Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke

by Rob Sheffield

  Damn, John Waite. That’s so horrible I can’t even think about it.

  I want the musicians to feel appreciated. I want them to feel people were paying attention all those late nights, all those lost years, when they must have felt like they wasted their lives on a dream. I want rock stars to be content, even though the gig of being a rock star is inherently contentment-denying and soul-crushing and bitterness-magnifying and satisfaction-thwarting, and even though it’s well documented that nobody devotes their lives to music unless they are permanently insane. I’m just trying to make the most miserable people on earth feel a little less miserable. I’m asking too damn much.

  Why am I like this? Is it because I want to show off? Is it because I want extra credit for all my extra listening? Is it an ego thing where I’m trying to impress them with obnoxiously knowledgeable insights? Or is it because I want to reassure them their lifetime of music was spent wisely? I really don’t know. But remembering which dude in which band sang which song, or knowing every dusty nook and cranny of their discography—it’s like an obnoxious party trick I can’t stop doing. This is the one thing I can do to make them happy, so it’s compulsive. (If I do it and it bums them out, as in Johnny Marr, that miserable memory haunts me forever.)

  Everybody knows the story about John Lennon walking into the fancy French restaurant where the violinist serenaded him with “Yesterday,” which was a Paul song. John loved telling this anecdote in interviews. But I hear that story and I feel bad for the violinist. He wanted to make John happy. Nobody takes years of violin lessons so they can ruin John Lennon’s dinner. He just played the wrong song. I know his pain.

  I’m not alone, of course. Everybody here wants to thank the rock stars, in their own way. So this is the special thing I can do here, instead of actually playing the notes, which is what everyone else here came to do. These people can take the rock stars’ music and echo it back to them. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do, but can’t. I seethe with envy when I meet Barry, the fifty-four-year-old dermatologist from Florida who played the organ parts on the Mark Farner jam. “That moment, ‘I’m Your Captain,’ with Mark—not only did I sing that with him, I sang it for him. I will carry that memory with me the rest of my life.”

  And I’m jealous. I don’t even like “I’m Your Captain,” but I’m jealous.

  TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT WE TAKE it to the stage. Our final rehearsals are downright cocky. We’re the only band performing an original song, the one Scotty wrote. All the other bands have heard about our teen guitar whiz, and they’re pissed, which is awesome, so we officially dub our band the Unfair Advantage.

  Fred sits at the Hammond B-3, working on his “Good Lovin’” solo. “I’ve been trying to get this down for twenty years,” he mutters. An old hippie studio dude who resembles a tattooed Santa Claus offers to help. He slips out his cell phone and calls the guy who played the solo, the Rascals’ Felix Cavaliere. Fred asks, “So how did you do that last trill?” He takes instructions over the phone and gets back to work.

  As we practice “Good Lovin’,” I dance around, sucking in my cheeks, shaking my hips, using the choreography known among my bandmates as “Rob’s spazzy dance.” My legs are on their last hobble, and under my jeans the hideous purple bruises have gotten worse, not better, and it seems obvious I will require medical attention and most likely amputation, but nothing will keep me from struttering out tonight. Stealing moves from a friend who used to model, I spin into a T-stance, and then whip around to bang the tam on my ass Benatar style. Seductive, trust me.

  We have a last-minute rehearsal with Simon Kirke, the drummer for Bad Company. The camp wants to get video footage of us onstage with him later tonight playing the Bad Company song “Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy” for their promo materials. Simon tells us funny stories about partying with John Bonham. He has a foxy daughter in New York, who is the mortal enemy of a friend of mine because they both made out with the same guitarist in the same band the same night after the same gig. For about a second and a half, I think he might be amused by this story. Fortunately, in a momentary lapse of reason, I shut the hell up.

  During the breakdown, I hear Jim behind me drumming along, grunting out loud with the intensity of it all. I desperately want to prove to myself I’m part of this intensity, not just standing near it. It’s important to me, personally, to be as into it as my bandmates are, not to be a pretender. I want to be inside the music. But does anybody really get all the way in? Does loving music as intensely as I do mean that I am really and truly part of the music, even though I can’t play it? Or am I still on the outside? Is being into it the same thing as doing it, or is loving it being it, or what? Do real musicians agonize over these stupid ontological quibbles? Or is this yet another example of how I tax their patience? The possibility that I’m a dick, not for the first time this week, hovers before me.

  Another band down the hall is rehearsing Journey’s “Any Way You Want It.” Somehow, that song, with its promise of infinite gratification, makes me feel a stab of melancholy. It’s like the feeling Steve Perry must get when he meets a woman who loves to laugh and loves to sing but doesn’t love the lovin’ things.

  WHEN WE TAKE THE BUS to the House of Blues, we’re shocked to see hundreds of people in the crowd, only some of whom are relatives. (They’re here for the all-star charity benefit jam that follows our Battle of the Bands.) The coaches are here to watch, too. “I’ve been in worse bands,” Liberty DeVito tells me at the bar. “Hell, I’ve been in worse bands that were getting paid.” We’re scheduled to go on last, and we already know it’s to spare the other groups the humiliation of following us. When the first band hits the stage, mass euphoria sets in; after waiting all week, we finally see our new friends kick out the jams. Hey, that’s Gina rocking the cowbell in “You Shook Me All Night Long!” That’s Christy belting “I Want You to Want Me”! That’s Dan shredding to “All Along the Watchtower”! I am so proud. Everybody buzzes around the room with a manic joy that’s new to me, at least, trading “you rock!”/“no, you rock!” high-fives.

  When it’s our turn, like most American males faced with a live mike, I go into Kiss Alive! mode. “You wanted the best and you got it! The hottest band in the land: The Unfair Advantage!” We do our three songs: “Good Lovin’” (Jack sings the first verse, I do the second), “Flowers and Flame” (twice as fast as we played it in rehearsal), and “Johnny B. Goode,” where Ben sings and Ed makes every guitarist in the room feel a little queasy, milking his whole teeth/knees/upside down/behind the head routine. The sweat pours out our bodies like the music that we play. For our grand finale, Simon Kirke sits in with us for the unofficial camp theme song, “Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy.” My role is to yell “fantasy!” over and over, and somehow that feels right.

  The next morning Gina will drive me to the airport. We will meet in the Riot House lobby and go get a nice long overcaffeinated, overpancaked brunch at Mel’s Diner, which used to be the Sunset Strip rock & roll hangout Ben Frank’s. She will spill her alleged Alec John Such gossip and I will feel a tremendous sense of well-being, like everything in my life is absolutely good. We will head off to LAX in her convertible, blasting one of her bootleg live tapes from the Slippery When Wet tour, and I will think, here I am cruising down Sunset Boulevard, a cool blond California girl at the wheel, top down, sun out, listening to a Bon Jovi concert. This is the most American moment of my life. We will email next week and I will ask, because I know I will never get another chance like this, how did you form a first impression of me? How did you know I wasn’t going to hit on you? She will reply, “I just knew.” But I will ask, How could you tell I knew how to do the thing where I hold your purse? And she will write back, “No, you taught me the purse thing. I didn’t give you my purse, you took my purse and held it so they’d leave me alone, so I knew,” and I will remember it differently but she will leave it at “I just knew” and I will spend the rest of my life wondering what she means.

  FOURTEEN


  11:47 p.m.:

  Hot Legs

  1

  Nice try, Oedipus, but there are in fact three ages of man:

  1. He thinks Rod Stewart is cool.

  2. He doesn’t think Rod Stewart is cool.

  3. He is Rod Stewart.

  No man ever plans to turn into Rod Stewart. It just happens. There are days when I dread this fate. And then there are other days when I think every minute of my life I don’t spend being Rod Stewart is a waste of time.

  In his younger days, Rod the Mod was a rambling rock & roll rogue, a devil-may-care ladies’ man charming the world with his tales of romance and adventure. By the time I got to him, Rod was used up, a grim blond Hollywood Casanova with a vacant jet-lag smile on his face that says “if it’s Tuesday this must be Wednesday.” Yet this was my Rod. I was fascinated by his seventies album covers: his sozzled grin, the way he lounged around in pink satin kimonos, his hair spiked up in a state of permanently postcoital bed-head.

  You can see your future in his dazed grin, the one he flashes on all his album covers. The grin that says, “I’m all right, me. The tonsils may be a tad roughed up and I can’t get out of this leopard skin catsuit because it’s been three days since I saw the Danish bird who zipped me in. She disappeared between the lobby and the limo. But don’t worry, I’m just here to entertain. And now, if you please, the boys in the band and meself would like to sing you a song about me passion and me pain. It’s called, ‘Hot Legs.’”

  Rod faces everything with this serene smile of detachment, as if his life is this great joke he’s stumbled into. Rod’s smile charmed me when I was a little boy. I had only the vaguest idea of what that smile meant, partly because I was too young to have a clear idea what alcohol was, and I knew nothing about hotel rooms, hangovers, divorce lawyers, paternity suits, stomach pumps, all the other clichéd accoutrements of a rock slut’s existence. But it’s not just a smug or self-satisfied grin, and you couldn’t call it stoic or tragic: It’s perpetually bemused.

  Everybody likes Rod Stewart, especially Rod Stewart. “I think England is fed up with seeing its pop stars being humble,” he mused in 1972. “Perhaps they should—what’s the word—flaunt it a bit. Me, I’ve never been through a humble phase.” Why yes, Rod, “flaunt it” is definitely the word, and give the man credit for sticking to his guns. He still hasn’t hit his humble phase, and nobody would ever want him to.

  As a kid, when “Hot Legs” and “You’re in My Heart” and “Tonight’s the Night” were all over the radio, I couldn’t place Rod anywhere in the timeline of pop music. His hits resembled the Irish songs I heard old men sing in pubs, but they were also rock & roll. He didn’t look or sound young, and his most famous hit, “Maggie May,” sounded like he dug it out of a trunk in the attic. Everything about that song feels antique, with a mandolin solo that drops in from some other century. But it has never disappeared. You will hear it somewhere in the next week. It transcends time and trends.

  Rod has songs everybody knows. But he also has songs nobody remembers, least of all Rod. He had his classic rock phase, his disco phase, his synth-pop phase, and his latest phase of mom-jazz oldies covers. His early albums are full of buried treasures that are funny (“Lost Paraguayos”) or sentimental (“Love Lives Here”) or both (“Lady Day”). But even in his Hollywood automatic-pilot phase in the 1980s, he had great pop-trash nuggets on terrible albums nobody ever played twice (“She Won’t Dance with Me,” “Oh God I Wish I Was Home Tonight”), or great hit singles forgotten a week after they dropped off the charts (“Passion,” “Baby Jane,” “Somebody Special”). Nobody cares about these songs and that’s fine with Rod, so I guess it’s fine with me. These days I hear him sing “Moon River” on my mom’s radio, and that’s fine with me, too.

  A friend did Rod’s hair for a photo shoot and reported that he was wearing see-through plastic flip-flops, yet that somehow gave her an even bigger crush on him. Rod doesn’t care. He will always tease the ladies, with so much romantic wreckage not even he could recall which ex goes with which song: there’s Maggie May, Hot Legs, Shanghai Lil, Baby Jane, Rita, a big-bosomed lady with a Dutch accent, enough to kill or at least bankrupt a lesser man. Everyone’s favorite Rod muse has to be the Swedish sex nuke Britt Ekland, who does the orgasmic moans at the end of “Tonight’s the Night.” According to her excellent autobiography, True Britt, she was introduced to Rod by Joan Collins, which makes all the sense in the world.

  Some rock stars get tragic as time passes. That would never happen to Rod. He doesn’t take any of this nonsense personally. In the immortal words of Elvis Presley, “Man, I just work here.” That’s Rod’s attitude, too.

  You can see that in his face and hear it in his voice: that sense of adulthood as something that sneaks up on you, in the middle of your adventures, and conquers you. You blink once and you’re on a plane, or in an airport lounge, or onstage. Or you hear one of your old songs on the radio and you think, “Crikey, I was cool once. ‘My body stunk, but I kept my funk’—who wrote that line? I did? How the hell did I do that?” Then you go out on the American Idol finale in a tux, flounder through “Maggie May,” barely hitting your marks. For a second or two, you might even have the vague suspicion that you blew it somewhere down the line. Then you bite your lip and turn around and it’s showtime.

  You can hear it all in Rod’s voice and see it on his face, that smile that says, “Wait, how did I get here?” Every guy knows that smile and what it means, because every guy knows that sensation—that feeling of being trapped in your own life. We know that smile because Rod taught us what it looks like, and we recognize that smile when we see it in the mirror, or on the faces of our friends, at weddings, anniversaries, christenings, or ordinary afternoons. It’s the smile of a man realizing he is no longer a kid, and although he has no idea how it happened, he’s pretty sure it would make a cool story if he ever gets a spare minute to piece it all together.

  Like most men, I first realized I was turning into Rod Stewart around the time I turned twenty-four. It’s scary the first few times this feeling hits you, but then it starts to be funny, and that’s when you catch yourself wearing that Rod grin. You have blundered into an adult existence you don’t understand, and you can’t tell whether you planned it this way or whether you screwed up big-time, though it’s too late either way. The feeling waxes and wanes as time goes by. Some years are a little bit Rod, some are extremely Rod, some are moderately Rod.

  But I can’t rule out going Full Rod. No man can. Any male is just a couple of fate-kicks away from that, whether it takes a few divorces, a few cocktails, the wrong pair of leotards a few tragic degrees too tight, or just a life that goes according to the plans you made when you were too young to know better. One day you’re a rock & roll rake, the next you’re an L.A. roué trapped in that same crusty catsuit. How did you get here? Was this what you wanted? How much say did you have in this decision? What the hell happened to you? And what do you have to show for it all, besides that smile?

  Like I said: No man plans to turn into Rod Stewart. It just happens.

  2

  The first time I truly felt Rod’s love touch was a hot summer night, deep in the seventies, in the pinball room of a Holiday Inn in Dunn, North Carolina. My family was on our yearly road trip to Disney World, and we always stayed at this Holiday Inn because my dad figured it was located at the precise geographical halfway point between Boston and Orlando. So over the years I got to know that pinball room well: the Elton John “Captain Fantastic” machine, a couple of others, an air hockey table, foosball, all on a carpet that was Bubble Yum green. And a jukebox.

  Every summer, we pulled into the motel parking lot after a long day on the road. I liked to loiter around the pinball room pretending I was staying at the motel all by myself, the way a young boy does. This night, there was a teenage girl playing the Captain Fantastic, a real seventies dream-weaver gypsy queen, feathered hair, blue jeans, hemp-braided belt. I only saw her that one night, b
ut I bet even today I could pick her out of a police lineup and charge her with crimes of love. She commanded the jukebox, playing the same two songs over and over all night: ELO’s “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” and Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night.”

  I felt safe with “Sweet Talkin’ Woman,” which was one of my favorite songs. I could relate to ELO, and the way Jeff Lynne sang about falling in love with girls who walk too fast and talk too sweet and slip away before you can catch them. I also admired the cellos. But I didn’t feel safe with “Tonight’s the Night” at all. I was threatened by how much this older girl liked it.

  The jukebox in North Carolina played “Tonight’s the Night” complete with the forbidden line, “Spread your wings and let me come inside.” Not exactly a double entendre—it’s barely two-thirds of an entendre. But it was too much for the radio. The pop stations back home censored that verse. The only time I’d heard the “spread your wings” line was on TV, during the prime-time soap Family, as the soundtrack to a slow dance between Kristy McNichol and Leif Garrett.

  This song has to be the most effective anti-sex commercial ever; it makes the act of physical love sound unbelievably sordid. They should play it in schools to drive down the pregnancy rates. Rod invites his virgin child into the parlor, pulls down the shades, and pours her a glass of wing-spreading potion. He disconnects the telephone line (probably because Jeff Lynne won’t stop calling, begging her to come back). A brief interlude of gown-loosening, then it’s upstairs o’clock. Somehow you just know how it will end: Rod passed out on the couch, pants down, snoring, while she goes through his wallet, copies his credit card numbers, and plugs in the phone to call her boyfriend back home in Strasbourg.