Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095)

by Fagen, Donald

  AUGUST 9

  Back from a show at the Wang Theatre in Boston. Decent enough crowd.

  But after seven weeks out, ATD tends to trump joy. To boot, my right kidney’s been bothering me a bit, probably because of some crystal gravel, tiny kidney stones that I sometimes get. Eventually, they flow through into the bladder and then I’m fine, but it’s been hurting for a while now and I can’t help obsessing about it every second. I started getting paranoid, like I probably have renal carcinoma. After all, I’m sixty-four, I’m smoking again, I take too many painkillers and my blood pressure’s high. I’ve had microscopic amounts of blood in my urine for thirty years. Let’s face it, I’m a dead man.

  After the show, I was so tired and despondent that I lay down on the filthy leather couch in the dressing room and started whining for my mommy, Elinor, Bob’s pal. I wanted her to sit beside me and put a cold compress on my mind, the way she used to put one on my face when I had severe poison ivy. A few minutes later, Carolyn Leonhart came in and asked if she’d heard me correctly, that I was moaning for Elinor: she’s heard this routine before. I said, yes, she heard right, but that I’d get over it.

  On the way out of the theater, there must have been twenty-five rabid autograph chasers at the stage door, a big thing in Boston for some reason. Most of these guys are autograph dealers. They come prepared with vintage album covers and expensive-looking, textured, framable white paper. They often want a picture, too, for purposes of authentication. Of course, they always masquerade as fans—like, “Great show, Donald”—even though most of them have been standing outside all night. Usually, I’ll ignore them or sign some shit or whatever. Tonight, I wanted to melt them all with one of those Raytheon laser cannons and bury them under the sidewalk.

  One more word about my mother: She died, horribly, of Alzheimer’s. One time, after not seeing her for a while, I visited her in this nursing home in Ohio. As I walked toward her, she stared at me with great interest and then said, “You know, I’ve always liked you very much.” Not long after that, she was gone. How do you like that?

  A couple of days later, I started a lyric for this song “Godwhacker,” which Walter and I completed and recorded for a Steely Dan CD. It’s about an elite squad of assassins whose sole assignment is to find a way into heaven and take out God. If the Deity actually existed, what sane person wouldn’t consider this to be justifiable homicide?

  AUGUST 10

  While I was away at school in the late sixties, my father got laid off from his job in Jersey. He took the family out to Ohio, where he went into the fast-food business with his brother, my weird, funny uncle Dave. My father even consented to attend fast-food school in Indianapolis or somewhere like that. Unfortunately, of all the franchises Dave could have picked, he chose Burger Chef, which was wiped out by McDonald’s after a few years.

  When I was a kid, Dave once invented an organization for me and my cousin Jack called the MDMD Club. That’s “More Daring than the Most Daring.” We’d just make up all these stories in which we’d bring off all these dangerous exploits. I guess that’s what Dave and my Dad (and Jack’s father too, my uncle Al) thought they were doing when, in midlife, they lit out for Ohio to, as one of Dave’s hard-boiled idioms would have it, “bilk the goyim.”

  Not long after the burger tragedy, I was visiting for a holiday weekend. In the evening, Dave gave me a lift from my sister’s house over to my parents’ nightmarishly bland apartment, which was in a high-rise building on—wait for it—Chagrin Boulevard. On the way, he took me over to see the Beer and Wine Drive-Thru Warehouse, another of the family investments. It was December, and it was freezing when we got out of the car in this little concrete building with a booth where you’d drive up and pay for the crates of wine and/or beer that you load into your trunk yourself. Because it was late, the place was closed. After standing there for a while in a puddle of spilled beer, Dave, wearing one of those hats with earflaps, said, “You know, Donny, sometimes I just want to put a shotgun in my mouth and end all this nonsense.”

  Which wasn’t totally shocking. As I said, Dave was a funny guy. Thing was, Dave’s father, who was also my father’s father, that is, my grandfather, had gone into his basement thirty years before and done exactly that.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “things’ll probably start to look up pretty soon.”

  “Right,” said Dave.

  Both my mother and father died in Cleveland, in this century. I’ll be there on Monday, after weekend gigs in Rochester and Toronto. My sister and her family still live there, but I haven’t been in contact with her since my father’s death. (It’s a long story.) I’m planning on seeing a friend from college who’s a doctor at the Cleveland Clinic, though. I’m hoping that Richard can get someone to do a CAT scan of my kidney. It still hurts. I’m also starting to worry about what appears to be a spider bite on my elbow that I got onstage at Wolf Trap. A couple of years ago, in Woodstock, a spider, maybe a brown recluse, bit me on the chest while I was asleep. It itched like crazy for a few days and started to spread. It turned out that the spider had injected a necrotizing toxin, and I had to take antibiotics to stop it from eating off all my flesh. I still have a scar. My elbow’s starting to itch a lot now too. I can just see myself in two weeks on the flight home from Indianapolis, a melancholy skeleton sitting there eating airplane food.

  AUGUST 11

  The Rochester gig turned out to be a solid gas. Joy trumps ATD, for a change. Good crowd, good enough sound, nice vibe all around. In a house where I’m able to hear some detail in the monitors, there’s no better job than being in a good rhythm section. If it’s jazz, there’s more freedom, but juicy groove music has its own thing. Also, as the piano player, not to mention the bandleader, I’m not confined to always playing the same part, though that’s fun too. When everything’s working right, you become transfixed by the notes and chords and the beautiful spaces in between. In the center of it, with the drums, bass and guitar all around you, the earth falls away and it’s just you and your crew creating this forward motion, this undeniable, magical stuff that can move ten thousand people to snap free of life’s miseries and get up and dance and scream and feel just fine.

  Wait, I’m in too good a mood. Somebody, stop me, please.

  AUGUST 12

  When we crossed the border into Canada for the Vancouver show a couple of weeks ago, they had us sit in the office (bright fluorescent lighting, uncomfortable chairs) while immigration searched the bus. I got called up to the counter. A guy in a uniform held up a tiny white pill.

  “Donald, we found this on the floor in the back bedroom. Is this your property?”

  I looked at the pill. “I believe it is.”

  “Can you tell me what this is? You notice it has a little ‘V’ inscribed on it.”

  “Mmm,” I said. “I believe that’s a Topamax. I take them for migraines.”

  “And you have a physician’s prescription for these?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, it was lying on the floor back there. Would you like your property back?”

  “I guess.”

  He gave the Topamax back, and that was that. Tonight, crossing over to go to Toronto, a young immigration officer told me to come through a door into a hallway. I assumed it had something to do with the Topamax again.

  “Donald,” he said, holding up a piece of paper, “are you this same Donald Fagen who has an arrest record in New York State?”

  “What? No. I’ve never been arrested,” I said. Then he had me look at the paper. All the birth and family info seemed correct. Then, down at the bottom, there was a flag from the FBI, saying I’d been arrested for selling drugs in 1969.

  “Wow. I can’t believe I’m seeing this,” I said. “When I was in college, they arrested a bunch of students in a raid and I was totally framed for selling pot. The case was dismissed, and, at the time, my lawyer said he had managed to have my
arrest expunged from the record, the leverage being that the accuser, a ‘sheriff’s deputy,’ had perjured himself. Have you ever heard of G. Gordon Liddy?”

  “No, sir, I haven’t.”

  “Back then, you see, he was running for deputy DA of Dutchess County, New York. He staged the raid on Bard College to get the anti-hippie vote. Then, a couple of years later, Liddy was picked up for being one of the Watergate burglars.”

  The Canadian copper stared at me for a moment and took the paper back. “Well,” he said. “I see you’ve been in Canada on many occasions. I don’t know why it came up this time. It’s a really old arrest and I believe you. You should try to have the record corrected, though, because it could keep you out of Canada in the future.” And he let it slide.

  So, forty-three years later, I now find out that the FBI has a file on me. Vince and I got back on the bus and headed for Toronto.

  Pasqual wasn’t so lucky. After a hopeful meeting with a dude from Canadian immigration in New York, they still refused to let him into the country, citing old U.S. tax issues and an ancient drug thing. Imagine how many actual psychos they let in just this week: Cyril “The Foot Collector” Gerhardt, Floyd “Rodeo Clown” Van Loon or whoever. O America, O Canada . . .

  • • •

  At the show at the Molson Amphitheatre in Toronto, when the band started the intro to Ray Charles’s “Tell the Truth,” a TV Baby near the front actually yelled “Fuck you!” and left in a huff with his girlfriend. I guess he only wanted to hear our radio hits from the seventies. You could cut the guy some slack and say that, despite all the PR we did to inform people what the Dukes’ Rhythm Revue was all about, he was justified in being put out because he paid for two tickets and his expectations weren’t met. On the other hand, you could deduce that he was a rude, ignorant, incurious, racist douchebag that his parents should have been ashamed of conceiving, except that they were probably rude, ignorant, incurious, racist child abusers themselves.

  AUGUST 13

  Day off. I’d never been to the Cleveland Clinic before. Because of the huge numbers of patients they process every day, they’ve developed a highly evolved bureaucratic style. A simple visit with a doctor requires a registration with the clinic and then another similar process with the department you need to see. To avoid errors, you are asked the same questions many times over. Through all of this, the staff members maintain an affable but professionally aloof demeanor that started to grate after a while. I could see how a patient could quickly go all cuckoo’s nest in this place dealing with the friendly but neutral face of posthumanism. Or maybe it’s all hospitals.

  My friend Richard arranged for me to see a Dr. Monga, who sent me for a CAT scan. As I suspected, it’s just gravel. I’m going to live after all.

  AUGUST 14

  The show at the Jacobs Pavilion was also fun. Wiggy crowd. Afterwards, Richard and his wife, Margaret, visited the bus. I had invited Dr. Monga, the kidney guy, and he and his wife came too. No use trying to get any interesting scripts from these guys, though—not a writing croaker in the bunch. These days, doctors are terrified that if they prescribe painkillers, or anything that’s actually comforting, they’ll go to jail like that idiot who shot up Michael Jackson with propofol. Even the familiar “rock docs,” local doctors who treat musicians in exchange for permanent backstage privileges, won’t prescribe anything useful anymore. I couldn’t even get a shot of cortisone for my incredibly itchy spider bite. Oh, well. If all my flesh isn’t eaten away by necrotic bacteria, maybe I’ll end up with some of that spidey sense, like in the comic books, or I’ll be able to make great bounding leaps and crawl up the wall. Put it in the act.

  Which reminds me: Last summer, Walter mentioned this guy, the Banana Man, who used to come on the Ed Sullivan Show. Occasionally some geezer will bring up Señor Wences or the Old Philosopher or those guys who spun the plates, but I hadn’t thought about the Banana Man in fifty years. His whole act was, he’d come out with a big overcoat and keep finding bananas in his pockets or in his pants, strings of them that would get progressively longer and longer. Every time he’d find another string of, like, twenty bananas, he’d pull them out of his clothes while making a surprised sound, like this gurgly “Whoooooooo!”

  Now that was entertainment.

  AUGUST 15

  I’m weary of the rock-and-roll tour now and I want to go home. Sleep deprived, Libby deprived, I’m in the bus, finally on my way to perfect Gregor Samsa–like insectitude. The bus is in the parking lot of the Toledo Zoo, where there’s a stage. It’s drizzly today and the place looks pretty shabby, but, then again, so do I. No real dressing rooms here. The stage is backed by a band shell that’s made of a special acoustic metal that turns music into garbage. The only good thing is that, for some reason, the Leonhart siblings were on the bus this morning and brought Vaughn, Carolyn’s four-year-old, who’s visiting. He said he liked turkey. I asked him if he ate turkey with the feathers, the feet and the beak still attached and he said yes, he did. Annie, the nanny, said, That sounds disgusting, and Vaughn said, No, it’s yummy-disgusting.

  • • •

  Because of the out-of-phase-sounding acoustics due to the band shell and the freaky blowback, the band was not on its game tonight. The audience didn’t seem to know the difference, or maybe they did and didn’t care.

  Tomorrow’s off, at the Henry Hotel in Dearborn, Michigan. I’ve got a long Stravinsky playlist on the Apple and that’s what I’ve been listening to every night to go to sleep: the Odes, Le Chant du Rossignol, Apollon Musagète, Pulcinella, Symphony of Psalms and so on. It’s really ill to wake up in the middle of The Rite of Spring—it’s like waking up with the bed on fire. I also now have a small photo of youngish Igor on the desktop of my laptop, one in which he’s staring into the camera with that look that’s supposed to terrify pitchy violinists.

  This latest recurrence of Igormania led me to watch a film streamed from Amazon, Coco & Igor, about a supposed affair between Stravinsky and Coco Chanel when Chanel invited the recently exiled Russian and his family to live at her high-style digs outside Paris. The film starts earlier, in 1913, when Coco attends the infamous premiere of The Rite of Spring and sits right through the riot, seemingly fascinated by the nutty new music. She doesn’t meet him again until seven years later, when she invites him to work at her house. And yet, for the rest of the film, we watch this curiously buff Stravinsky apparently recomposing the Rite on Coco’s piano. This paradox is never explained. I guess the filmmakers couldn’t resist the idea that when Igor got to shag Coco, he was inspired to compose this wild, atavistic, new kind of music, in a sort of reversal of George Clinton’s slogan “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”

  In truth, by the early twenties, Igor was actually through with that stuff and had retreated into a more conservative “neoclassical” phase. It’s much more likely that Coco, who would eventually become a Nazi spy, fucked Igor into a reactionary spin that would last for the rest of his life. Good music, though.

  AUGUST 16

  The Henry is a hotel in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford’s hometown and the headquarters, I think, of the Ford Motor Company. This morning I actually managed to get up and accompany Catherine, Carolyn, Vaughn and his nanny to the Henry Ford Museum, a huge building filled with old cars, planes and other relics from the history of motored transportation, including a massive Allegheny locomotive, the Lincoln in which Kennedy was murdered, Rosa Parks’s bus and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. Vaughn had a great time with the trains.

  I was going to ask if they had a vintage copy of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, the first of Ford’s screeds blaming the Jews for all the world’s ills, but I chickened out. Igor wasn’t that crazy about Jews either, probably because he was often assumed to be one, with that nose and all. There’s a story that, on a bus, a grateful fan once addressed him as Mr. Fireberg.

  AUGUST 17

  A
fter the Detroit show, on the road, late, heading toward Interlochen, Michigan, which is a music camp with a theater and a lake. Walt Weiskopf, one of our reed players, spent a summer there. He remembers the theater, but he doesn’t remember the lake. How do you like that?

  • • •

  We’re about an hour away, and I just saw a sign that said:

  PRISON AREA

  DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS

  Does that mean that the prisoners frequently escape, roll down the embankment and try to thumb a ride? There’s your screenplay right there, folks: Magwitch, the scary escapee (let’s give him a Cockney accent; why not?) rolls down the hill, pulls the sign right out of the ground and throws it in the bushes. He’s picked up by a crew bus jammed with happy, drunken roadies on their way to Wisconsin. Years later, having made a fortune in the . . . er, um . . . cheese business, he becomes the whole crew’s anonymous benefactor. No? Okay, no worries—the Banana Man’s got a million of ’em.

  AUGUST 18

  As I’ve mentioned, Boz and Mike mostly sleep on their buses, forgoing the hotels. Last night Boz’s driver drove straight to the gig, the music camp. He found a place to park near the stage and they all sacked out. Early in the morning, one of the roadies was watching as campers set up chairs and music stands on the lawn facing Boz’s bus, a whole symphony orchestra’s worth. I guess it was their regular outdoor practice spot. Kids with instruments soon took their places—I’m talking about a huge string section, trumpets, tubas and trombones, woodwinds, a full percussion unit with tympani, giant cymbals, everything. I don’t know what piece they were rehearsing, but apparently it was a real flag-waver, double forte. Our man couldn’t stop laughing as Boz’s bus quickly revved up and moved to a more restful location.