Again, it’s the island nation problem, and again there are some parallels with British culture, though Japan is an extreme case. The intensely formal code of courtesy, especially when dealing with foreigners, causes a lot of misunderstanding. Here’s a Japan story our guitarist likes to tell:
Late one night, Jon and a few other players walked into a restaurant and asked if they could still get something to eat. The waitress looked slightly upset but said, Oh yes, come in. Is there a table available? Oh yes, please sit here. Could we get some menus? The waitress, almost in tears, brought the menus. Can we order, please? She finally bowed her head and came out with it: Oh—so sorry, we closed.
There you have it: because there are apparently no words in the language that actually express the concept no, the promoters, the club employees, the drivers, even the sympathetic translators, are all forced into lying about almost everything. My wife, who, for various reasons, including one or two unreliable parents, is severely allergic to mendacity or any sort of equivocation, no matter how subtle, can never go there again. I guess I can endure it for a week for some easy green.
• • •
Okay, I’m back on my own bus, heading to Austin. It’s all good. The show at the Verizon Theatre in Grand Prairie, a suburb of Dallas, was disappointing, especially since the venue’s acoustics were so slick. The previous night in Tulsa had turned out to be a gas, a great crowd. Tonight, though, too many TV Babies out there. They mainly wanted to hear the hits they knew from when they were kids, or from their parents’ vinyl collection, or classic radio. Those sleek, tipsy Dallas babes with the expensive dresses and coifs and earrings, you know they’d be real goers if they weren’t with their spouses. One of them in the front row in a white dress would get up and dance for a minute with her eyes closed and her arms in the air and then, reined in by the hubby and the other couple she was with, would sit back down, defeated. Every night, there’s always some chick out there who’ll yell, “We love you, Michael,” or “I love you, Boz,” and once in a while I’ll get one of those too. But usually, with me, because of the “musicians’ musician” thing and various other disqualifiers, it’ll be some poor dude yelling “DONNNNALD” in a crazy, tortured voice.
JULY 15
Okay, okay, I confess. I’ve had a few cigarettes, but only bumming them at the gigs and from Geoff the driver. Today, at Austin City Limits, I smoked a Newport on the terrace, watching dark clouds roll in over the street, the beginning of a storm. I called home and Libby checked her various devices to see if there was a tornado involved, but I guess not. This is the third of another three-show stretch. I’m falling asleep standing up.
The last time I played in Austin was in the early seventies at a legendary counterculture rock palace called the Armadillo World Headquarters. We were opening, I think, for a group called Rare Earth, a white group signed to Motown that became successful doing covers of Temptations tunes. They had a good singing drummer. It was a big, funky room filled with reefer smog, good clean fun. Now it’s a parking lot or something. Today, on the private dining menu at the Four Seasons, you can order something called a “Hippie Salad.”
JULY 16
After a show, if it’s a longish drive to the next location, I’ll sleep on the bus for a while. When we arrive, we move into the new hotel in the wee hours. While Vince gets the keys at the desk, I stand in the lobby, bleary eyed, watching the cleaners vacuum the rugs and wax the floors with those big chrome machines. This morning, when we stepped into the elevator, a young black guy was polishing the metal ornaments with a product called “Brite Boy.”
Most of the time, McDonald and Scaggs save money on hotels by having the bus drive straight to the parking lot of the next gig—in other words, they never get off the bus. I’ve tried that a few times. It felt more like the lifestyle of an insect than a human.
JULY 17
Exhausting show in Houston. Outdoor gig with a rare airconditioned stage, but the humidity was still crushing. The effect was that of an irritating polar draft in hell. The whole Oklahoma/Texas run has been a grind. Again, I’m starting to wilt. And the luxury hotel in, say, Houston isn’t what you might expect. It’s a depressed town right now, and the hotel is old and ailing, like me. I keep thinking of that Jim Thompson novel A Swell-Looking Babe, in which the young protagonist gets a job as a bellhop in an Oklahoma City hotel and is initiated into a shadowy world of sin and corruption. I was never that comfortable with big-time sin and corruption, and now that I’m old and ugly and pooped out—well, I said good-bye to all that some time ago. Now it’s just cold meat and rice on the bus after the show.
When I went for a swim this afternoon, there was a young, long-legged girl in a pink bikini getting some sun. Dark, gorgeous, Persian or Israeli, perhaps. Her fingernails and toenails matched the suit exactly, and so did her BlackBerry, on which she seemed to be texting the whole time. A major TV Baby, Satan’s daughter.
I sat under the burning Texas sun for a while, reading the Times. I finally caught a Mexican waitress’s eye.
“Could I order a lemonade, please?”
“Yes, sir. Absolutely!”
JULY 18
Once again, the ambling ghost of Fess Parker intersects our path. In 1955, the elders of San Antonio, Texas, after noticing the influx of tourists following the final episode of the Davy Crockett series—Davy buys the farm when the Mexicans invade the Alamo, which is right here in town—got some Disney architects to look at the river, resulting, many years later, in a sort of San Antonio Land, which is the present-day River Walk. Our hotel is on the River Walk, and that’s why I was awakened earlier than I wanted to be by a loud mariachi band just outside the window. I wrenched myself out of bed and stumbled outside, having noticed a pool in a Spanish garden the night before. In daylight, this turned out to be a shallow pit filled with greenish syrup and jammed with children.
Okay, some food. Strolling along the River Walk, I realized I’d left my wallet in my room. I walked back, now in a black mood, hating the tourists, especially the ones wearing T-shirts that say things on them, walking billboards for companies and stores and teams and bands and health clubs and who knows what all. We sell our own at the gigs, for chrissakes. Also hats, cups, mouse pads, all that garbage.
• • •
I’m back from the show. The house was a legion of TV Babies, maybe tourists from Arizona. I don’t know. Probably right-wingers, too, the victims of an epidemic mental illness that a British study has proven to be the result of having an inordinately large amygdala, a part of the primitive brain that causes them to be fearful way past the point of delusion, which explains why their philosophy, their syntax and their manner of thought don’t seem to be reality based. That’s why, when you hear a Republican speak, it’s like listening to somebody recount a particularly boring dream.
In the sixties, during the war between the generations, I always figured that all we had to do was wait until the old, paranoid, myth-bound, sexually twisted Hobbesian geezers died out. But I was wrong. They just keep coming back, these moldering, bloodless vampires, no matter how many times you hammer in the stake. It’s got to be the amygdala thing. Period, end of story.
The crowd sat through our versions of some of the great sixties soul tunes, hating them, waiting only for the amygdala-comforting Doobie Brothers hits that Michael sings, Boz’s dance numbers and the Steely Dan singles that remind them of high school or college parties. They despised the old Ray Charles tune, and I started to despise them. Toward the end of the show, during McDonald’s piano introduction to “Takin’ It to the Streets,” I think I really made Carolyn and Catherine uncomfortable by walking back to their riser and telling them, as a way of venting my rage, that I’d been imagining a flash theater fire that would send the entire audience screaming up the aisles, trampling each other to get to the exits, ending up in a horrible scene outside on the sidewalk with people on stretchers, charred and wrinkled. When t
hings aren’t going well, the girls, standing just behind me, have to listen to my insane rants. If they’re singing, I’ll rant to Jim Beard, playing keyboards on the next riser, or, if he’s busy, I’ll walk across the stage and harass the horn players.
No, I’m not a psycho; it was just a momentary surge of wrath. (Two days later, a bona fide psycho shot up a movie theater in Colorado.) The crowd, they know not what they do. But when I’m fighting exhaustion, putting everything into the performance and still feeling like I’m getting an indifferent response from the house, it’s easy to morph into the Hulk. I guess I’m getting more and more thin-skinned as the tour goes on. It’s the ATD starting to pull me down, down, down and out.
JULY 19
This morning, the whole band flew to Atlanta to begin the Southern leg of the tour. On the plane, I mentioned to Vince that I regretted my behavior onstage the previous night, bothering the girls with my theater fire scenario. And then Vince revealed this: Not twenty minutes before I was annunciating my terrible vision to the girls onstage, Vince happened to see Pasqual unpacking the laundry backstage so he could put it in my wardrobe case. When Pasqual tossed the weightless plastic wrapping aside, it drifted onto one of the hippie-dippy atmospheric candles in the hall. Vince alerted Pasqual to the ensuing conflagration and he was able to stomp it out. Hmm.
I also found out this: Just like almost every other band, we use a smoke machine to create a haze onstage, which greatly enhances the lighting effects. Every time one of these machines is turned on, theaters have to turn off their fire alarm systems so as not to set them off, which means for the entire length of the show. Think about that, theatergoers.
Anyway, as far as my fiery vision goes, I’ve never seen any evidence to support the idea of extrasensory perception. What people mistake for ESP, or a case of someone being “psychic”—for instance, someone having foreknowledge of future events or events taking place elsewhere—seems to me to be a matter of intuition based on the conscious and unconscious accumulation of thousands or millions of tiny details. Naturally, some folks are more talented along these lines than others. For instance, my wife is, certainly; I’m not. But I think I might have been pulling in a little ectoplasm last night. No?
JULY 20
A miserable night in the Grand Hyatt. Not a wink of sleep. How can I be the adorable host, the sensitive accompanist, the more or less competent vocalist I’m expected to be under these conditions? I guess it was a mistake to go out last night and see The Amazing Spider-Man in 3-D, but after being cooped up on that rotten plane . . .
And then this whole business of changing hotels. When we arrived at the Ritz-Carlton, I realized it was that place I absolutely hate at the intersection of several highways, parking lots and malls in Buckhead. Like, Oh, let’s build a luxury hotel in this post–World War III dystopian wasteland. To boot, the lobby and the bar had been taken over by conventioneers from Microsoft, turning it into a scene from Animal House, only these TV Babies all reeked of cologne. I panicked. Minutes later, I had Vince check out and we moved down the road to the Grand Hyatt, which was at least a little better—some green things were visible out the windows and so on.
I hadn’t seen a film in 3-D since, probably, Hondo with John Wayne when I was six or seven. I remember an arrow soaring off the screen and right into my guts. The new 3-D is better, but maybe too exciting for a late show.
Operating on no sleep in my mid-sixties is way different from when I was a kid. I don’t run so well on auto anymore. Just now, shaving, I noticed that I’m not thinking practically but, rather, ontologically. In other words, instead of asking myself, “Am I shaving well?” or “Am I shaving cleanly?” I was asking myself, “Am I shaving?” And then, moving on to ethics: “Is shaving the newly grown hair off my face—putting aside, for the moment, the question of whether I leave the sad little goatee alone—a good thing to do? And, even if that is so, is it the right thing to do at this particular time?”
Uh-oh: insomnia tends to come in waves. Maybe I should see if Libby can FedEx me some Ativan.
JULY 21
No need. I bummed an Ambien from Pasqual. I still woke up quite early, but I feel okay. Actually, some therapists recommend staying up all night as a simple cure for simple depression. It’s worked for me in the past. In this case, it had the effect of wringing all that boiling, hateful venom out of my body. Last night at Alpharetta, the crowd was my new best friend. Woozy from lack of sleep, I was a combination of Samuel Johnson and Will Rogers, knocking out pithy bons mots, gettin’ silly, acknowledging the audience’s complicity in life’s grand comedy (or so I thought). It had to be a hundred degrees onstage, but the band played like demons. When McDonald went into “If You Don’t Know Me by Now,” a middle-aged couple in the first row started making out. On cue, a crack of thunder sounded as we came out for the encore, and as we walked off, a torrent of Georgia rain drenched the happy, cheering crowd.
• • •
Storm clouds here too, in Orange Beach, Alabama, on the “Redneck Riviera.” It’s hot, but mainly it’s that the air is heavy with water vapor, like in one of those greenhouses they use to grow orchids. The dressing rooms reek with mold, so I’ve decided to hang out on the bus. Unfortunately, something has come loose in the ceiling in the back bedroom, resulting in a nasty rattle, especially when the AC is on. At the same time, Vince comes in to tell me that the hotel we had booked for the two days off in Tampa has reported that, due to unforeseen construction, the rooms might be a little noisy. Fuck that. What’s more, everything in the area, including the hotel where the band will be staying, is all booked up. Suddenly, the bus is more or less uninhabitable and we have no place to stay starting tonight. But I have another reason to avoid the two-day layover in Tampa Bay. I make plans to get on a flight to New York in the morning.
• • •
Late in July 2009, my wife, Libby, was helping Walter shop for kitchen equipment for his daughter. As they walked down Madison Avenue, she turned to him and said, “I know Ezra’s dead. I haven’t heard from him since July sixth.”
Her forty-three-year-old son had moved to Tampa several years before. Looking at his powerful, six-foot-three frame and his strong features, one might not guess that he was a troubled soul who’d had a chaotic childhood and had spent his teen years deep inside the drug culture of the late seventies and early eighties. He’d spoken openly of his suicidal thoughts many times and had come pretty close to pulling it off in recent years. Though his relationship with Libby was tumultuous, Ezra and his mother were so close that it seemed at times as if they shared a single soul. She was tormented by the thought that he might try it again. I had come to love Ez as well and on several occasions had spent long hours on the phone trying to find a way to lift him out of his complex despondency.
Walter tried to make light of Libby’s fears. When she got home, though, she tried to contact Ezra by phone and e-mail, without success. On July 30, she checked again to see if she had missed an e-mail. She finally thought to check a rarely used Twitter account and found this from July 9:
From: snarky5000
Ezra to Mom
Had a tooth pulled today—
Now the long, slow, upward march towards death begins—
Libby immediately called his numbers again, with no response. She called the main office of the apartment complex he lived in and was able to speak to the manager, Rhonda, who said she thought someone had heard him “howling at the moon” outside his apartment the night before. But when Libby sent her the Twitter message, Rhonda decided she’d better call the sheriff. At four p.m., Libby called again and asked if the officers had broken into the apartment.
“Yes,” said Rhonda.
“Is he alive?”
Rhonda said, “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that.”
Libby took a Valium, stared out the window for a while and then lay down on the bed. At six thirty, an Officer Sepulveda called.
“Is this Mrs. Fagen?”
“Yes.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Your son’s dead,” said the detective. “Gunshot wound to head.”
“How long ago did he . . . ?”
“Well . . . he’s covered with bugs.”
“No! I want to die too—”
As far as we’ve been able to find out, Ezra took his own life on his birthday, July 23. Our lives have never been the same, and never will be.
JULY 25
After spending a day with Libby, I flew back to Tampa, played the damn gig in Clearwater and got back on the bus for the ride to Florida’s east coast. Libby escaped to Mexico, where she has friends.
No one was waxing the floors or vacuuming when we walked into the lobby of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, at three o’clock in the morning. Like the Hard Rock in Vegas, it’s a casino, and it was jumping. Several hundred people were gaming and playing the slots.
The Seminole’s main claim to fame is that Anna Nicole Smith, the blond creature whose tragic life was, thanks to reality TV, also a parody of a tragic life, died in room 607 from an overdose of downers. I remember that the teaser for that mind-boggling, heart-whipping show on the E! network was “We don’t know why it’s funny—it just is.” Wow.
There’s a folded piece of cardboard on my night table here in room 1247 displaying a quote from Aerosmith in a script font that reads:
Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) Page 11