Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

by Steve Almond

  I knew that The Close would find his way to an Ike Reilly show, but I was out of town on the weekend in question. The Close appeared on my doorstep that Monday with an envelope of photos. “This is me with Ike,” he said. “This is my girl with Ike. This is Ike looking at my girl’s titties.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You met Ike Reilly?”

  “Hell yeah I met Ike. We showed up three hours before the show and drank with him. He drinks Red Stripe. He jumped off the stage and danced with my girl at the end of the show. Oh hey, I got something for you.” He presented me with a small promotional poster. “That’s signed,” The Close said. “I had Ike sign that for you. Do we got any cigarettes or what?”

  He was enjoying himself immensely, in particular the fact that I was infuriated. After all, I prided myself on being a “mature” Fanatic now, the kind who (generally) resisted overt Drooling. But The Close had an entirely different conception of Fanaticism. He weaseled what access he could, then flaunted it shamelessly. As I watched him flip through his photos, a horrible thought seized me: what if the little mooch was right?

  I’m going to skip all the begging that led Ike Reilly to allow me to visit his home north of Chicago. It reflects poorly on my begging skill set. I will mention something fairly obvious: in the five years since Salesmen and Racists, Ike’s career hadn’t exactly exploded. “Why do you want to come see me?” he said, when I spoke to him on the phone. “I’m not a rock star. I got four kids. Seriously, you’re going to be disappointed.”

  On the Road Again

  Why did I invite The Close to come along? I had two reasons:

  1. I was terrified to go alone and envisioned The Close as an ideal co-stalker in the sense that he lacks the capacity to feel shame.

  2. If things took a turn for the worse, The Close could show Ike photos of his girl’s titties, which he stored on his phone.

  The potential snag lay in our record as road buddies; we had threatened to murder each other many times. The worst of our misadventures was a seven-hundred-mile trek across the South undertaken on the evening after the 2004 presidential election, the highlight of which was not listening to The Close urinate into a Gatorade bottle in the backseat, as you might expect, but listening to him ogle a group of prepubescent Mennonite girls at a McDonald’s outside Roanoke. “Mmmm-mmmm virgins,” The Close murmured, as the girls jittered in their bonnets. “Virgins taste good.”

  The mood inside our car was pure homicide. About all we could agree on as the black rain beat down was Ike. We had the stereo cranked so loud the crickets in the dark fields were swayed back in terrified silence.

  A week before our flight to Chicago, The Close called to announce that his mother had died. To say he was estranged from her understated the situation. She had left her husband and three kids for another man. The Close had bragged to me once that he had spit on her when she appeared at the memorial service for his father.

  Nonetheless, I told him I was sorry and I absolutely understood and we could still cancel his plane reservation.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “The funeral,” I said. “The arrangements.”

  “It’s not a problem,” The Close said.

  “What do you mean it’s not a problem?” I immediately launched into a big speech about how he had to try to forgive his mother and honor her death and how if he didn’t he’d be hounded by Furies like Orestes and eventually need to be purified with pig blood.

  “Hey, pally,” he said impatiently, “this is Ike Reilly we’re talking about.”

  And what could I say to that? Can you force people to feel what they need to feel? Can you force them to grieve? You cannot.

  Dead on Arrival

  Ike lived an hour north of Chicago, in Libertyville, the town where he’d grown up. On the phone, he described his house as a “log cabin.” This made sense to us, because his lyrics suggested a working-class hero, full of contempt for the swells. Thus our confusion as we pulled into the Reilly homestead at nine in the evening—the “log cabin” was actually a lodge, vast, exquisitely gabled, with numerous wings. The driveway was the size of an indoor track.

  “Where the fuck are the logs?” The Close said.

  Ike wandered out to his driveway. He had striking blue eyes and a nose Picasso would have adored, but his manner was that of a chippy bantamweight, the sort of guy who had spent much of his life beating up bigger guys.

  The Close and I stood there staring at his lodge while trying not to stare. Ike coughed uncertainly. Finally, he sighed and led us upstairs to his studio, which looked very much like a ski chalet and included a full bar. He introduced the Craiger, a burly Australian who served as his driver/tour manager. Nobody quite knew what to do. Was this like a journalism thing? Was I supposed to interview Ike? I pulled out a notebook.

  “No notebooks,” Ike said.

  “Remember me?” The Close said.

  Ike squinted.

  “Sure you do,” The Close said. “Your Cambridge show, like, four months ago. We bought you Red Stripes.”

  “Oh yeah,” Ike said. “The guy from Jersey.”

  “That’s right,” The Close said. “Jersey. You danced with my girl.”

  This exhausted our small talk. We began chugging vodka tonics, in the hope things would become less awkward. Eventually, Ike played us a demo of his new record. The more we praised the songs, the more he scowled. “It must be kind of hard to listen to your own music,” I said.

  Ike wheeled around and glared at me. I’d tripped some kind of silent Drooling Fanatic alarm. “Hey, you think this matters to me? You think I base my self-esteem on this shit? It’s like I told you, this isn’t who I am. I don’t even know what you guys are doing out here.” The room plunged into silence. “I’m supposed to feel like some big deal because I wrote ‘Commie Drives a Nova’?” Ike sneered. “Please. How pathetic is that?”

  I wanted to shout back that it did happen to be a big deal, that I’d watched “Commie” transform confirmed depressives into howling ecstatics and what’s more that Ike was the only songwriter on earth who spoke the common language of punk and hip-hop and blues and Celtic music, the roiling rhyming bluster of motherfucking America. But Ike was still glaring, waiting for me to say the dumb thing that would justify giving us the boot. The Craiger dropped his big meaty fists onto the bar and awaited orders.

  Sweeney Arrives

  Just then, a large, red-faced human burst into the room. He was roaring drunk and eager to announce that his wife of many years, a beautiful woman, a woman he probably still loved, wanted a divorce. This was Sweeney. Sweeney and Ike had been pals since boyhood and their wives were best friends and Sweeney was thrilled to meet us because he was Ike’s “number one fan on earth” and had many secrets to reveal about Ike such as that his real name was Michael but mostly he wanted to go out and Get More Fucked Up. “Let’s get laid!” Sweeney roared. “I’m a free man, practically! Who’s with me?”

  It was nearly midnight on a Wednesday, but Ike wasn’t going to leave Sweeney hanging and we were along for the ride because Sweeney had decided we were from Rolling Stone and were going to make Ike famous. We settled in at a bar downtown, where Sweeney held forth on a variety of subjects, such as the fact that, as a boy, he sat on the lap of Libertyville’s most famous native, Marlon Brando.

  “How did that go?” The Close asked.

  “Great!” Sweeney bellowed. “He fisted me.”

  We stumbled through an alley to a second bar. At two a.m., Sweeney suggested we repair to his basement for alcohol poisoning. “I’ve got Tombstone Pizza! Who’s in?” The Close set his head down on the bar and closed his eyes.

  The Close Gives Me a Pep Talk

  “Ike hates you,” The Close observed the next morning.

  It was nearly eleven. I had been up for hours already, fretting.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I mean it; the guy really hates you. That shit you pulled with, like, psychoanalyzing him. W
hy are you always doing that?” The Close belched. He lay on his bed in our room at the Days Inn, wearing the kind of elaborate mid-length underwear you see on Sears mannequins. “I thought he was going to punch you in the face. How does it feel to know that my friend Ikeal,17 who I’m out here visiting as a favor to you, who obviously wants to get to know me, this guy now wants to punch you in the face?”

  “I wasn’t psychoanalyzing him.”

  “Your problem,” The Close said, “is that you’re a Hebrew. Moral instruction is embedded in your DNA. This mentality is the result of being a desert people. Deprivation and excessive nerves activate the prophetic impulse.” The Close got up to piss, then burrowed back under the covers.

  “You can explain all this to Ike over lunch,” I said.

  “There’s not going to be any lunch, pally.” He shook his head. “Talking to you is like talking to a dog.”

  Within a minute, he was asleep.

  How to Score a Major Label Record Deal, Buy the House of Your Dreams, and Fail Spectacularly Without Really Trying

  Ike did not blow me off. On the contrary, he showed up freshly showered, having just run ten miles. This struck me as something close to miraculous, given that he had consumed his own weight in alcohol a few hours earlier. But this was how Ike conducted business. His life amounted to an ongoing struggle between high ambition and low behavior. Years ago he’d refused a track scholarship in order to play rugby. He graduated college with a degree in political science and theology, then blew off law school to take a job as a bellhop at a Chicago hotel, where, if his songs are to be believed, he supplemented his income by serving as the unofficial concierge of drug sales.

  His musical career had followed the same twisting path. He played with a series of bands throughout his twenties, including the Eisenhowers (this explained the nickname Ike), but dropped out of the music scene to support his family. He and his wife, Kara Dean, would eventually have four kids. In his mid-thirties, Ike began recording songs with a band of local guys, more or less on a lark. He sent a demo of this material to an acquaintance in L.A. Through a series of events too far-fetched to detail—but which Ike nonetheless detailed, in a series of digressions marked by radical shifts in tone, subject matter, chronology, and pronouns—this disc made its way to Mike Simpson, one half of the Dust Brothers. A few months later, Universal offered an ungodly sum for the record that would become Salesmen and Racists.

  At this point, Ike did what any self-respecting American would: he bought a house far more expensive than he could afford. In his case, Log Haven, the elegant hunting lodge he’d visited as a kid and dreamed about ever since. It was approximately twenty times as large as the shitbox in which he and his family had been living. When he took his kids by to see the spread, they stared in confusion. His eldest asked him, “Are you going to be the doorman?”

  Salesmen and Racists remains one of the greatest rock and roll albums ever released, and one of the least heard—which goes a long way toward explaining the chip on Ike’s shoulder. In his mind, the label made at least two major mistakes. First, they chose as the lead single a song that opens with the lines “Last night I didn’t make you come/Last night you didn’t fake me out”—delightful lines to be sure, but not for commercial radio. Second, they sent Ike out on the road with John Mayer, which is something like asking Iggy Pop to open for Jackson Browne.

  As petulant as Ike can sound about all this, it’s fueled his creativity. He’s released five raucously elegant records since Salesmen, all on a small indie label, and built a cult following. The commercial failure of his debut has become an inside joke among his bandmates, one of whom had a bunch of T-shirts printed up when Ike moved into Log Haven. They read: BIGGEST HOUSE, FEWEST RECORDS SOLD.

  The Terror and the Drugs

  After lunch, I went to pick up The Close. He had drawn the shades and lay in the darkness, looking pallid and frankly despondent. I wanted to ask if he was all right, if the aftershock of his mother’s death had finally caught up with him, but I knew better. So we headed back to the studio, where Ike and his producer Manny hoped to lay down a demo for a new song. The following colloquy ensued:

  Ike: Hey. Did you sleep well?

  Close: Yes, I did.

  Ike: You know, I’ve got all sorts of pills.

  Close: Yeah, if you would like to give me some. My girl and I take them with wine.

  Ike: So do I.

  Close: Oh very good. You and I, we’re the same. So I’ll take any Oxycontin you’ve got.

  Ike: I’ve got Oxycodeine. I’ve got—should I get them going now?

  Close: No, I don’t want one now.

  Ike ducked out and returned a minute later. He pulled a handful of red and white pills out of his pocket, which he began cataloguing for The Close. The Close repeated that he wasn’t in the mood for any pills. Then they both took a pill. Now it was time to record a new song.

  Ike had told me about the song at lunch. He’d sung me the chorus, too: “Let’s fight the war on the terror and the drugs.” I didn’t get it—had Cheney’s people gotten to him? Ike picked up a battered acoustic guitar, played a blues shuffle, and began singing:

  I need a girl, because I always need a girl,

  Because I’m weak and I’m lonely in love

  The song carried on in this manner for several verses. Then Ike’s voice, which is most often a keening tenor, dropped to a whisper:

  I dreamed that my children could not catch their breath

  They were falling off buildings straight down to their death

  Try as I could, I could not catch them

  Before they landed and cracked open their heads

  Out of their heads came laughter and lies

  And frozen light and dark lullabies

  I saw their sweet mother mixing their ashes and blood

  But I didn’t see no terror and I didn’t see no drugs

  At which point he roared into the chorus, and by which time I was roaring too (though softly), because the true purpose of that chorus had been revealed. It was a sly parable about the artificial wars cooked up by political admen, and how they obscure our true fears—the terror of losing those we love. This was classic Ike Reilly, a composition bristling with moral outrage but loyal to the needs of the pub crowds.

  I had just watched my hero record a new song. Boy, I thought, that wasn’t so hard. In fact, Ike spent the next six hours playing the same song, trying to settle on the right key (A to B to B-flat) and the right lyrics, which he had not bothered to write down and therefore kept tinkering with or forgetting or both. There was also the tempo, the phrasing, the best way to segue out of the bridge, and how to arrange the song for a full band. It was beginning to dawn on me how many decisions a musician had to make, which made the job seem—even in this most generative phrase—depressingly similar to writing.

  Except that Ike would get a demo out of these sessions, which he could then give to his mates so as to effectuate that loud, collective feeling of rocking, to be transmitted (eventually) to a room full of sweaty fans, some of them young women whose beautiful tits would bounce up and down as Ike sang about the terror and the drugs and whose throats would produce lovely shrieks. This was not how writing worked.

  The most charming aspect of watching Ike record a song was the constant intervention of his kids. His eldest son Shane called with a report from his soccer game. “How many did you score?” Ike shouted. “Against them? They suck. Yeah, well they used to suck.” A bit later, we heard a loud scraping from outside. This was his ten-year-old, Kevin, tearing down the driveway on a new and spectacularly dangerous variety of skateboard. “Hey, Dad, check this out!” Ike stared at the boy. He clearly wanted to be down there watching his kid possibly crack his skull open, rather than recording a song about how frightened he was that his kids might crack their skulls open.

  Then his oldest daughter, Hannah, appeared. She was a junior in high school, blond, beautiful, a star long-distance runner like her pop. Ike said that
she might be visiting Boston to scout schools and The Close, who had mentioned that he taught at Boston University perhaps a hundred times by now, immediately got very close to her. “All right,” he said, “the first thing is I’ll give you a full tour. Then you can sit in on my class. Then we’ll get you set up with the track coach. I’ll call him when I get back.”

  “You can do that?” Hannah said. “You know him?”

  The Close waved his hand like a magician.

  “She’s going to need a scholarship,” Ike said.

  “Not a problem, pally,” Close said. “You just get in touch with me and I’ll take care of everything.”

  The Wild One

  Ike hadn’t forgotten that we were Drooling Fanatics. But our presence in the studio had softened his basic contempt for us, so he took us to his favorite sushi place and we got shit-faced on sake. This made us all sentimental. Ike decided we needed to see a few of the local sights: the old frame house where he’d grown up, the alley garage where he and his pals came to get loaded, Brando’s place. “There were times when I hated this town,” he told us. “It was crawling out of me. That’s why I identified with Brando. Terry Malloy. The Wild Ones. The group of guys I ran around with, that’s who we wanted to be. I still lie to myself about where I am.”