My sweet and patient mother had taught me piano basics and encouraged me to take lessons, to which I reluctantly trudged. I hated practicing and I found it incredibly frustrating to sight-read music off the page—as I still do—but I could figure out how to play anything I heard on the radio. I’d been amassing a pile of hypomanic songs for the piano since I was twelve, recording them into tape recorders and scribbling lyrics into notebooks in almost total privacy. Until I met Brian, I’d been a repressed performer of my own music, only venturing out once or twice a year to timidly share my not-so-timid songs with a live audience in a café, at an open mic night, at a party. My early teenage lyrics reflected and copied the music I loved: musical theater, The Beatles, New Wave—my songs were confessional and dark, drawing mostly from my confounded struggle to understand myself. I also wrote satirical songs about Starbucks. I couldn’t handle any criticism, no matter how well-intentioned, and sharing my songs or playing live simply terrified me, since any rejection of the material felt like a direct rejection of me.
But now I was free to unleash my massive back catalog of unheard material onto Brian on the top floor of the Cloud Club, where Lee allowed us (of course) to rehearse for free. Brian sat at his drums and listened intently as I shared each song, and, without an ounce of judgment regarding the hyper-personal lyrical content, he orchestrated pounding, delicate, symphonic drum parts. Everything he did was perfect. One by one, I played Brian every song I’d ever written; we kept the best, we ditched the rest. We booked our first gig in a friend’s art gallery.
Along with some thrown-together vintage costumes (to my delight, Brian loved to cross-dress) and our soon-to-be-signature white face paint (to my extreme delight, he loved wearing stage makeup), we had a magic chemistry that ambushed people with the sheer magnitude of our sincerity to emote. I was ecstatic. After spending half my life all but alone with a pile of weird little songs, I’d found a comrade, an outlet.
Date Neil Gaiman. Date Neil Gaiman The Writer. Date Neil Gaiman The Writer?
Why not? I figured I’d try.
Though I was nursing a broken heart from my last breakup, and he was still recovering from his, along with the shadowy aftershocks of his divorce, we edged towards each other, day by day, like two cautious but wounded animals, and started to poke experimentally at each other’s hearts, opening up little doors one at a time. It was slow, self-conscious work; we both knew how damaged we were. At least we could joke about it. And bit by bit, we started to fall in love.
It wasn’t a plummet to the bottom of the love well, which was the only way I’d experienced falling in love. I was used to relationships going from Hi! to Fuck Me! to Fuck You! in under three weeks. Those relationships tended to slam into painful realities when the initial rush was over. This one was different: it was more like that moment in Wonderland when Alice’s dress poufs out like a parachute and she floats down to the bottom of the well like a delicate feather.
One thing, however, I just couldn’t shake. I could deal with the fact that Neil was famous. I was famous, too, in my own small, indie-rock way. But rich? I was struggling with that one. I made plenty of money when I toured, but I spent every penny on my recordings, my road crew, and my office staff. I had no savings and barely owned anything at that point: no car, no real estate, no kitchen appliances. I owned a lot of books, records, and T-shirts. My net worth was roughly equivalent to the cost of the grand piano I’d bought for $15,000 when I finally signed a recording contract. My rent was $750 a month. Neil owned multiple houses.
To make things worse, I couldn’t talk to anyone about how weird it felt. I mean, I talked to everyone about it—my close friends, my intimates, my touring mates—but none of them was in a similar position, and they couldn’t really advise me. Plus, complaining to my broke-ass artist friends about how to adjust to dating a rich guy felt like it was in particularly poor taste. I needed someone to ask who I knew was in the same boat. I tried to figure out who that might be.
Kathleen Hanna. Singer of Bikini Kill, the seminal Riot Grrl band. She would know. She was a punk feminist icon who was used to being embroiled in controversy, cutting records, and touring; cult famous but never famous enough to fill a stadium. Like me, she’d spent years just working her ass off on her bands and projects, but had never been rich. Then she’d married Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys, who had achieved stadium-sized success. From afar, they seemed really happy. I didn’t know her, but I tracked down her email address and wrote her:
Hi. It’s Amanda Palmer from The Dresden Dolls. I know you don’t really know me, but I need to ask you for advice. It’s a phone call, not an email.
She called me.
Honestly, Amanda? she said. For a while it just sort of sucked. There was a month when I was so broke I barely had enough money for food. And I was dating Adam and crashing in his swank apartment in Manhattan while he was away on tour, and I was, like, scraping together money to walk to the corner and buy instant noodles and oatmeal. It was really weird. And the thing that sucked most of all was not being able to talk to anyone about it.
You had my life! I said. And I’m not even that poor anymore. I can afford food. But I’m still freaked out.
Ha. I get it. You know, I’m glad you asked me…because I didn’t have anyone I could ask. It was really lonely, and in this creepy way that sort of made you feel like a jerk for being upset about it.
That didn’t sound familiar at all.
From the start, The Dresden Dolls functioned in an artistic community that depended on messy exchanges of goodwill and the swapping of favors. More than a decade later, when the outside world was trying to make sense of my million-dollar Kickstarter success, I found myself digging through the past, trying to explain how it worked.
The New York Times called. Forbes magazine called.
Tell us, Amanda, can you explain this relationship you have with your fans?
Are you married? I’d ask.
Actually, yes. My wife, Susan, and I just celebrated our tenth anniversary last week!
So tell me, can you explain this relationship you have with your wife?
At least I’d make them laugh.
Like all real relationships, my “special relationship” with my fans wasn’t some shtick that I came up with at a marketing meeting. On the contrary, I’ve spent many marketing meetings banging my head against a long conference table.
Throughout my career, the fanbase has been like one big significant other to me, a thousand-headed friend with whom I have a real, committed partnership. I don’t take vacations from communicating without warning. We share our art with one another. They help me run the business by feeding me constant information. I cop to my mistakes. They ask for explanations. We talk about how we feel. I twitter to say good night and good morning, the way I would with a lover. They bring me food and tea at shows when I’m sick. I visit them in hospitals and make videos for their friends’ funerals. We trust one another. Occasionally, I’ve broken up with fans. Some have broken up with me.
In the band’s first three years, we played in friends’ illegal lofts, in makeshift art galleries, in crappy sports bars that were trying to lure in drink-buying customers with the promise of live music, in people’s living rooms, in used clothing stores, at benefits for feminist sex-toy shops. Whether we were being paid or not, if it was a gig, we took it.
But mostly we just played at my house, since we could always get a gig there. I was already in the habit of throwing huge parties. Lee loved it when the Cloud Club came alive with guests, and my new housemate, the filmmaker Michael Pope, became a co-conspirator in organizing bashes at which we would cram people into the various floors of the house, and out into the back garden and onto the roof in the summer. We put a shoebox at the door of the house with a sign suggesting (but not requiring) a ten-dollar admission, and set up a bar in every kitchen, spending the rolling donation money on wine, beer, and vodka. Anybody could bring whatever they wanted to share, be it food, drink, art, or mus
ic. I was perfectly happy letting four hundred strangers waltz through my kitchen and bedroom; I had nothing so valuable in my apartment that I ever had to hide it.
The entirety of The Dresden Dolls’ travel inventory (electric piano, five-piece drum kit, and a few old suitcases full of costumes and the band T-shirts we sold for $10 each) could be perfectly Tetris’d into the back of my beat-up Volvo station wagon (affectionately dubbed The Vulva). We started driving farther and farther distances from Boston to take gigs. Brian was the technical expert (he knew everything there was to know about gear, including where to buy it and how to set it up), and I was the band’s manager, press agent, and booking agent. I’d just bought my very first cell phone.
It was 2001 and email was still coming into vogue (and slightly suspect—lots of people in my artistic social circle resisted it), but I was obsessive about maintaining an email-based newsletter for the band and for the house parties. I could send out an email to fifty Boston friends, they would spread the word, and two weeks later, hundreds of people would show up at our house for a party. So the band’s email list began as the house-party inner circle, then grew every time we had a gig or a gathering—there was no distinction between fans and friends. Not only did most of our early fans know where I lived and where we practiced, but most of them had also been in my kitchen.
Eventually, since it seemed impolite to be extending Boston house-party invitations to our fans in St. Louis, we made one email list per city. I considered the email list our pride and joy—the Thing From Which All Other Things Stemmed. Any time I ran into an old college friend on the street, any time I got into a conversation with a stranger on the subway, any time someone expressed even a remote interest in the band, I’d ask, DO YOU DO EMAIL? If the answer was yes, I recorded their address onto whatever was handy—my journal, a napkin, my hand—and when I got home, I’d send a personal welcome note.
My own email address was front and center on our website. I emailed back and forth with individual fans daily—about our lives, our gigs, ideas for shows—and often included a few words of den-mother comfort, because much of the fan mail usually came with a harrowing personal story attached. People thanked me for the songs: “Half Jack” had helped someone come to terms with their own parents, “Coin-Operated Boy” was popular with dancers on the burlesque circuit, who used it for routines, “Girl Anachronism” spoke to people’s own battles with self-doubt. While Brian drove us to out-of-town gigs, I managed the band from the passenger seat on my bulky, blue, constantly crashing Dell laptop. Managing the band didn’t mean talking to labels, agents, or publishers; we didn’t know any. Managing the band meant making friends with other freaks in other cities, finding performers to share the stage with, lining up couches to crash on, chasing down a gallery where a friend was hanging paintings and was happy to have a band play at the opening.
Slowly but surely we amassed a local, then regional, following as we convinced our art-party friends to follow us into the rock establishments of Boston and beyond. Like the Cloud Club parties, the early concerts were more like happenings than straight rock shows. We’d bike around town posting up flyers that read:
THE DRESDEN DOLLS live THIS SATURDAY
at THE MIDDLE EAST NIGHTCLUB.
Doors 9 p.m. $12.
ALL ARE WELCOME.
DRESS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD,
OR THE BEGINNING.
People got a kick out of dressing up for our shows, and we encouraged it. Top hats, zoot suits, body paint, feather boas, and wigs were de rigueur. Our email blasts, which I sent out every few weeks, were celebratory missives, written to our friends. I kept the tone personal: Come to a party at the house. Or come to a Dolls show at a club. Or come to a Dolls show at the house. It was all the same.
I told Anthony I was thinking about dating Neil Gaiman. I was nervous. Anthony never judged me, but he judged my boyfriends (and occasional girlfriends) as fiercely as a protective older brother would.
So who is he? Anthony asked.
He’s a writer.
Never heard of him.
He’s like…cult famous. He writes comic books and science fiction and stuff. He’s forty-eight. And British.
Anthony emitted a guttural, rumbling sound of suspicion.
What? Which part? The Famous? The British? Or the forty-eight?
None of it. He sounds…like a contender. When do I get to meet him?
Describing how art and exchange play off each other in The Gift, Lewis Hyde says:
The spirit of an artist’s gifts can wake our own.
In my darkest hours, I still go to my secret stash of medicine-music to comfort me, like a familiar childhood blanket, and cocoon myself in the songs of Kimya Dawson, Leonard Cohen, or Robyn Hitchcock, who seem to be expressing some inexpressible thing inside of me. And listening to those songs performed live, in concert, and sharing that blanket feeling with a crowd of strangers, gives me a feeling of humanhood that I don’t often get to experience; it’s the closest thing I have to church.
When the gift circulates, we feel the very essence of art and life not just in the words and songs, but also in our deep desire to share them with one another.
You probably don’t know who Edward Ka-Spel is.
Edward Ka-Spel is the singer of my favorite band, The Legendary Pink Dots. They formed in the early eighties in the UK, and they’ve been recording and touring for more than thirty years. They still tour, playing to crowds of hundreds more often than thousands, and their fanbase is like a family. I’m in the family. I joined when I was fourteen and my first boyfriend, Jason Curtis, started making me Pink Dots mixtapes. The psychedelic mash of synthesizers, violins, and drum machines, plus the raw emotional honesty of the lyrics, stole me straight out of the clutches of the “standard” alternative music I’d been listening to (The Cure, R.E.M., and Depeche Mode, mostly). But along with the Pink Dots’ music—which we had to hunt down in used record shops or mail-order from faraway Dutch distributors—came the community.
The first time I saw the band play live was at a small all-ages club in Boston. I was sixteen. I had barely experienced any live rock music, and certainly nothing like this: a band I loved, on a stage five feet in front of me. That night changed my life: I was finally experiencing, in person, the songs that had been the soundtrack of my life for the past few years, the lyric-images I’d memorized after hours of headphone-listening on walks to school, the worlds that had been direct-deposited into my heart through the channel of my ears—I was hearing them here, now, in a moment that would never exist again. I was also standing in a room with three hundred people who seemed to have formed a real, connected comradeship by virtue of Loving One Thing and, by extension, one another. It seemed that this whole scene of people had formed a sort of open secret society around their love of this strange music and the strange guys who played it. I hadn’t even known this was possible. I certainly hadn’t been expecting to meet the band after the show.
Meet the band? I asked Jason.
Yes, he said, they always do this. And he was right: there they were, selling their own CDs and shirts while holding court in the dim light of the club as the grumpy bar crew dismantled the stage. I stood in line, waiting to meet Edward, the main singer and songwriter, trying to think of what I could possibly say that could have any meaning to him whatsoever. My idol. And then, for a short moment, we were face-to-face.
It’s my dream, I said, looking right into his eyes, to make music as honest as yours.
Edward smiled and took my hand. He was as kind and warm as if I were a long-lost friend. We chatted for a minute, what about I’ll never remember. I was awestruck.
I’ll never forget that brief encounter. I didn’t feel like a fan meeting a rock star. I didn’t feel like a groupie. I felt like a friend.
Two years later, when I was about eighteen, The Legendary Pink Dots came through Boston again on tour, and I was lucky enough to be invited to tag along to the after-party at my friend Alan’s house, wh
ere the band was also crashing. Alan was an advanced-level computer geek who ran the fans’ online bulletin board system. Late into the night, we sat in Alan’s living room, sharing beer and stories. Jon, another member of the trusted Pink Dots family who hosted the band’s official website, said, out of the blue, Edward, did you know Amanda’s a songwriter? She plays piano. She’s pretty good.
I froze. No no no no no no no, I thought.
Edward looked interested.
Really? he said. Do you have anything we can hear?
Alan, do you have Amanda’s demo tape kicking around? Jon asked.
I’d made a four-track tape recording of a few of my piano songs with a few cheap microphones in my parents’ living room, and Alan had one of the twelve copies in existence.
I think so, said Alan, rummaging around in a milk crate. Yeah! Here it is…
No no no no no no no no.
He popped the tape into the stereo, and I sat there trying not to throw up while Edward and the collected company listened to my piano songs warbling through the speakers.
Hearing my own singing voice paralyzed me, and another voice that I knew intimately rose up inside of me:
I can’t write songs. I can’t sing. I have a fucking phony English accent and THESE PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY ENGLISH. How humiliating. And god, my lyrics are so pretentious and stupid and self-indulgent. Who the fuck do I think I am?
I wanted to run. I wasn’t ready to be judged, and certainly not here, in this room, by my heroes. After two songs (one a fast-pounding punk rant about my nail-biting habit, the other a dirge about the loss of my virginity set in a metaphorical playground), Alan snapped off the tape player.
There! She’s good, right? Edward and the band nodded affably and the conversation turned back to the show, politics, and other bohemian topics.
I was shaking. I stepped outside to smoke a clove cigarette, and was sitting on the steps in the cold autumn darkness, inhaling sharply and trying to calm myself down, when the door rattled shut behind me. It was Edward. He sat down next to me and lit his own hand-rolled cigarette. I’d never been alone with him before.
The Art of Asking Page 9