Deeper Than Dreams

by Jessica Topper

  “I’m curious to know what made you guys tick.”

  “Oh, we ticked, all right. Like a bloody time bomb.” Adrian flashed a wry smile. “Luckily, I’ve got a much longer fuse these days.”

  He chuckled to himself as we turned to a fuzzy black-and-white class photo of Rick and Adrian in their Ditcham Park school uniforms.

  “Aw, look how cute you guys were!”

  “Cute?” Adrian protested. “We weren’t aiming for cute. We were two guys aiming for total annihilation of our country through rock and roll.”

  He smiled fondly at the photo of the starry-eyed best mates. “We had to learn how to play first, though. I found a beat-up acoustic that had belonged to my stepfather and I began to teach myself notes and chords. Rick fancied himself a singer, so he worked on poses and struts when he was not doodling elaborate logos for the name we had chosen: Diabolus in Musica.” He used air quotes and a deep voice, laughing at its ostentatious ring. “We had come across the Latin term in our school encyclopedia.” My fingers ghosted his as they skirted down the glossy page of text.

  Rick was summoned to spend the holiday with his parents in New York in the summer of 1977, which proved to be a long but evolutionary summer for both lads. Digger spent his break back in Portsmouth, where he could come and go without much hassle from his dad, and get reacquainted with his old friends.

  “Good God, look at me and Sam!” Adrian pointed to a full-color photo of an adolescent version of himself and a chubby, grinning blond boy.

  Sam Summerisle was a mate of the highest order; not only had he given Digger his nickname long before, he also freely offered up his sister Tess for snogging. Adrian received his first kiss that summer behind the motor mechanics garage where both their fathers worked. Sam, too, was hot to be in a band; his father had put him to work in the auto shop that year earning a few quid a week to save towards an instrument. Digger followed Sam’s lead, working under his father at the garage until it was time to return to his mum’s to prepare for school. He promised Sam that as soon as Rick returned, they would have Sam up for a proper band meeting.

  “So what was Rick up to all summer in New York, while you were back home snogging?” I teased.

  “What didn’t he do? He sent many letters home, for one thing. Shared stories so incredible they were almost not to be believed, but it was New York City, after all. Anything was possible! Catching a Ramones show at CBGBs, seeing Debbie Harry walking down St. Mark’s Place wearing pink sunglasses in the rain. Going to the Waverly in Greenwich Village at midnight to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show and throwing toast at the screen. Toast!” Adrian dreamily ticked off the list, his mind time-traveling back. I pictured him as a teen, holding these letters, the ink smudging under his hot thumbprints with his burning desire to jump in and live within their pages.

  “But it was Rick’s final letter home that left me gobsmacked. A single word, written in red on one of those thin, pale blue airmail sheets: ‘SHAGGED!’” Adrian hoisted the book up to his lap again. “Ah yes, here’s the picture he’d sent home.” I peered at the scan of a bent Polaroid picture, depicting Rick and a black-haired beauty with cavernous blue eyes. “Rick had met a girl; a sixteen-year-old Manhattanite named Simone. Their parents had mutual friends in the same social circles. It was Simone who took him to the East Village, to the movies, to concerts . . . and ultimately to her bedroom on the Upper East Side.” Adrian shifted his weight, and glanced at me. “It was yet another case of the Have and the Have Not. Yet this one bothered me more. I could accept the imbalance of material possession. Yet in affairs of the heart, I was still standing on the outside with my nose pressed against the glass, looking in while Rick was handed tail on a silver platter.”

  Adrian turned back to the book with renewed interest, perhaps eager to change the subject. “Anyway, Rick came home soon after, with a 1964 cherry sunburst Gibson that his parents had bought for him in New York. He thrust it onto me so I could have a go, complaining of the blisters on his fingers from trying to play it. And so began my own torrid affair.”

  I rested my chin on his shoulder and followed along with his index finger.

  Rick was lovesick and brooding over Simone. She had two more years left at Brearley before college, when she hoped her parents would send her abroad and into Rick’s waiting arms. He went through a brief black turtleneck and poetry-writing phase, which Digger took the piss out of him for. “He’d ask me how my mate Simon was, and I would call him a cunt and tell him to fuck off!”

  “Adrian! That wasn’t very nice.”

  “It was for his own good! I told him no self-respecting woman was going to date a ‘big girl’s blouse,’ and he needed to turn his depression into the heaviest music possible. So we vowed to make it our single-minded mission at the expense of everything else.”

  Singing the blues helped Rick hone his vocal skills. Once school commenced in the fall, he signed up for voice instruction there to further improve his range. The lads began to write their own songs, but it was evident that they would need more manpower to bring it home.

  As promised, Digger invited his childhood mate up. Sam brought two things to the table: a crap copy of a Fender Precision Bass that he had bought for forty quid, and transportation. He and Rick, however, were as different as night and day, and butted heads routinely.

  Adrian tapped an early picture of their trio, making music with a tiny amplifier and big hair. “I was constantly working as peacekeeper between those two. They were my two best mates so it drove me mad that they refused to take a liking to one another.”

  “What did they fight about?”

  “Cripes, more like what didn’t they fight about! They argued over football, television, the name of the band. Sam thought Diabolus in Musica was too fancy, too difficult to pronounce. He fixated on another name, Black Leather Fantasy.” Adrian chuckled. “Rick would take the piss out of him, even after we had sold a million albums and were selling out arenas. If Sam got angry about something and threatened to walk out, Rick would have a laugh and ask, ‘You going off to form Black Leather Fantasy, then?’ Sam wasn’t the brightest bulb. But he was a solid bloke and he really could play. Rick tolerated him mainly because it would be another two years until either of us could drive and it wasn’t like Rick’s aunt Bootsy could haul our gear in her Karmann Ghia.”

  More pictures had been unearthed of the two best friends. Adrian, slight and fair, gold guitar in hand, gesturing toward the pickups on a V-shaped guitar strapped to the tall, lithe body of swarthy Rick. “Crikey, how he could shred on that Flying V! That’s how he earned his nickname: Riff.”

  The “posh Jew” and the “puny pleb” were routinely bullied. Rick was called a Zionist, simply due to the fact that his father often had business dealings in Israel, and Digger was guilty by association, plus he wore the wrong brand of trainers. They were beginning to see how the world wasn’t going to do them any favors. They were going to have to squeeze their own lemonade from the sour lemons life was pitching their way.

  End of term came at Christmastime and once again, Rick was whisked off, this time for a skiing holiday in Switzerland. Sam was working two jobs back in Portsmouth, at the garage and unloading freight at the docks. Digger picked up enough hours as his father’s apprentice to finally purchase a quality guitar of his own: a Gibson Les Paul Goldtop.

  “My favorite. It cost me two hundred pounds, and I still use it to this day. My father thought I was daft to spend that amount of money on a ‘hobby,’ and my mum, well. Let’s just say that her son’s dreams of becoming a musician were not welcome dinner conversation. She wasn’t convinced that playing music could provide a living or a pension. So when I told her, over the roast tatties, boiled sweets and Christmas crackers, that I didn’t give a toss; I had decided to leave school anyway, she kicked me out of the house to help me on my way.”

  “Oh, sweetie. Where did you go?”

&n
bsp; Adrian slapped over to a new chapter entitled “The Portsmouth Years.”

  “I went back to my dad’s. He was a stern taskmaster at work, so for two years I was his whipping boy. But I had a goal; I wanted to be in London by the start of the new decade and playing music full-time. So I kept my eye on that. I bought a small practice amp with my wages, and began taking lessons.”

  “And what about Rick?”

  “Leaving school was out of the question for him.”

  Certain things were just expected of Rick, and academics were nonnegotiable. So he would put in a full day at Ditcham Park, and Sam and Digger would travel up from Portsmouth afterwards to clock in rehearsal time. But it wasn’t all schoolwork that occupied Rick’s day; he commandeered the pupil payphone to arrange gigs, mostly Bar Mitzvahs and parties where they would play original songs if tolerated and cover songs if requested.

  “We weren’t picky, we’d jump at any chance to play live. I think we even played at a hen night . . . what do you call them here, a bachelorette party? Yeah, for one of Bootsy’s friends.”

  “Diabolus in Musica at a Bar Mitzvah?”

  “Oh, back then we changed our name more often than we changed our pants! We were Rue Morgue, like the Poe story . . . then Howler. Oh, and Houston to Delancey—I think Simone had come up with that, she was always writing letters to Rick with suggestions for improving the band. Trying to make us avant-garde. For a long time we were called Fetish. Probably Sam’s contribution, can’t remember.”

  Adrian turned the page. “Ah yes. Cue the lovely Simone. She arrived the fall of that year to study at Queen Mary University. Straight from New York’s Upper East Side to London’s East End, but that didn’t seem to faze her. She fell right in with us. Adam had joined as our drummer, and we had moved to London by then. Rick’s parents funded a flat for us, so long as Rick enrolled in University there.”

  “So were you officially Corroded Corpse by then?”

  Adrian nodded. “We were hanging out in the flat, drinking and listening to records, when Rick picked up the cover to Iron Maiden’s brilliant debut. He gestured to the artwork, which featured a gape-mouthed zombie-like creature, and scoffed that we could do better than some corroded corpse on our album cover. We all just looked at one another and it clicked.”

  So with the name and lineup firmly established, and shortly thereafter a demo under their belt, the band began playing regular gigs around London, gaining an impressive loyal following of denim-clad teens, their leathers covered in badges and pins to prove their allegiance to the various bands of the era. The U.K. youth in the London heavy metal scene were a recognizable force by 1981. In fact, there wasn’t much difference between those on the stage and those in the audience. Digger was 18, and knew the ins and outs of almost every club in town as both a musician and a concertgoer. His reputation led to secondary jobs as a stagehand and guitar tech at larger venues like the Marquee and the Rainbow.

  “Were you a roadie?” I asked him.

  “I was more like local crew for the clubs. Not only did I get to see a ton of quality shows, buckshee and front and center, but I also met a lot of musicians, managers, and A&R blokes from various record labels. Every connection was a step closer to discovery. But it was a chance meeting in a pool hall that led us to our manager.”

  The edge in his voice was palpable. Several of the book’s glossy pages crumpled beneath his death-grip. I smoothed my hands across his, soothing as I moved up his arms.

  “It was Wren who suggested Rick shorten his somewhat ‘ethnic’ surname to Rotten. When we moaned that it sounded like a blatant rip-off of the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, Wren pointed out, ‘Do you really think Chaim Witz would have gotten very far leading KISS?’ See, he just knew all these bizarre rock facts, like Gene Simmons’s birth name. He could recite how many albums a band had sold or what a venue’s capacity was without batting an eyelash. And when that eighty-page contract from the label was couriered to our doorstep, he was able to offer up valuable points of advice, like ‘Get a feckin’ lawyer so we can sign this thing!’”

  “Wow. How did your parents . . . and Rick’s . . . react?”

  “Rick’s parents had been ever-supportive of us, so long as Rick continued with school. They always expressed interest, even attended shows when they could. I hadn’t seen either of my parents since moving to the big city.” He waved his hand to dismiss the memory. “I couldn’t be arsed; I had a contract with my name on it! We took it straightaway to my brother, who was in law school. We didn’t exactly have the money to put a professional on retainer, or the foresight to have Wren’s own deal examined at the same time, unfortunately. But Michael did all right by us. The most important revision he made, and to this day I am in his debt, was to stipulate that ownership of the masters from both the EP and from Ruins of Decay be retained by the band.”

  “Why was that so important?”

  “Well, when a band breaks big, often several albums into their career, their less-commercially-successful back catalog increases in value. It was money that Wren could never touch, no matter how big he made us.”

  “Ah, gotcha.”

  “Our contract was a five-album deal with two firm, and the label was hot to get the band in the studio. Recording near home rather than being on the road fit in perfectly with Rick’s schedule, as he and Simone had—surprise!—a baby on the way and a wedding to plan. The elder Rottenbergs were none too pleased.”

  “Didn’t they care for Simone?”

  “Oh they were very fond of her, but once they learned Rick planned to juggle the band, the books, a wife and a child . . . they knew something was going to give, and from the looks of things, it wasn’t going to be the music.”

  “Oh man. How old were they?”

  “Simone was twenty. Rick, going on nineteen.”

  “Her parents must not have been too thrilled, either.”

  Adrian shook his head. “But Rick and Simone were in their own little bubble of bliss and refused to let anyone pop it for them. That’s how things were, back in those days. Me and you and let’s shut out the rest of the world. Until, of course, contractual obligations forced us to tour in support of the album, ad nauseam. None of us saw our families much that year.”

  I turned the page and was surprised to see one of Marissa’s favorite bands during her high school years.

  When the band returned home to London, they learned that while they had been out playing some of their best shows yet, another British band was sashaying through the living rooms of America.

  “Whoa, what are they doing in your story?”

  “While Corroded Corpse really didn’t care what Def Leppard was up to musically, we were intrigued by America’s reception of them via a new channel called Music Television.”

  “Ah yes. I remember them entering my living room.” I giggled. “My friends and I would rush to my house after school to watch hours of MTV.”

  “Ach, probably the worst thing that ever happened to rock and roll. Personally, I’d rather watch wallpaper peel. So yes . . . Def Leppard. We didn’t give a toss. But Wren had a way of making us feel we had to. He dangled their Pyromania in front of our noses like a carrot. And vowed that if we stuck with him, it would soon be our album on the turntables of every teenager on earth.”

  He flipped to the back of the book, revealing a full-color photo of the band labeled “Rock in Rio, 1985: 350,000 strong.” Leather-clad, sweating and screaming for the crowd that spilled well past the recommended bleed lines of the glossy page. Adrian slowly shook his head, as if he could scarcely wrap it around the notion. “And well . . . you know the sordid story from hereon.”

  “Yet here you are.”

  “As are you.” He smiled and caressed my knee. “Your chariot awaits.”

  ***

  One spell was broken, yet another began as Adrian’s doorman ushered us through the heavy
brass entryway of his building. Manhattan was alive at street level, the night’s pace frantic in every direction. Headlights swept north and south, and to the east loomed the dark leafy wilderness of Central Park; the valley I had stared down at from high windows today was now a backyard filled with secrets.

  Mixed feelings slowed my steps. Was all this fuss just preparation? Adrian buttering me up, just to tell me he was leaving for another two months? He had talked of longer fuses . . . had a new countdown to detonation already begun?

  “Would it be silly to suggest changing into sweatpants and ordering in Chinese instead?”

  Or would it be delaying the inevitable?

  “Come on, now. My Cinderella isn’t getting cold feet, is she?” Adrian asked, a west wind tousling his hair against mine as he turned to face me. “That’s not how I recall the fairy tale going.”

  “There’s that “f” word again.”

  He laughed. “Just enjoy it, luv.”

  “While it lasts?” I added. Had he planned this whole fairy tale evening because he was going to be on tour and we weren’t going to have many nights like this together anytime soon?

  He smiled, and it hurt my heart to think it.

  Our limo was waiting curbside, its glossy black exterior blending in with the night. Adrian chauffeured me right to the open door. Remembering Mindy’s words, I plunked down, ass-first, and swung my legs in. I heard pleasantries being exchanged between him and our driver as he walked to the other side and climbed aboard. Soon we were sailing past Columbus Circle, sealed in our luxurious surroundings.

  “Funny, I feel like we’ve done this before.” Adrian gave me his cheekiest grin.

  “Yes, I remember it like it was yesterday,” I joked. It was hard to reconcile the man in the bespoke tux sitting beside me with the leather-clad, sweaty rock god who had brought an entire crowd to their feet and then down to their knees in worship last night. I fingered his bowtie, appreciating that he had taken the time to hand-knot one, rather than opting for a premade clip-on that would have cheapened the look. “You clean up nice,” I added.