by Wesley Stace
“Well, they’ve changed a bit actually. At first, he just told me what was going on; and then he started to tell me more about his feelings about stuff.” Greg groaned at what he interpreted as a negative development. “No, it’s good. He was ashamed but he wouldn’t admit it. Now he’s over it, over trying to rise above it; it’s his punishment and he should accept it, or he might as well not have been punished at all. Have a look. It ends: ‘I’m going to come out of this a better person. I’m just looking for a little humility.’”
“Yeah, well, he’d probably like a holiday somewhere warm,” Greg remarked from the kitchen.
“What?”
He popped his head round the corner: “Humidity?”
“Humility.”
“Read that bit again.” I did. “Bit Jesus-y, isn’t it? Humility.” He didn’t like the taste of the word.
“He’s looking for a little meaning.”
“That’s how it starts,” said Greg.
“He’s probably joking.”
The next time I saw Greg was over snooker at Framed on the Uxbridge Road. It was one of those places he went to keep in touch with whatever cartoon version of the underworld he liked to feel himself familiar; the place scared the crap out of me. I’d seen a cue or two broken there before, in one case wrapped around an opponent. It was, he thought, a haunt for villains. Greg loved villains, though they existed only in his imagination—old-fashioned gentlemen gangsters who loved their mums, wouldn’t hurt a child, wore sharp suits, and occasionally maimed people. In fact, Framed was racked with louts.
As I bent over to play a shot, I happened to scratch my behind. A heavy bloke announced to Greg in a thick Ulster accent: “I didn’t know your mate . . .”—he said it “meat,” if “meat” had two syllables—“. . . was getting married!” I assumed it was the overture to trouble.
“He’s what, mate?” asked Greg politely but with an atypically working-class accent, quite the reverse of Mrs. Terry’s approach to the word “duvet.”
“I said,” the man repeated aggressively, “I didn’t know your meat was getting married.” He addressed me directly. “Son! Are you getting married?
“No,” I answered.
“Oh, only I just saw you pickin’ your ring.”
The assembled company nodded and laughed mirthlessly, in considered appreciation of this line rather than specifically at me. Greg, however, nearly cried with laughter. “Pickin’ your ring!” He took to repeating it in a variety of accents and deliveries, chuckling after each reinterpretation. We finally got back to our game, which, as usual, he was winning. He could be mystically calm around a snooker table. I preferred pool.
“So I’ve had a chat with Blake. He’s called me in for a meeting.” Greg loved meetings; they were the high point of existence, reason to get up in the morning. And a meeting in a prison: too perfect. Meetings, I told myself, didn’t count as visits; that’s the only way I could keep from being upset. “He’s got an album of material ready to go, acoustic.”
“Is Mr. Hedges interested?” Maybe I’d tag along. No.
“Nick?” He polished off the blue ball, lined up the pink, and set his sights on the black. “Not at all interested, though I think he’d be quite interested in never hearing from me again. Wanted are in though, and I’m taking William in to meet with Blake. They’ve got American distribution.”
Greg had the phenomenally annoying habit of, after he’d lined up the winning ball, looking directly at, and talking to, you while he nonchalantly potted it. I bet he got it from Blake.
The letters took a sharp left turn.
We’d gone through resentment, shame, Blake feeling sorry for himself. Now he wanted a new life. He had a guitar with him, he was playing pretty much all the time: new stuff, all true, about his life, the band, this and that girlfriend, the one who left him when she was pregnant. “Twilight in My Cell, Twilight in My Heart” was one title he mentioned; “The Devil’s Daughter” another. “The thing is,” he wrote, “I don’t find myself worthy of any of this yet. I mean trouble. I didn’t do anything to really deserve it, so I should do something that makes it all worthwhile.”
It was a bit over the top. When did a drug bust and subsequent imprisonment do anything but enhance the glamour of a musician’s career? I mean, it gets a bit undignified on the David Crosby end of the spectrum, smoking crack under your jacket on an airplane, but the great coked-up walrus was still flying first class. For those in coach, the rest of rock ’n’ roll, a drug bust’s not really going to do any damage.
“I can’t write the nonsense anymore,” was perhaps Blake’s saddest pronouncement. “It was perfect then, but now I need a new way. Start making sense. But it’s still a battle against the Philistines! Against Respectability! Against Self-Importance! Against Orthodoxy!”
What on earth was he reading in that library full of out-of-date books? I assumed it was the Bible. (I mean, you would, wouldn’t you?) Or maybe Karl Marx. But it wasn’t the Bible; it was Oscar Wilde. And a Wilde Complex is just as bad as a Messiah Complex. The Gods gave Oscar everything, but from the disgrace of his prison cell, he saw that he had allowed himself to be lured over to squander his talents over on the dark side. It was perfect for Blake.
And now these songs, these new true no-nonsense songs about his life, the ones he’d started writing on our shiftless trip across America. What on Earth were those going to be like?
Blake was released in February 1993, his new album the following month. He didn’t let us know exactly when he was coming home, but he made it clear that there was to be no celebration: no champagne, no bunting. Barry in particular was not to be told.
The first I knew was the surprise turn of a key in my own front door. There he stood with his guitar and a bag of possessions. I hugged him: “Welcome home. Thank God that’s over.”
“It isn’t,” he said, surveying the recently “spring-cleaned” apartment. “It’s just starting. But, hey, it’s good to be here.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, I’d better give you some space.”
“You stay here, no problem. I’ve got another place lined up. There’ll be some gigs for the album. I’ve got to stick around for a bit on curfew and take a job. In fact, I’m going back to The Regal. And then I’m going to dust off the old passport.”
“Well, you’ve been inside a lot.” It was precisely what he would have said. He didn’t crack a smile.
“I’m going to write a book, or read some good books; one or the other. They both sound nice.”
“About your experiences at the prison? About the band?”
“No. Wanna hear a record?”
An Act of His Own, the first Blake Lear solo album, bore two quotations on the back cover: Emerson—“Nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own”—and Oscar Wilde—“Most people are other people.”
I don’t know what he hoped for from its release, how he imagined the best-case scenario. Certainly, the songs meant a lot to him. They passed his ultimate test, remembered from university: the unity of a thing with itself, the outward rendered expressive of the inner. But hadn’t the nonsense songs that brought him such unexpected success passed exactly the same test? That was the sadness: he was unable, consciously, to do the thing that he had been able to do so easily unconsciously. Like the owl and the pussycat, the sublime and the ridiculous danced hand in hand on the edge of the sand by the light of the moon. Blake was at his best, his sandiest, when he was at his most trivial. And he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, access that side of his brain. What was he now afraid of? Did he feel a need to keep a tighter rein on his subconscious? I’d always thought that the nonsense was a kind of safety valve for him. So what would happen now that he couldn’t let off steam?
The new songs were a perfect marriage of form and content, truly expressive of the new Blake Lear; judged by those standards they were entirely successful. Judged by any other, the album was a bit of a nightmare. I’m not saying for a second that I didn’t like
it. But anybody else who bothered to judge said precisely that.
Unfortunately, whatever he hoped for from the release eluded him entirely. The worst-case scenario played out tediously. The album, about which he was initially enthusiastic, albeit with an air of slight resignation, should perhaps have been presented with a bit more pizzazz: “Welcome to My New Direction!” But that wasn’t the new Blake Lear. Why he even kept the name I’ll never know. The spirit of Blake Lear, and his component parts, Blake and Lear, were nowhere to be found, unless you went back to the “Little Lamb, who made thee?” stuff. There was a bit of that, but without the childish wonder that had always been his strong suit. The whole thing seemed weary. You longed for the old Blake, “Lord High Bosh and Nonsense Producer,” amusing himself for his own diversion.
He rented a rather characterless apartment, to which he never specifically invited me, two streets down. Two streets down! And he was working at the Regal again. It was as though he wanted all the same things, the same haunts, but didn’t actually want to be the same person. His new place seemed more of a prison than the relatively spacious Normanside. There was a kettle, a bed, a guitar, no TV, and lots of books. I was in the habit of knocking on his door every now and then, just to check up on him. (He was always in.)
Once I was sitting on the only comfortable chair when Greg rang, instructing Blake not to buy the NME. Blake immediately told me to pop out and buy the NME, which I did, assuming there was finally a good review to be had. When I returned, he tossed it on to the sofa nonchalantly. It sat there, waiting to be read, but Blake wouldn’t pick it up. Finally, I did.
“Oh leave that till later,” he said, dunking a tea bag like he was ducking a witch.
“Well, presumably there’s a review if Greg told you to buy it.”
“Well actually he told me not to, so it probably isn’t a very good one.”
It wasn’t.
At a time when so many of this country’s Britpop heavyweights are almost self-consciously rejecting transatlantic influences in a bid to throw off grunge’s post-colonial yoke, the despairing pursuit of ‘Stateside’ success of which Blake Lear’s press-release misguidedly boasts might at least have the whiff of a heroic failure about it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Taking H. L. Mencken’s famous maxim that “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public” as its gospel, Lear’s band—fancifully named the Wonderkids, after a failed UK launch under the name the Wunderkinds: remember them? No—pursued a demographic of cloth-eared mall-rats and Walmart-weaned teenage shut-ins with sufficient principle-free relentlessness to eventually earn themselves a small piece of the MTV major label pie.
And how did Lear celebrate this triumph of musical bad faith? He immediately got himself thrown in jail by means of an embarrassing drugs bust, that’s how. Sadly, making yourself a walking rock ’n’ roll cliché does not carry a mandatory life-sentence in the Land of the Free (otherwise half the current Billboard top 10 would be languishing behind bars). But Lear’s next move was calculated to take even the most hardened cynic’s breath away. After sucking Satan’s cock in pursuit of airbrushed corporate pop success for the previous few years, he decided to reinvent himself overnight as a tortured artist. And if you think that what the world really needs is another depressed Oscar Wilde–quoting Oxbridge graduate strumming an acoustic guitar, his new album might just take your breath away. —TOM BENSON
And on.
“Could it be worse?” asked Blake as though he didn’t care.
“Not really,” I said.
“Should I read it?”
“If you weren’t going to, you wouldn’t have bought it.”
“That’s the thing, see?” said Blake. “There’s no pigeonhole for me now. You go through that and there’s no way back; you go to prison, and when you get out that’s when you’re abandoned, just when you need the help most.”
“Blake, are you actually okay?”
He didn’t answer. He was staring at the kettle flex, which looked like the curly lead taut between the young Dave Davies’s Epiphone and his amp. Not to Blake, it didn’t. He was looking right through it. After an interminable pause, he said: “The trouble is: you get punished for the good you do as well as the bad you do. That’s what happened in America. And yes,” he said. “I’m fine. I half-expected it. I knew I was going out on a limb.”
“Is the album coming out in America?” If there was a silver lining, I’d find it. “Seems like the notoriety might give it some profile.”
“I’m pulling it.”
“Since when?”
“Since now. I don’t want to thrive on notoriety. I want people to hear it for what it is, and obviously the time isn’t yet.” I’d never seen him so still.
“So what next?”
“I’m going to get some money together and travel.”
“Do you want some company?” I was worried about him on his own. It was that bad.
“No thanks. I’m going take a breather from London, and from music, and from society, and I’m going to put my trust in nature.”
“You’re going to be a tramp?” I couldn’t see him sleeping rough.
“Far from it. I’m going to Italy. San Remo.”
“San Remo? Isn’t that on the Riviera?” It was the last place I would have predicted. I just didn’t see him swapping the city for a casino holiday.
“Yeah, Edward Lear spent his last twenty years there. That’s where he’s buried. Lived there with his cat Foss. I’m going to write a novel about him. At the age of forty or so, he grew two new teeth that he’d never had before. Weird, right? So, it’s back to nonsense for me.”
This actually sounded not horrible, the least worst alternative. I imagined the old Blake peeking out.
Apparently, there was a serious problem extricating the money from the accountants in Los Angeles; there were bills to be paid, royalties owing, contractual disputes. The money would come, but not yet. Blake put in extra hours at the Regal until he had just enough to leave with. And he was gone.
Greg didn’t complain about the abject failure of An Act of His Own. It seemed to give him perverse pleasure, as though its pitiful showing and disastrous reception made it more memorable, more successful even, than albums that had merely done okay, got a few good reviews. Its immediate consignment to the dustbin gave the record a kind of mythical status, perfect future anecdote material, another story over a pint of beer: Blake Lear’s solo record. Remember that one?
“I mean, seriously, man,” Greg said with a kind of awe as we stood with Jack at the Coachy. “It’s a real achievement. Anyone can have a record out, anyone can have a hit if they’ve got enough dough behind them, but it’s a one in a million record that does that badly. I don’t think it’s sold twenty-five copies. And the reviews were amazing.”
“They were terrible,” said Jack.
“Yeah, but amazing. I mean, it’s much easier not to get reviews at all. A record’s got to be seriously great or earth-shatteringly crap to get that much bad ink. That’s something you really have to earn.”
Jack also derived pleasure from the album’s self-immolation, but his reasons were less bizarrely poetic, more self-interested: “The band was always a band. Jimmy should’ve had me put together a combo for him. I should have written the tunes.”
“When’s he back?” asked Greg.
“Dunno,” I said. “Expect azure blue postcards from San Remo. He’s writing a book.”
“Licking his wounds,” said Jack, real older brother stuff. He blamed Blake entirely for the demise of their band, the canceled endorsements, the lack of a free lunch. “Oh, I have to duck out. I’m meeting Rita at the flicks, though she’ll probably be late.”
“Maybe she’s tied up,” I said. It was certainly what Blake would have said.
“Who needs Blake when you’re around?” asked Jack. We watched him go, an unusual bounce in his step: Blake’s failure, Rita’s submissiveness.
“Greg,” I said. “I’m so b
ored. I don’t like sitting around. Can you get me on the road? I know what to do. I’d be good at it.”
“Merch? Roadie?”
“Road manager, Greg.”
“You’re very young.”
“I’d be a very good, very young road manager.”
Greg liked the smell of it. Another tale to tell.
“I’ll ask around, mate. I’ll ask around.”
“What’s Blake going to do for money?” I asked. “When’s that all gonna clear up?”
“Oh, he’ll be okay. He’s sold a lot of those old posters and the rest are on consignment.”
“Posters?” I just didn’t put two and two together; besides, Greg often misremembered.
“Yeah, those old posters from the Regal. He’s been getting them out on the sly, a few every night.”
“Ernie’s posters.”
“Dunno. Yeah. He got, like, a grand for a Citizen Kane poster or something. A grand! For a piece of paper!”
I said nothing; I couldn’t believe it, but there was no point talking to Greg. I later found out that the widow was dead, and that there were no children, but somehow that didn’t make it any better.
“So, a road manager,” said Greg. “Lemme think.”
I’ve plied my trade as a gentleman of the road ever since.
I’ll save those stories for another book, one I’ll never write. You don’t need to know that I am familiar with every motorway service station in Britain; with every promoter who promises cash then pays by check; with the rainy festivals of Europe and the third-floor clubs of Japan where shows start at dusk; with the backstage toilets in which not even GG Allin would take a dump. I learned many years ago that “the phones have been ringing off the hook” means that there will be no walk-up whatsoever. And of course, the rules of the tour bus are exactly the same as they always were—still sleep feet first, still no shitting, and, most of all, don’t get left behind. As tour manager, this has only happened on my watch once: Joan Baez.
None of it would I describe as glamorous, even the bits that others do. Sometimes it’s a bit like getting married every day, eating the finest food, drinking bubbly, being showered with gifts; eventually, you just want a day off. (Ian Hunter said that.) Other times, it’s just like you’re never going to stop getting divorced from the same person.