Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  “Well, we’re not coming out with some tits-and-ass beerfest. We say obnoxious things and stuff, but I’d rather have my kid go to see Offspring than Poison, because at least I’d know there was some kind of sensibility associated with the band. Because . . .”

  Billie Joe takes a deep breath and goes into rant mode.

  “In America in the early part of the 90s, mainstream music was starting to get more interesting, Nirvana breaking big, Pearl Jam—who I don’t like that much, but they’re still more interesting than Bon Jovi—taking off and punk rock starting to get everywhere. Lots of cool stuff. Then, suddenly, in 1995, you get a bunch of fucking golf-playing fraternity boys putting out music. I mean, have you heard Hootie & The Blowfish?”

  I have. While having no objection in principle to golf-playing fraternity boys releasing records, the appeal of Hootie & The Blowfish eludes me. In a sane world, they would play to modest audiences whose average age and IQ coincided somewhere in the high forties. In reality, there’s hardly a venue in America they can’t fill.

  “Regular guy rock. Jesus. And Jay Leno is beating out David Letterman for ratings. Can you believe that? Things really are going backwards.”

  Green Day, presumably, see themselves on the side of the angels.

  “There’s more to us than people think,” says Mike. “We do more than whine. There are a lot of subjects on the new record if people want to decipher them. ‘Westbound Sign’ is about the time Billie’s wife moved out. ‘Tightwad Hill’ is about where we come from. ‘No Pride’ is like the anti-anthem, it’s an anti-nationalism kind of song.”

  Ah, Green Day whining about nationalism.

  Billie Joe gives me the look this last remark deserves, but decides to let it go.

  “Listen,” he says. “We’ve got to go and play, but come and have a beer afterwards, huh?”

  This seems a reasonable offer.

  WE STAY UP pretty late afterwards, while Green Day’s crew pack crates, roll cables and give the buses the sort of meticulous clean you give buses when you’re about to drive them across the border into America and you don’t fancy becoming an extra in some lonely customs post’s remake of Midnight Express. Tre helps the process along by smoking what remains of Green Day’s stash, and entertains himself by smashing empty beer bottles against the dressing room wall. Mike shuffles quietly about, chatting to passing crew, and Billie Joe and I get into a frankly embarrassingly detailed argument about whether or not All Shook Down is a better Replacements album than Let It Be.

  The Replacements were one of those bands whose commercial success was directly inversely proportional to their musical merit, which is to say they had almost none of the former and a lavish wealth of the latter. Bands like this have a way of turning their fans into crusaders, passionate bores who will seize at the slightest opportunity to make a convert. Woe betide the stranger in the seat next to me who makes a passing reference to The Go-Betweens or The Fatima Mansions at the beginning of a Heathrow-Los Angeles flight. Where The Replacements are concerned, Billie Joe and I have met our matches in each other. A glazed look begins to descend on everyone else in the room (Tre had one already, but for different reasons).

  While I’m just delighted to have met someone else who can quote the line “Anywhere you hang yourself is home” from “Someone Take The Wheel” (The Replacements’ peerless lament of the touring life), Billie Joe is trying to make a point. Green Day are in this for the long haul, he says. Earlier, he’d drawn a comparison with The Beastie Boys, who started out with multi-platinum success as a puerile novelty act, and went on to achieve genuine respect and the cult-level fame that Billie says he’d be more comfortable with. A shame that The Beastie Boys accomplished this transition by ceasing to make such splendidly cretinous records as “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)” and “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” and turning into a bunch of smug, self-righteous hippies in silly jumpsuits, but that’s not relevant to Billie’s argument.

  The Replacements, Billie Joe reminds me, filled their first couple of albums with songs called “Gary’s Got A Boner,” “Dope Smokin’ Moron” and “Fuck School.” They made Green Day sound like Soren Kierkegaard. They went on to make some of the most haunted and glorious music in the rock’n’roll canon.

  “That,” says this determined, and brighter than expected, young man, “is what we’re here for.”

  6

  FRIDAY I’M IN CHICAGO

  The Cure in America and Canada

  JUNE 1992

  ONE OF THE joys of travelling as a reporter is the opportunity to work with great photographers, and I’ve been unusually blessed in that respect—as I was on this trip, travelling with Melody Maker’s Stephen Sweet. And one of the frustrations of working as a writer is realising how little impact thousands of your words might have in comparison to a single frame snapped by a great photographer, which was what happened when this story originally ran. I’d mumbled something to Sweet about maybe focusing on the odd relationship between The Cure’s Robert Smith and his mascara-smeared legions of look-alike fans, and Sweet nailed it the first night, outside the band’s hotel in Chicago.The scene is described, and done insufficient justice, below Sweet’s shot of Smith’s encounter with an especially ardent adherent from behind the singer’s shoulder, deftly capturing the worshipper’s supplicant gawp and Smith’s wincing, forehead-rubbing awkwardness. I still think it’s one of the best illustrations of the dysfunctional relationship between celebrity and celebrator I’ve ever seen, and its potence is diluted not even slightly by the knowledge that the anguish discernible in Smith’s expression was due principally to the fact that he was just plain sloshed. The camera, in those pre-Photoshop times, may not have lied, but it didn’t always declare the whole truth.

  What is lacking in the story that follows is much in the way of any meaningful attempt to understand the cult of Robert Smith from the perspective of its adherents. This was partially due to constraints of time, but mostly down to your correspondent’s pathological aversion to boring nutters. I could understand being a fan of The Cure, because I was—and am—one: indeed, a little over two years before I did this trip, I was living, back in Sydney, in a room dominated by the black-and-white Boys Don’t Cry poster, and I would still doubt the sanity of anyone prepared to argue that The Head On The Door wasn’t one of the dozen best albums of the 1980s. I just don’t understand the urge to appropriate your favourite singer’s haircut and taste in misshapen jumpers, and regard his every pronouncement as freighted with Delphic sagacity. Which is to say that I don’t understand uncritical reverence for anything, which is, I suppose, to say that I don’t understand quite a lot of the rest of my species terribly well. However, I believe that the analysis of his own flock that Smith delivers later in this piece is both astute and compassionate, or at least blessed with more of both those qualities than anything I might have come up with on my own.

  Fame is a phenomenon that generally conspires to make both the admired and the admirer look ridiculous: I suspect that this is what I was trying to demonstrate with the random observations of The Cure’s celebrity inserted throughout the narrative. The best that all concerned can do with any variety of notoriety is refuse to take it seriously, and I’ve rarely since seen anyone cleave to that attitude quite so splendidly as The Cure.

  “HERE, LOOK. NO, over here. See, I’ve invented this game for you. And I’d like you to play it.”

  The face—that great grinning shambles of lipstick, pancake and hair gel that I’ve only previously seen on magazine covers, television screens and, I’ll admit, the walls of the bedrooms I occupied during my teens—is inches from mine. We’re in a dressing room backstage at The World, a modestly-named arena an hour and a half’s drive from Chicago, where The Cure have just played a superb show in front of 15,000 people. I’m sandwiched between Robert Smith and long-serving Cure bass player Simon Gallup on a black leather couch that might conceivably seat one in any kind of comfort.

  “Look. On th
e table.”

  While Gallup has been asking me about a couple of friends of his back at the Melody Maker office, Smith has been arranging the contents of a bowl of M&Ms on the polished black table in front of us. From where I’m sitting, there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to what Smith’s doing, but as we’ve only just met and I’ve got to get a cover story out of this, I figure it’s as well to humour him. I nod, and smile, and wish I wasn’t quite so sober.

  “Right,” Smith continues. “Now what you have to do—and pay careful attention to this, right—is move that red one there at the bottom up to the top without,” he pauses for effect, “touching any of the others.”

  Ah. Smith, it must be said, is drunk. Heroically so, in fact, and operating according to the deranged and indecipherable logic the state engenders, which is to say that while I’m sure this is all making cast-iron sense to him, I haven’t a clue what he’s talking about. I turn to Gallup in some faint hope of support, but he’s got his head in his hands, is muttering intently to himself and clearly has no wish to be disturbed. I’m on my own.

  “Come on,” says Smith. “I’m waiting.”

  I’m thinking that somewhere, in some little-regarded footnote in a dusty thesaurus stashed in a dank corner of a cobwebbed attic owned by some mad, bearded, elderly professor, there’s a cracking French or Latin phrase for “the fear of making an irredeemable plum duff of oneself in front of one’s adolescenthood heroes within five minutes of meeting same for reasons you can neither control nor comprehend.” Still, I steel myself, extend a trembling digit to the small red sweet, push it around the others to the spot Smith had designated at the top of the table, and sit back, trying to look nonchalantly triumphant. There follow some seconds of confused silence, broken only by Gallup’s mumbling.

  “Right,” says Smith, eventually, and buries his fingers deep in his hopelessly congealed thatch. “Ah . . . okay. I can see I’m going to have to make this more difficult.”

  I’M STAYING IN the Claridge Hotel in Chicago, a renovated terrace house in which the halls are lined with glass cabinets full of antique toys. Amusingly, the hotel also has a complimentary stretch limousine service, and a driver with enough of a sense of humour to cope with directions like, “Oh, I don’t know, just drive around for a bit and let me wave at people.” When I come back and turn on the television, there’s one of those uncountable, indistinguishable sub-90210 teen angst soap operas on. This particular episode revolves around an outwardly normal, obviously beautiful, and tiresomely overachieving young woman who takes a stack of pills in an effort to kill herself. On her bedroom wall, looming above her as she belts back the downers, is what the show’s producers doubtless imagined was a definitive signifier of tormented youth: a poster of The Cure.

  IT IS DECIDED, after a couple more hours of drinking and slurring by all present, that The Cure will give me and photographer Stephen Sweet a lift back to Chicago on their tour bus. While we huddle on a couple of couches, The Cure’s crew move into fluent action, packing up and rolling out everything non-human in black flight cases. Someone takes off the Sensational Alex Harvey Band CD that has been playing at excruciating volume since I arrived. “I was enjoying that . . . ,” protests Smith, half-heartedly. “Someone threw it on stage tonight . . .” He stops, looks slowly around the room, then embarks on an animated ramble about how Alex Harvey reminds him of his wife, Mary, and about something that once happened with his brother and some French women, which I can’t follow at all.

  Gallup, meanwhile, is flinging surplus crisps, unwanted carrot sticks, empty cups and Robert’s M&Ms at the nearest available target, which turns out to be The Cure’s record company boss, Chris Parry of Fiction. One of The Cure’s minders makes him stop. Smith, by now, is wrestling on the floor with another of the band’s minders. It’s hard to say how serious it is. Given that Smith has the upper hand, it’s probably fair to surmise that he’s trying harder than the minder (I mean, Smith is a big bloke, and probably more than capable of looking after himself, but the chap he’s locked in combat with has arms thicker than my entire body and looks like he could kick-start a 747). A couple of crew prise the two apart and organise everyone onto the bus. As we pull out of the venue, the few dozen cars that have been parked, waiting, in the darkness alongside the road, start their engines and follow us.

  The bus is as well-appointed as you’d expect, given that it’s carting about a bunch of thirty-something millionaires whose singer is pathologically terrified of aeroplanes (The Cure crossed the Atlantic on the QEII). There are lounges fore and aft, a small kitchenette, a toilet, at least two televisions, a VCR and, inevitably, a stereo capable of broadcasting to all points within six zip codes in any direction. The Cure’s on-board listening this evening rather belies their reputation as arch miserabilists: T-Rex’s “Hot Love,” Gary Glitter’s “Didn’t Know I Loved You Till I Saw You Rock’N’Roll” and, perhaps surprisingly given the bickering over stolen basslines traded by the two groups down the years, New Order’s “State Of The Nation.” It’s while Smith is on all fours in the bus corridor, cradling a beer in the crook of his elbow, bellowing along to Middle of the Road’s “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” in a hearty roar quite removed from his patent wracked whine, and trying, for reasons known only to himself, to tie my shoelaces together, that Gallup, entirely unprovoked, makes an announcement.

  “I can cook, me,” he informs the bus at large. This is greeted with total indifference.

  “I said,” Gallup says, focusing this time on Sweet, “I can cook. I can.”

  “I, uh, don’t doubt it,” replies Sweet, polishing his lenses with a view to recording the carnage unfolding around us.

  “I’m one of the greats,” continues Gallup, swaying back and forth for reasons not entirely to do with the movement of the bus. “And I’m going to prove it. To you all. To you, my people, to whom I am a river.”

  Gallup approaches the stove and begins waving ingredients around. The dusting of herbs and generous squirt of Worcestershire sauce that congregate on one shoulder of my jacket suggest that the tottering gourmet is working on Welsh rarebit. Smith, meanwhile, has hauled himself upright via my left knee, a table and a handful of my hair, and has descended again on his long-suffering minder, whose job description appears to encompass punchbag as much as protector.

  Gallup’s culinary tour-de-force stumbles to a finish. He arranges it on a paper plate, and with a slurred “Ta-daaa,” taps Smith on the shoulder and presents it to him, having evidently forgotten who he set out to impress in the first place. Smith disentangles himself from a headlock, takes the plate from Gallup, looks at it briefly, emits a maniacal cackle, and flings it across the bus, where it bounces off the wall just above where guitarist Porl Thompson is sitting, quietly reading.

  “Piss off,” he murmurs, without looking up, and turns the page.

  WISH, THE ALBUM The Cure are in America touring with, went straight into the American Billboard Chart at Number Two. It was kept off the top spot by Def Leppard. Robert Smith claims that this doesn’t bother him. I can’t believe he means that.

  AT THE CURE’S hotel on the bank of Lake Michigan, there’s a bigger crowd waiting for us than most bands ever get coming to see them play. This happens everywhere The Cure go, but the Chicago crowd are going to be luckier than most—depending on how sociable the band are or aren’t feeling after a show, the tour bus is often sent off empty, while Smith and company are spirited away in anonymous, windowless minibuses.

  An obviously time-served plan is immediately in effect: two minders get off the bus, explain that the band will be coming out shortly, and will sign things and chat for a bit, but they’re all very tired, need to get up early and so forth (Gallup and Smith, at this point, are waltzing, cheek-to-cheek, unsteadily up and down the bus, each humming a different tune). The minders arrange the mob in an orderly queue between the bus and the hotel door. Porl Thompson, drummer Boris Williams and guitarist/keyboardist Perry Bamonte make their way briskly alo
ng it, signing t-shirts, shaking hands, exchanging brief pleasantries. The queue is then re-straightened, and Simon and Robert appear, holding hands and smiling shyly, like children being presented to friends of their parents.

  It takes Smith half an hour to get inside. Most of the fans are just enthusiastic and excited, though there’s a few who give every appearance of being unhealthily obsessed. At least three are in floods of tears and hyperventilating, and there’s one that Smith just can’t seem to get past—the kid is a lot shorter and slighter than Smith, but in every other respect looks exactly like him, from his oversize white sneakers to his baggy black shirt to his powder-pale face to his artlessly smudged lipstick to his uproariously tangled black hair. The scary bit is that the kid doesn’t say anything, just gazes up at Robert with a daft, adoring smile. “Look . . . ,” Robert starts saying, then rubs his eyes. “I mean . . .” One of The Cure’s minders notices what’s up, and hustles Robert past him.

  Another earnest mascaraed waif, who’s seen me get off the bus just before Robert, comes up to me with her Wish tour poster and a marker pen.

  Uh, I’m not in the band.

  “Yeah, but you know them.”

  Well, I only met them a couple of hours ago, and I meaningfully doubt that they’re going to remember it in the morning. I don’t know if that counts.

  “Oh, please. Would you?”

  I take her pen. With love from Andrew. Melody Maker, every Wednesday. Still only 65p.

  ON THE PLANE to Toronto, I’m reading the entertainment liftout of The Toronto Daily Star, which has Robert Smith on the cover, his face bathed in a green ink that makes him look like a QEII passenger who’s wishing he’d flown after all. Inside, the Star’s resident rock’n’roll hack has bashed out one page of cribbed Cure history and a couple more pages of the usual lazy rubbish about doom, gloom, misery and despair, all rounded off with a few of the standard jokes about Edward Scissorhands and how, gosh, Robert Smith looks a bit like him. Also included for the edification of the readership are “Ten Frightening Facts about Robert Smith.” Among these lurk the revelations that “His mummy knitted him ten pairs of socks to take on the current tour” and “He has a habit of sticking his fingers in his mouth when he talks, which makes him look silly.”