Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke

by Rob Sheffield

  Later, when he tries wheedling her up to his hotel room, she comes up with a classic exit line: “I need to go back to my room and take out my contact lenses.” Unfortunately, she says this in the parking lot, where she gets overheard by Marshall the Mean Roadie. For the rest of the week, every time Marshall sees her, he yells, “Hey babe! I got contact lens fluid out in the van!”

  JACK BLADES IS EVERYONE’S FAVORITE camp coach. In the eighties, he was in Night Ranger. In the nineties, he was in Damn Yankees. He’s been married to the same woman for more than twenty-five years, which has to be either a symptom or a cause of his bizarre niceness. One night in Toronto, back in the eighties, Jack was out on the town with Mötley Crüe. He had just done backup vocals on Dr. Feelgood. Jack was feeling really metal, so when he and the Crüe hit the tattoo parlors in a drunken haze, he decided to cap his evening by finally getting his first tattoo. But Nikki Sixx and Vince Neil wouldn’t let him because they were scared of his wife. They said, “Dude, you’re not getting a tattoo until Mollie gives us permission.” It ruined the moment. (Vince confirms this tale later in the week, when I ask him. He says, “Mollie woulda killed me.”)

  Two of the many fascinating things about Jack Blades:

  1. If anyone calls his band “NIGHT Ranger,” he corrects their pronunciation: it’s “Night RAYN-ger.” Nobody except Jack has ever pronounced Night Ranger that way.

  2. If anyone mentions Night Ranger’s most famous song, “Sister Christian,” Jack goes into this well-rehearsed disclaimer that he did not write or sing “Sister Christian”; it was written and sung by the band’s drummer, whereas Jack wrote all their other hits. It doesn’t come off as grumpy—more like he doesn’t want to accept credit for someone else’s song. But he’s serious when he makes this speech, and it becomes clear why, since everybody, as soon as they meet him, raves about “Sister Christian.” It must drive him nuts. But it’s immaterial to me, since I am the kind of music geek who already knows not to mention “Sister Christian.” My favorite Night Ranger song has always been “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me,” and I already know Jack wrote that one, and it is a pleasure to see him puff up his chest when I tell him how much I love it.

  That defines the turf I’m on: This is the one spot on earth where it is a social asset to be able to tell Night Ranger songs apart. Being a rock nerd here is not a flaw or a quirk or a pathetic disorder. It’s good manners. This will probably never happen to me again.

  BRET MICHAELS IS OUR MOTIVATIONAL speaker Monday morning. “We were the poor poor poor man’s Kiss,” he says. “All spandex pants and leg warmers. It looked awesome at the time.” C. C. DeVille was also supposed to be here this morning, but didn’t show, leaving Bret alone to tell how he wrote “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” in a Dallas laundromat after his stripper girlfriend dumped him over the phone. He tells me, “For a real rock & roll fantasy camp, you gotta pass out with a beer in each hand in a motel room full of groupies. Maybe that’s Week Two.”

  After that, the shuttle bus takes us to one of Hollywood’s most famous recording studios, S.I.R., for our first rehearsals. The judges have assigned me to Band #4, which turns out to be nine guys, nodding as we plug in and tune up.

  Meet the band!

  —Scotty Seville on guitar. He’s thirty, a born Southern rocker, with rooster-blond hair, leather boots, his name emblazoned on his guitar strap. We can’t stop calling him “Scotty Seville”—it’s such a rock name. He has a band back home in Charlotte, North Carolina, called Flight 6. His day job is working construction. For him, this camp is all part of a larger career plan. “I live for it, man,” he tells me. “That’s what I work all week for. That chance to play.”

  —Ben is a twenty-eight-year-old cinematographer, on guitar. He likes Southern rock but he admits, “That eighties hair metal is what I really love.” We fail to convince the rest of the guys to play Cinderella’s “Coming Home.”

  —Jim, a forty-four-year-old drummer from Tampa, where he runs a home building company and plays in a bar band called Seven Miles. He tells anyone who will listen, “Aaaah, there’s only two things I give a shit about: my car and my music. Fuck the rest of it. Fuck it hard.”

  —Jack, forty-six, is one of the few bassists in camp, as well as the only black guy. He predicts (correctly) the camp photographers will hover around trying to get him in every picture for the next brochure. His band back home has the awful name Uncle Tom. (They had the name before he joined, he says, not that anyone asked.) Camp was a surprise present for him—his wife, Rose, drove him here, secretly stashing his bass in the trunk, telling him they were going to visit the in-laws. He’s in an understandably cheery mood.

  —Rose, Jack’s wife, hangs out on the couch in the practice room, criticizing the rest of us and pointing out our mistakes. When we do “Good Lovin’,” she has issues with the way I pronounce the word lovin’. At first I can’t stand her, but her critiques swiftly become not just endearing but inspiring. She really cares about this band. She’s in love with the bassist and wants the rest of us to make him sound good. What’s not to admire about that? Nothing. That’s why Rose is the key ingredient of the band and I end up dedicating “Good Lovin’” to her from the stage.

  —Finn, our shy and mysterious Danish percussionist, is too laid-back to rehearse. I don’t hear him say a word all week. If you can believe it, he plays rhythm tambourine to my lead.

  —Fred is a fifty-three-year-old financial advisor from Delaware, a master of the Hammond B-3 organ. He’s an old friend of Mark Farner’s—I think he did his taxes or something.

  —Oliver, twenty, is a punk rock college student from Grand Junction, Colorado. He’s a drummer, a big NOFX fan, and the only dude in the entire camp with piercings.

  —Ed Hill, a seventeen-year-old kid from suburban Illinois, who got here by winning a Chicago radio station contest. He’s too painfully bashful to say hi to the rest of us. He leans against the wall, hands in pockets, a guitar pick in his mouth so he doesn’t have to say anything.

  —Me. Nobody told me tambourine was so hard. I bang it against my thigh hard enough to do lasting damage. The doctors will shake their heads sadly and say, “He rocked too hard. He’ll never come back.”

  Band practice gets off to a sketchy start. Ben and Scott both want to sing John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses,” so we spend almost two hours on it. All I get to do is yell, “Gulf of Mexicoooo!” I hate this song. Then, during a lull, Ed casually strikes up Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child,” and suddenly we realize he is some kind of demented boy-genius guitar freak. He goes into “Johnny B. Goode” and we all race to keep up with him, as he hams it up—he plays it with his teeth, plays behind his head, falls on his knees, the whole bit. Jack says, “The boy’s possessed.”

  Suddenly brimming with confidence, we bash out every song we know: “Paradise City,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Break on Through,” and about twenty minutes of “Wipe Out” to give the drummers some. This is crazy fun. As Fred plays the majestic organ intro to “Free Bird,” I realize that I have just heard someone unironically yell for “Free Bird,” and I was the one yelling it. Playing in the band is every bit the rush people say it is. Only the adrenaline keeps me from noticing, until I hit the men’s room, that my thighs are swollen and aching and I will probably die. But damn, I am taking that tambourine down with me.

  Over the dinner buffet, the campers jam on “Gimme Some Lovin’,” with Micky Dolenz on vocals and Spencer Davis on organ. A bunch of us sit in the corner with ziti on paper plates and we talk about our love lives. That happens a lot this week. It’s surprising how we end up spilling our secrets to each other, almost like the rock & roll makes it a safe place to confess. It’s like the erotic intimacy of jury duty—you can’t talk about the trial, but you’re cooped up together all week, and you end up telling each other things you don’t tell your friends.

  Sarah from Ohio is here because she needs to sort stuff out and make some life changes. She needs to get rid of the boy sh
e’s dating and she needs to figure out how the next one will be different. It doesn’t seem strange at all that she’s telling this to strangers. This afternoon I watched her drop to her knees to moan the final verse of “Stormy Monday,” so there’s a degree of intimacy. We all have a lot to say about our love lives. For a few hours, the torments in our hearts are explained by the gospel of rock & roll. Every cowboy sings a sad, sad song.

  Back at the Riot House, up in my room, seeing the gnarly purple welts all over my pale, naked flesh, I console myself that at least I don’t have a girlfriend back home who’ll want me to explain how I got all these bruises.

  THE KINKS’ DAVE DAVIES GIVES us a Q&A session, guitar in hand. It quickly becomes apparent that I am on music-nerd duty today, because nobody here knows any Kinks songs besides “Lola.” So I raise my hand to ask some annoyingly precise questions about songs Dave actually wrote. “Susannah’s Still Alive” is one of my favorites, a song about a tough old widow who still wears the locket of her dead soldier. Dave is surprised to be asked about it, but he plays it for us, and then he tells the incredibly sad, long, and true story of Susannah. (It’s in his book, which I really wish I’d read before I met him.) She was the love of his life, but her evil parents tore them apart, and for years they never knew why. If I knew how sad the story was, I wouldn’t have asked. But people ask him more questions about Susannah. Everyone buzzes about Dave Davies and his touching tale for the rest of the week.

  Over breakfast the next day, we watch a screening of the brand-new episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to fantasy camp. (The biggest laugh comes when Keith Richards gives Homer a lesson on how to escape groupies.) Campers are already grousing about band politics and their goddamn prima donna lead singers. Having all these people around to talk music with is surreal. This is an environment where you can start a conversation with anyone and know that it will only take three minutes or so to arrive at the topic of Jon Bon Jovi.

  When Gina and I natter over our Frosted Flakes about the deep cuts on Slippery When Wet, we’re instantly surrounded by strangers eager to debate the merits of “Wild in the Streets” versus “Never Say Goodbye,” or reminisce about live shows they’ve seen. Bon Jovi is easily the most popular and most discussed band here, more than the Beatles, Stones, or Zeppelin. (Oh, and “Wild in the Streets” is much better than “Never Say Goodbye.”) Gina claims to have the true inside secret scoopola of why Alec John Such was kicked out of the band, but she and I will have to save that discussion for after camp because Bon Jovi–wise, these walls have ears.

  Playing with the band is blowing my mind. I have become obsessive about my tams. Sorry—my tambourines. By now, my legs are in horrible pain, and I can barely walk. I start taking my tambourine with me into the bathroom, because I read somewhere that Eric Clapton used to do that with his guitar, so I learn to balance the tambourine on my head.

  During rehearsal, Carmine Appice from Vanilla Fudge wanders in. I stand in back, shaking the maracas as we wail on one of Scotty’s originals, a power ballad called “Flowers and Flame.” Carmine Appice stands and listens in his paisley top and purple velour pants, holding a cup of coffee. He does not smile. After our big finish, he glowers silently for a moment and then fixes his stone gaze on me. “Can you even play maracas?”

  He seizes my maracas and demonstrates a basic shake. “You have to find a groove,” he commands, making me play solo over and over while the rest of the band watches. For the next few minutes, he drills me in front of the guys, bringing shame upon us all. For the rest of the week, every time he sees me, Carmine lifts his arm and gives me an angry air-maracas shake.

  I stay up late drowning my sorrows at the hotel bar drinking Jameson’s with Nick, a forty-eight-year-old tax assessor from Florida. Nick’s here because his fiancée called off the wedding and left him. He took the money he had saved up for the honeymoon and spent it on fantasy camp. “It’s like Dave Davies was saying,” he tells me. “Once you love somebody, you can’t get them out of your system. You think you know somebody, but they always have a secret other side, but it’s too late, they’re already mixed up in your blood. You can never know them.” I’ll drink to that.

  SOMETHING I AM LEARNING ABOUT myself: I am freakishly scrupulous about rock stars’ feelings. I want them to be happy, even if I’m not a big fan of their music. I overworry about how rock stars feel. I didn’t realize I was wired this way. It’s a problem, not a virtue. Rock stars have enough problems without me.

  A few years ago I met Johnny Marr in a bar and I had a sudden flash of overthunk fan etiquette: Maybe I shouldn’t mention the Smiths. He must get sick of hearing about the Smiths. Sad memories. He’s heard it all before. Give the guy a break. So I felt obliged to tell him I once saw him play live with the Healers, a band he was in for about ten minutes, long after the Smiths broke up, although nobody remembers, because as even I have to admit, the Healers sucked for all ten of those minutes.

  But “I saw the Healers once” turned out to be the Wrong Thing to Say. He was weirded out that I mentioned the Healers, and his face clouded up. He seemed uncomfortable, like he wondered if I was “taking the piss,” as English people are wont to say. After that faux pas I couldn’t really bring up the Smiths as a BT fucking W. So I stepped aside and watched, as every kid in the bar, dozens of them, lined up to tell Johnny Marr how much they loved the Smiths, and he was cool to every fucking one of those kids, and he loved hearing them say how much the Smiths meant to them, why wouldn’t he, he wrote those songs, and I stood there feeling like Mr. Shankly or something, branded with the shame of having said the Wrong Thing to Johnny Marr, one of my favorite rock stars who ever lived, and one who I always daydreamed about sharing a pint with, except when it actually happened I was clumsy and shy and I blew it. Rock & roll is like that sometimes. Most times.

  There are lots of musicians here this week, and I meet them all, either because they’re down-to-earth people who like talking to fans (George Thorogood, what a mensch) or because they find out I’m from Rolling Stone and they want to complain about something somebody wrote when I was in kindergarten (nice to meet you too, Eric Burdon). They’re all absurdly nice (except Eric Burdon). Even when Carmine Appice chews me out it’s because he cares. Sheila E gives me a pep talk about my sense of rhythm; she tells me she hears the tambourine sound as “ka-ching,” because that’s how she made her dough. I tell Bret Michaels about the Poison show in 1988 where he spilled beer on my little sister in the front row, and though it makes him nervous for a minute about maaaybe where this story is going, he claims to remember the show, the touching insincerity of which is almost embarrassingly sweet of him.

  But no matter who it is, I ask too many questions. I have trouble turning down the volume on that Rain Man rock-geek thing. It’s a sorry situation.

  The rock stars are here to do music clinics, or to jam with the campers, or just to do grip-and-grin photo/autograph sessions. It’s always interesting to see how some rock stars can handle this part of the life and some can’t. Some actively love talking to fans; others put up with it like good sports; others roll their eyes. I have never seen a human being who isn’t a fourteen-year-old girl do as many eyerolls-per-minute as Vince Neil.

  Eric Burdon refuses to sign autographs except for people who are buying his new book, which isn’t really how things are done around here. But it’s funny to see his face when people ask him how he wrote hits like “House of the Rising Sun” or “We Gotta Get out of This Place” or “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” none of which he wrote. He only asks to talk to me after he hears there’s a Rolling Stone writer on the premises, whereupon he shares his feelings about the two dullest topics any old rocker ever wants to discuss: 1) He’s working on a new album that ranks with his finest work, and 2) Rolling Stone never appreciated his genius in the seventies. Believe it or not, I have heard these before, and while I’m enough of a pro to listen sympathetically to the first one (which old rockers do often sincerely believe, and why no
t, good for them), the second sends my normally trusty eyeroll muscles into Vince Neil mode. The sad part is that Eric fails to exploit the rare (I assume) opportunity of being face-to-face with somebody under sixty who’s a fan of his music, one who would have been happy to massage his ego by quizzing him about the gnome symbolism in “Spill the Wine.”

  George Thorogood is the opposite. He’s easily the most articulate, generous, and ego-free of our guest speakers. He declines to sit on a stool (“folksingers sit on a stool—blues singers sit on a chair!”) so he stands and shakes hands for upwards of an hour, letting us all pump him for stories about Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. Some dudes are just cool, I guess.

  I’m so not one of them. I’m a combination of two horrific personality types, an encyclopedia-minded data-storage-facility rock geek and a cripplingly polite firstborn Irish son. It’s a deadly combo, and it means being unable to chitchat with these musicians without making it all complicated. I’m overzealous to please in the most irritating way. When I run into Micky Dolenz, and gush about the Monkees, I worry about his feelings. I want him to be marginally happier after meeting me than he was before. Why? I have no idea. It’s got something to do with gratitude—anyone who goes through the dirty and dangerous business of spreading music through the world deserves a well-informed compliment. But what if he doesn’t like to talk about how much I love the Monkees? (It turns out he does. Nice guy, Micky Dolenz.) I would hate to meet me if I were a rock star.

  On Thursday, I meet one of my main men, John Waite, but I decide I shouldn’t mention “Missing You,” because I know he gets reminded of that song a zillion times a day and there are other songs I want to thank him for. So I tell him how much I love his version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” from his 1995 album, Temple Bar. Fortunately, in this case, it’s not the Wrong Thing to Say. “I have to shake your hand for that,” he says, and indulges me with a long discussion of his underrated nineties work, at which point he’s the one who brings up “Missing You,” as if he’s suddenly worried I haven’t heard that song. “I’ve never sung it without loving it,” he says. “I’m lucky. A lot of artists have a famous song they hate.”