Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

by Steve Almond

  Paloma and I began to drift into the brainless grievances that signal erotic demise. We decided drugs might help and one night resorted to a candyflip—half acid and half Ecstasy. The pills sickened us. She lay down on my bed and moaned while I stumbled outside and tried to walk it off. Before long, I stood amid the hordes of Ocean Drive, lobster-colored tourists, models and muscle boys and pimps and playgirls, all frolicking in puddles of neon, reeking of suntan lotion and clove cigarettes and puke. They sent shots gurgling down their throats and plucked buttery morsels from oversize plates, everyone on the make for pleasures they didn’t quite deserve. This was Bosch by way of the tropics. And it was perhaps at this moment that I fell out of love with Miami Beach itself and came to see the place as a monument to self-regard, though probably it was half an hour later, having staggered naked into the rancid Atlantic and emerged to find nothing changed.

  Then Floodie lost his mind. He was a supremely gentle soul—a loyal Deadhead even—but the chemicals inside him had their own agenda. He threatened to assault his boss, took up with cocaine, and disappeared for days at a time, returning with the fervent assurances of the mad. I went to visit him one night and walked straight into a NO PARKING sign, the edge of which caught my brow and opened a bloody gash. That’s how I seemed to be doing.

  Paloma never took up with Nil, so far as I discovered. Instead, she succumbed to the entreaties of her girlfriend Bella, with whom she necked passionately in a bar, either on top of or near a pool table depending on whom you believed. Within a few months, she’d left town and I’d taken up with a histrionic intern, an act of loneliness I mistook for revenge. Nil wasn’t to blame for any of this. But we couldn’t help feeling that the end of his run at the Talkhouse was the end of us, too, of that peculiar era in which our dreams cancel out all our mistakes.

  Nil released his debut on Capitol Records in March of 1996. Jon Pareles of The New York Times hailed the album as a masterpiece and Nil launched his long-awaited national tour. I kept waiting to see him on TV, serenading Rachel from Friends. But when I saw Nil again it was at a tiny club in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He looked thin and drawn and had a cast on his foot.

  I saw him only once more, in Miami, where I’d returned from grad school, hoping to recapture those fruity vapors of youth. Floodie came with me, though he was married now, a skittish adult with a kid and a mortgage. The crowd was young, club kids mostly, waiting for the DJ to show up and christen their drug trips. They didn’t seem to know who Nil was, or why he mattered, and when I tried to revive the Spoon they looked at me like I was an old dog performing a sad trick. Then I dropped my beer and everything got fucked up beyond repair. After the set I hugged Nil and he hugged me back, though I didn’t understand what was happening exactly; that we were saying farewell. Nil didn’t release another album for eight years.

  Barbaric Expressions of the Soul

  I figured this would be a sad story, because my own head is stuffed with foolish notions about what it means to succeed as an artist. But that’s not how this story ends. Nor does it end with some squalid meeting in South Beach—Nil guzzling yage tea and babbling about how he could have been a contender. It ends with a brief, polite phone conversation.

  I asked Nil what he was up to these days. He gets that question a lot. His website message board is full of DFs like me, still waiting for him to conquer the world. “I’ll play out maybe once a month,” he said, “make it an event. I get a lot of younger musicians. Every few shows, some kid’ll come up to me with all these questions about the music industry and the next thing I know he’s selling a million records.” Nil laughed. “I did the major-label thing. I put my two cents out there for people to discover and now I’m traveling below the radar. I don’t mind. It’s kind of cool actually.”

  He sounded astonishingly unbitter about his relationship with Capitol. “It was the ride of a lifetime,” Nil said. “How could it not be awesome? I got to travel around the whole country, twice. I got over to Europe. I met a ton of cool people. I was bringing the Talkhouse to the rest of the world.”

  But didn’t he have any regrets? Nil paused for a second. “I wish I would have had a better sense of myself, and stopped touring after a year. But, you know, the label said, ‘Keep touring, keep touring,’ and I figured they must know something I don’t. Two years of sleeping in a van, getting up at five a.m., doing the radio, the in-stores, then a show, you know, my body just crashed.”

  By the time Nil brought Capitol a follow-up, the folks who had signed him were long gone. He and the label agreed to part ways. In 2004, Nil put out two records on his own, which you can still find online if you hunt. These days, he sticks with the live shows. “You sell fifteen, twenty records. No middleman, just cash in your pocket.”

  I told Nil about the night he’d given me a KRU record, so long ago.

  “I don’t remember that, but I remember you at the Talkhouse, man. Dancing and dancing and dancing. Bouncing Steve. You’d come up to me after a show and hug me and you were covered with sweat. That I remember.”

  I apologized, retrospectively.

  “That’s cool,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about, man. Barbaric expressions of the soul.”

  I was struck by the precision of the term, by Nil’s lyrical talents in general, something I’ve neglected to emphasize. The guy had a sick sense of rhythm, a melodic knack to rival McCartney, a voice of uncommon range and clarity. But he also wrote beautifully in two languages, three if you include the Afro-Cuban scat he did when the spirit took him. It made me suddenly furious again on Nil’s behalf. “Doesn’t it even bug you, though,” I said, “to know you never got what you deserved?”

  There was another pause. I hoped I’d maybe knocked some of the poise out of Nil.

  “That’s okay,” he said softly. “Be selfish. Keep it to yourself.” His voice was full of tenderness; I felt a lump in my throat. Was I going to weep? Was Nil Lara going to make me weep after all these years? “What does ‘big’ mean, anyway?” he said. “That I get to go play in a mall? Or some giant arena where everything’s lit up and you can’t see anyone? I’ve played in those places, Steve. It’s like you’re in a vacuum. No, I like bars. You order a beer and there’s a band and that’s it. You can see the faces, the bodies dancing. What else could I want?”

  Nil was saying, in essence: those nights of song at the Talkhouse—they were the dream. The rest was just the ambition we’d gathered on his behalf, which he was returning to me now, gently, without a hint of anger. I wanted to tell Nil that he was my hero, that he’d inspired me to become more than I thought I could. But I knew that would sound hokey, so I told him I should let him go and hung up and ran down to the basement and found his first record and blasted the thing and tried to remember the last time I’d felt so full of hope.

  Interlude:

  Five Really Stupid Things I’ve Done as a Drooling Fanatic

  1. Serving as an X-Rated DJ to 200 Small Jewish Children The summer after my freshman year in college, I was hired as a counselor at Camp Tova. This was a very bad decision for all involved. I lacked certain counseling essentials, such as a fondness for six-year-olds and any sense of the activities they might enjoy. “Let’s do some weight training!” I might say. Or, “Who wants to visit the cemetery?”

  The crucial thing was this: the arts and crafts counselor was hot. She was five years older than me and she went to arts school in New York City and knew actual junkies. To impress her, I volunteered to DJ the first (and only) camp dance party and spent the next three weeks fretting over the playlist. The big day arrived. The children filed into the multipurpose room. Overweening Jewish mothers assembled to chaperone. The Camp Director gestured for the music to begin.

  Was it wise for me to open with “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads? I will say no. Nor was “Shout” by Tears for Fears especially apt. Then I played “Add It Up” by the Violent Femmes, which begins with Gordon Gano wailing, Why can’t I get just one kiss? It’s an energetic an
them of lust, which I spent energetically lusting after the arts and crafts babe, who was dancing with a bunch of kids (lustily if you must know the truth). Did the ethical concerns of playing such a song for six-year-olds occur to me? Not really. I was more occupied by its effects on the arts and crafts babe and how she might be induced to grant me just one fuck. And why did this phrase leap to mind? Because, come to think of it, Gordon Gano was just about to wail it to an auditorium full of six-year-olds and their Jewish mothers and the Camp Director.

  I turned from the dance floor and began a slow-motion dash toward my record player, because this was still a situation I could rescue, I could break the kids into two groups for a quick game of Sharks and Minnows, or Who Wants to Not Report the DJ to Child Protective Services? But Gano was singing too fast and I was too far away and the Camp Director was staring at me with her mouth open. Then I plowed into one of my campers, a lethargic little turd named Corey who continually farted during story hour. It was this collision that doomed me, because you can’t run over a six-year-old and keep going, though believe me I considered it, and thus, as I pulled him upright and brushed him off, I heard Gano’s anguished contralto ask the assembled,

  Why can’t I get just one fuck?

  I guess it’s something to do with luck

  Actually, it’s not.

  2. Agreeing to Buy James Cotton Medicine This dates back to my days as a rock critic in El Paso, though the show in question took place 350 miles away, in Lubbock. I had managed to convince my editor that James Cotton was one of the most important musicians on earth and close to dying. The former was possibly true, if you consider harmonica the most important instrument on earth. The latter I made up. The reason I wanted to interview Cotton was that my pal Holden had just been shipped off to Lubbock.

  I showed up early for the concert and found his road manager, who led me backstage. As a younger man, Cotton had fronted Howlin’ Wolf’s band and toured with Janis Joplin and done backflips on stage. He was well past his acrobatic days. He moved slowly; his hands trembled.

  “You gonna be all right?” his manager said.

  Cotton nodded.

  Once his manager was gone Cotton turned and, as if noticing me for the first time, said, “You suppose you could do me a favor, young man?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I need to get some medicine.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  This would make awesome color for my story. What could be better than fetching medicine for a dying, legendary bluesman? I pondered what sort of medicine the old fellow might need. Hopefully it would be something dramatic, such as nitroglycerin tablets.

  “We gotta drive somewhere,” Cotton said.

  He was whispering and so I whispered back, “Okay, let me get my friend. He has the car.”

  “Hurry now,” Cotton said.

  It did not occur to me to question why Cotton had entrusted this medical task to me, rather than (say) his manager, or a person in some way affiliated with his tour. I was really a very sheltered human being. Nonetheless, I fetched Holden and Cotton stood up and placed himself in our custody.

  “You all got a liquor store around here?” he said.

  “I guess,” Holden said. “We can find one.”

  The situation now dawned on me: my dying bluesman was in fact an alcoholic, dying, perhaps, of alcoholism. This put a certain spin on the current scenario, made it seem potentially less heartwarming and more sort of criminally negligent. At the same time, I felt I’d committed myself to the cause of James Cotton. He was the star and therefore in charge of the unfolding events and I was, in this respect, merely following orders.

  And so we three proceeded toward a rear exit door, Cotton tottering along happily, until we heard someone address him from the other side of the stage. A brief low-speed chase ensued. The manager—not wanting to attract undue attention—walked briskly after us. Cotton reached for the door. “Hurry now,” he muttered gamely. His manager drew closer, softly calling, “James? James? Where do you think you’re going, James?”

  I was not granted further interview time.

  3. Regaling Dan Bern During His Pre-show Bowel Movement Let me start by noting that my admiration for Bern dated back to an advance copy of his 1996 EP, Dog Boy Van, and quickly blossomed into full-scale dementia. Bern is best known these days as the guy who wrote the songs for the faux biopic Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. But back in the late nineties, there was a small but stubborn contingent of us who considered him the heir apparent to Dylan: an adenoidal midwestern Jew who wrote brilliant rambling folk songs. “The day that Elvis died it was like a mercy killing,” he sang, and my chest went pitter-patter.

  I’d been waiting years to see Bern in concert when he finally played a show in Cambridge. I showed up hours early and milled around the merch table. I bought his mimeographed book of poetry. I waited. He eventually appeared and was set upon by a pack of smitten college kids.

  “What is there to do around here?” Bern said. Someone mentioned candlepin bowling. He looked at the prettiest of the girls—she had short black hair and a generous bosom—and said, “What are you going to do?” The girl blushed. They agreed to meet up later. I was mildly disgusted and deeply impressed. Then Bern excused himself and went into the bathroom.

  Why did I follow him into that bathroom? I suppose because I do not have a generous bosom and therefore assumed my only possible audience with Bern would be an at-sink rendezvous during which I could ask him to sign his book. This would segue to a broader discussion of literature and art, one so enthralling that Bern would insist we hang after the show, to hell with getting blown by the black-haired chick on lane twelve!

  He was in the stall. I had a brief Larry Craigish notion: I could sit down in the stall next to him. But it was one of those giant handicapped jobbers and I couldn’t quite get myself there. I considered exiting the bathroom, but that struck me as a form of surrender. I was a fan, after all. I had pimped the man’s work far and wide. Without dudes like me, there were no easy blowjobs. If you really thought about it (and I was really thinking about it, there in the bathroom, as only a DF can), the guy owed me. Bern had been in the stall for a minute or two by now. So I said, in a loud nervous voice, the kind of voice you might use upon greeting someone at a crowded party, “Hey, Dan Bern!”

  There was a long silence.

  I guess it sort of goes without saying that I was not seeing things from Bern’s point of view.

  “Yeah?” he said finally.

  “I just wanted to say, you know, I love your music!”

  More silence.

  “I’m a big fan,” I added.

  Bern said, at most, if I didn’t just make this up, “Thanks.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got all your records, all the way back to Dog Boy Van. I reviewed a couple of them for the Miami New Times, the weekly down in Miami, I was the music editor down there for a while, though I’m a writer now, you know, fiction, poetry, that kind of thing, though I still do some editing on the side just to pay the bills, whatever, actually we might know a few people in common …” I began listing people we might know in common.

  At a certain point, two guys walked into the bathroom. I was talking excitedly in the direction of a bathroom stall. They stared.

  “Right!” I said. “Okay. We can talk later on, I guess.”

  4. Nearly Getting Stomped by Kid Frost I very much doubt you’ve heard of Kid Frost, but I spent most of 1990 listening to his debut, Hispanic Causing Panic. I was an Anglo carpetbagger living in El Paso and trying to expand my Spanish vocabulary beyond chimichanga. Listening to Frost’s raspy sermons about street life made me feel as if I were bonding with the city’s Chicano underclass. (I was not.)

  When Frost’s name appeared as an opening act on a rap tour heading to El Paso, I arranged a phone interview. Frost did a lot of cussing. He was in a dark mood, he said, because his cousin had just gotten arrested. It was the sort of detail that made me feel we had bonded.

>   This, I suspect, is why I felt no compunction about approaching him when I spotted him swaggering through the lobby of the arena before his set. “Kid Frost,” I called out. “Mr. Frost, or maybe it’s just Frost! I’m from the El Paso Times. I interviewed you for the newspaper!”

  Frost glared at me with his hooded eyes. He was radiating menace, as befitted a budding hip-hop star in a public setting. But my Drooling Fanaticism wouldn’t allow me to see this. I assumed Kid Frost had read my glowing profile and felt embarrassed. Kid Frost was shy.

  “I’m a big fan of your music,” I said. “Fanático grande.”

  Kid Frost continued to glare at me (shyly!). Because I could think of nothing else to say and because I imagined referencing his cousin would somehow make me sound “down” with his “struggle” and that of La Raza in general, I added, “I hope your cousin is doing okay.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What’d you hear about my cousin?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just that he was, you know—”

  “Don’t fucking say nothing about my cousin.”

  Frost scanned the lobby for potential witnesses.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was just, because remember we talked about—”

  Frost flexed the fingers of his right hand and leaned toward me. The air between us was ripe with Paco Rabanne cologne, his, mine, ours. He murmured something in Spanish, of which all I could make out was a conjugation of the verb chingar: to fuck. Did Kid Frost want to fuck me?

  He set his hand on my chest and gave a brisk shove.

  Shit, I thought, I have somewhat misread this situation and am now going to get boot-stomped by a guy in patent leather shoes.

  But Frost saw something that gave him pause (a security guard, it would turn out) and brushed past me.