when I thought, oh, yeah, I’d be talking now too, and other times I thought, Why the fuck is everyone talking?”
“I was feeling that way the whole time. It was rude, for sure. Anyway, fuck ’em, man.” The line is a bit of a pose, but hey. He laughs. I lift a beer. We toast.
When I tell him about the abandoned book, the quest for the Secret that has taken over my life, the late-night sessions where I scribble and play, scribble and play, what David Bowie told me, the oracle and the Wind, about embracing contradiction, he tilts his head, gives me a look that says something like “you poor dumb bastard.”
Show me how you do that trick.
“Of course,” he says slowly. “It’s always been cathartic for me. I am by nature obsessive about everything, so I’d say that makes sense, to just beat it down, man. For some songs the only reason they exist is because I’m screaming at the world.”
“That’s all I want to do sometimes. Scream at the world. But it kind of feels like screaming at myself, you know?”
“Well, good. Because then people will respond to it saying, ‘God, that’s just exactly how I feel.’”
I don’t know if it matters that his songs were about people in a different country at a different time and not specifically about orphans or cults or the men who drink themselves to death, the imaginary boys pleading and running. But it’s strange how aware he is, how much he knows the effect he had, how I listened to those sad happy songs of his and thought, This is just how I feel. I had no idea anyone else did too.
Soon the conversation devolves into stories about touring and I sense his impatience because he has to go to the studio in a few minutes for remixing at 3:00 A.M. He goes on and on about “fucked-up situations,” “fucked-up feelings,” how life goes on anyway, that you find people who understand this and you tell them about it. Then you both can wake in the morning and feel better because the thing is named. That’s why you write the song. That right there. Write that down, you drunken ape.
As we stumble toward the door to leave, he places his hand on my shoulder and turns me around gingerly. I brace myself, feeling his hot breath on my neck as he leans into my ear: “I fucking hate the idea of normal. Normal is all that’s bad about living. All that’s boring about life. Why be normal?”
I stare at him, wondering how to retrace the lines between reality and projection, the idea-come-to-life in my head and the dizzy, querulous, drunk middle-aged man in front of me with a ten o’clock shadow and a smudge of red lipstick across his mouth.
“To be honest,” he whispers fiercely, “I have no idea what normal is.”
Then he is gone and I am alone with my thoughts and the empty bottles of beer.
Why be normal? Destroy yourself and dance in the embers. Embrace the catharsis. Use it. The words resonate in my head as I cradle the tape recorder in my hands. Show them. Show them how weird you are; show them the person beneath the mask.
That’s the whole magic trick of an essence brought to life by a song, to become an artist when you feel broken and you’ve decided to turn it into beauty. To make the pain useful. The longing, the fear, the heartache and dread, the ability to see these broken pieces of yourself like cracks in an armor through which you are better able to see the world: too broken to be normal, just broken enough to see beauty.
My God, Robert, what an idea.
CHAPTER 39
WISHING WELL
Back in my tiny Parisian apartment on the Eastside of Los Angeles, beneath the steady stare of Franz and Fyodor, I hunch over my synthesizer playing piano chords, pounding the keys, the same three chords over and over again. When I get claustrophobic, I walk through the neighborhood of sidewalk cafés and corner bars, taco stands and vintage clothing stores. I just want to feel the night air on my face. Some nights I see the line of people hiking up Vermont Avenue to the Greek Theatre at the top of the hill in Griffith Park. There’s something magical about that place, the way the music floats over the canyon, the sound of an electric guitar as it reaches the ear of a coyote sniffing the wind.
When I get back to my flat and turn on the keyboard and stare out into the street, those simple chords sound to me how running feels at night, the way the images burst from the darkness, the echo of the electric piano overlapping with itself like feet on cool pavement, down back alleys, under lonely streetlights. Why am I running? What am I running from? Who? I write some lines down and sing them over and over again, until the sprinklers come on at 3:00 A.M. and I finally say goodnight to my friends Franz and Fyodor.
For eight months I return to the song to revise it, first on a piece of old cardboard that sits on top of the synthesizer where I scribble lyrics while I sing, then in a notebook with pages crossed out. The restlessness. The street. The gasp that echoes up as if from the bottom of the well. The fact that I don’t understand myself, these impulses that shock and surprise and upend my world. These things I hide. Find the contradiction. Write about that.
There are twenty drafts, enough discarded lyrics to write ten songs, until finally one night, after eight months, I reach the end of the song, listen for the decay of the delay to die down into silence, and think, There. That is exactly how I feel.
I lean back from my desk and stare up at the ghosts staring back at me. The images dance around the room. I call the song “Wishing Well.” It’s the first thing I’ve ever written that feels like it’s mine. I have a thousand other songs, but this one feels new, like it came from a different place.
The room is silent. It’s 1:00 A.M. There’s nothing but the whir of the ceiling fan and the sound of faraway traffic from the street outside the window. It occurs to me that I’ve been working on it for eight months straight and no one has ever heard this song.
* * *
ONCE I’VE WRITTEN five songs in this same exhausting way, once I’ve rewritten every lyric, planned every note, every guitar riff, every keyboard string section I’ve programmed into the cheap recording software I bought, I finally decide it’s time to just get on with it, to find a way to stand on a stage and sing these songs of mine, to start a band.
I don’t know where else to begin, so I place a pathetic ad in a local music magazine. In it, I mention Lou Reed, the Cure, and David Bowie, hoping that it will find its way to the right people.
There is a drummer with a goatee who answers it with whom I spend five dreary afternoons, after which he quits because, he says, “the songs just aren’t the
re, man. Where are the hooks?” There is a young bass player in all black with five gold necklaces who gets excited by the influences I named but who disappears after three sessions into the rock-and-roll ether. There is another drummer who quits because he gets a paid gig with a folksinger, yet another bass player who has already toured the country with another band. He tells me the idea of putting out a record and going on tour is a pipe dream of mine, that I am delusional to think anyone would ever want to hear these “rambling nonsense songs.”
So when a short, skinny, handsome drummer with long sideburns and a pair of washed-out old Converse drops by the apartment to discuss my demo, the whole idea seems like some quixotic fantasy, like tilting at windmills with electric guitars. His name is Daren Taylor. He is from Fresno. He seems different from the other semipro players and big-talk hustlers, the guys who discuss “gigging” and “studio session work.” He’s weirder. Quieter. Sarcastic. He makes a few jokes about Siouxsie and the Banshees, the tour Robert Smith did with them as a guitar player where they all called him “Fat Bob.” He heard the demo, the one I made with Drew playing the guitar parts, because Drew was the best guitar player I knew.
Daren liked the songs, especially the one about the wishing well. He reminds me of Jake with his air of ironic humor, his deep knowledge of music, his sense we’re all screwed anyway so we might as well have some fun while we can.
I tell him sheepishly that I’ve decided to name the project the Airborne Toxic Event, after a section of the book White Noise by Don DeLillo. I explain that Jack Gladney, the protagonist, is scared he’s going to die because he’s been exposed to an enormous toxic cloud that the media gives the Orwellian name “the Airborne Toxic Event.” The cloud makes him realize his time is precious and short and he must make the most of it while he can.
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