A Stray Cat Struts

by Slim Jim Phantom

  I didn’t know all the famous stories about Dylan cutting things close and sometimes not showing when he was rumored to. One of the more well-known stories I’ve heard since include the supposed almost no-show at George’s first-ever charity concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden in 1972. The fabled rock-and-roll rumor is that someone close to him had to go downtown to a flat in Greenwich Village to collect Bob and bring him to the Garden with a sold-out crowd and full recording and film crews waiting in the afternoon. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s a good tale. It makes it even more memorable when he does show up for cameo performances at gigs that are not his own.

  I was drinking pretty heavily at the time. Eric Gardner was the Cats’ manager then. I liked Eric, and he had an interesting stable of clients, including Todd Rundgren, Bill Wyman, and Cassandra Peterson, who played Elvira. We affectionately referred to him as a rock-and-roll Broadway Danny Rose. We were all friends and went to each other’s events. He kept us working and really did care about each of us. He had given me a disappointed look when I started drinking so early in the daytime, and I wanted to be clearish for the gig. I knew I should slow down. I was standing outside in the back of the theater where the cars pulled up. Limos were coming and going, and a mini army of crew members and assistants with headsets and clipboards were buzzing around. I recognized some people. Stephen Stills came through, and I said hello. I knew him, and he’d come around Stone Canyon a few times and we played pool, staying up all night. Years later, I would be very friendly with his son, the gifted singer/songwriter Chris Stills, another full-circle mini story.

  A long, white, ’80s-style Miami Vice–looking limo pulled up. Bob Dylan half fell, half stepped out of the car, making a very skilled entrance clutching a bottle of Old Crow bourbon. Jack Daniel’s would’ve been too ordinary; in real Dylanesque style, his brand of whiskey was even cooler and more rock and roll. He looked exactly how he was supposed to, elegant in an almost scruffy way. He and Keith have that ability to really be comfortable while the scene around them is frantic. I’ve always admired it and tried to emulate it in my own way. Maybe call it rock-and-roll grace under pressure. As he was being swept in by a minder into the backstage area, he looked up and saw me. He must’ve remembered me from our dressing room meeting. We had met and talked previously at Dave Edmunds’s gig at the Palace where we had gotten along, talked about rockabilly music, and drunk eleven Coronas. He put his free arm around me and handed me the bottle in one motion while we were both whisked through the milling backstage area. I took a good swig. As I looked up, I saw Eric and gave him a shrugged shoulder wise-guy wink. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t insult Bob and refuse his drink. I was hustled with him into an empty dressing room.

  “I can’t believe these guys are hassling me about drinking. Managers are a pain!” I complained to Bob Dylan.

  “Hey, kid, don’t ever take anything in rock and roll personally,” Bob answered quickly and dryly.

  There it was. I had just gotten immediate, off-the-cuff, life-changing rock-and-roll advice from Bob Dylan. I still try to follow this advice. It was one of the most helpful things anyone ever said to me, and I’d like to thank Bob in print.

  The rest of the time we just sat, and he talked about Roy, his greatness as a singer, how it was Sam Phillips who gave him his first shot, and about our shared love of rockabilly music in general. He liked the Cats. It was another one of those special moments where if I’d been a little older or wiser, I wouldn’t have been as in the moment as I was. I think I’d be more nervous now to sit in Bob’s dressing room on two folding chairs, just yakking away about rockabilly. After a while, someone came to get me. Maybe I had a buzz—nothing memorable about that part. We did our song, and it was all good. I can’t remember what song Bob did. K.D. Lang did a version of “Crying,” which brought the house down. I think the show was filmed, and it’s gotta be available somewhere.

  It was 2012, and I was on a festival in Spain with Robert Gordon and Chris Spedding playing drums. Bob Dylan was on the bill. We did a set of solid rockabilly songs. Both Gordon and Spedding are iconic guys who are very good at it. I was looking forward to maybe seeing Bob and saying hello. By then, I was a full-fledged Dylan fanatic. I’d worn out copies of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. It came to me a little later in life, but I understood now how he had combined styles of American music and really invented something. He always did his own thing. He continues to make quality records, all paying homage to and reinventing American music. I get this now. He loves Gene Vincent, too. I’d heard all the stories and read a few bios and really dug Chronicles. I wanted to meet him again, armed with all this newly found fanboy stuff, maybe take a picture that I was aware of while it was being taken.

  I had lunch in the festival tent with his band members, including guitar whiz and good guy Charlie Sexton, whom I was introduced to by mutual friend Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1984, when he was even younger than I was. At fifteen, Charlie was smuggled in through the back of a pool hall in Austin, Texas, where he got up on one of the tables to shred the blues with the house band while Stevie, Brian, Jimmie Vaughan, and I were part of the audience. He did just fine. He was now in Dylan’s band.

  Bob arrived two seconds before the show and was taken right onstage. That was cool; I just wanted to watch the show. I was bummed out when I was told no one could stand onstage or at the monitor desk. I couldn’t really go into the audience, and the stage was really high, so standing in front was not so good, either. So I sat in the area behind the festival-sized stage and half listened, thinking about taking a shuttle van back to the hotel. During the second song, a burly personal security guy who looked after Bob approached me, and before I knew exactly what happened, he had led me up the stage stairs and into a little nook that had been created out of road cases. I watched the whole show from this cave on the side of the stage. Bob looked supercool in a white cowboy suit with yokes and smiley pockets. He sang a few I didn’t know and did alternative versions of the famous ones. His band moved along smoothly in sync with him, and I could tell he was improvising the whole time, relying and expecting the band to be with him. I know this feeling well. It’s both a lot of pressure and a lot of fun.

  At this point, I might be nervous with Bob, anyway. I would more than likely think about what I was saying. I never thought about anything before I said it in the past. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Harry Dean called me “youthful and hotheaded,” but we stayed buddies. In a few cases, as with Bob and George, my youthful innocence mixed with the right amount of bourbon and natural attitude got me through. Nobody gave me that weird look and walked off. These guys didn’t have to be nice to a young drummer if they didn’t feel like it. I must have been okay.

  I really enjoyed the gig from my custom-made perch. Bob was led offstage onto his bus and was gone while the audience was still cheering. The way it’s supposed to be done, like Elvis. As I was walking down the stairs, Bob’s guitar tech gave me one of his harmonicas, key of E. I keep it in my drumstick bag. I have it with me at every gig. It was a good exclamation point on a good night. I like to think that someone told Bob that I was there, that building the little niche for me to watch from and the gift of the harmonica was his way of saying hello. A very cool move from a very cool guy.

  19

  Do It for Johnny

  Johnny and Linda Ramone used to have barbecues every Sunday. It was always an eclectic small group of people that would be brought together by Johnny. The gang included Vincent Gallo, Eddie Vedder, Rob Zombie, Rosanna Arquette, record executive and commissioner of our fantasy baseball league Andy Gershon, Rose McGowan, Steve Jones, Billy Zoom, Gerry Harrington, longtime rock-and-roll manager and true pal Michael Lustig, and a few others. I’ve stayed friendly and hang out with most of these folks, and some of us promise to get together, but we were all united by lunches with the Ramones.

  The Stray Cats and the Ramones had the same business managers in New York, and we had met on a fes
tival bill we were both on back in the 1980s. I have a very vivid memory of meeting the Ramones in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn while we were both on tour. They were in their usual tour transportation, the famed van, and John was riding shotgun reading his copy of Baseball America. We were in a tour bus, and I remember thinking, Why aren’t these guys in a bus, too? Around the same time, we were on a festival bill together, and John, being an avid autograph and memorabilia collector, had Britt sign a few original movie posters from films she had done in the 1960s.

  I had been a fan of their music since I was in school. They embodied the New York City punk rock scene and proved that a band of outsiders from the neighborhood could go all the way. The band was loud and fast, but the songs were catchy and always had a strong musical hook, a clever chord change, and a deceptively simple lyric. Looking back, I see now even more clearly that like all the classic bands I still like, there was always a reference and a nod to the original American rock and rollers.

  The Ramones had very good musical taste and influences. I was too young to have seen them in the early days at CBGB, but I had seen them in the 1980s quite a few times. One memorable show at the Roxy stands out, and I remember pogo dancing with a visiting Swedish relative of Britt’s and losing my keys. To be from suburban New York City and be able to tour the world was as much of a dream as I could muster, and the Ramones were living proof that it could be done. They were from Queens, and being from Long Island, I could relate to the whole thing. John and I had an Irish-Catholic New York upbringing and love of the New York Yankees and Elvis Presley as our common threads. We would become very close when he and Linda moved to LA.

  We were part of a wacky fantasy baseball league that was very serious and important to us all. Our league included musicians, nightclub guys, a former DA from the Bronx, and a few other assorted characters. We had one season where two guys who shared a team sued each other. We had long catered draft days at Gershon’s house where everyone came with some notes and a few magazines. One year, a member was in Rome on business and did the six-hour draft on a cell phone. The bill must have been in the thousands. We had the league for years, and John especially took it personally. He tried really hard to win every year and did so a few times. John came armed with stacks of paper with statistics, graphs, and any info to help pick the players, all notated with his tiny, perfect handwriting in the margins. He was a meticulous cat in everything he did. This was before everyone was online, and every league member would handwrite and fax the lineup into the commissioner every week. It’s much easier these days, and I often think about John doing fantasy baseball in this day and age of instant scores, updates, and stats; I know he’d easily win every league. I don’t remember how I got it done, but I always did. I fondly remember waiting on Monday morning when the fax machine kicked on and all the statistics for the week would come through on my old-school roll-paper machine. We had one member who had longtime ties to the ownership of the LA Dodgers and had four of the best possible field-level box seats right on the visitor’s dugout at Dodger Stadium with a choice parking spot. Neither he nor John liked to drive, so I would get the call and bring TJ with me. So we went to a lot of ball games together. We drove downtown, listened to the oldies station on the radio, kept score, and ate peanuts, but never got a foul ball. TJ and John became close, too.

  Everyone at the barbecues was somehow linked either by rock and roll, movies, or baseball. TJ was the lone kid in the mix. I didn’t have a nanny, so I was the guy with the kid. He went everywhere with me. John and Linda’s house in Sherman Oaks was a combination of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and Graceland done up in exact 1950s Palm Springs Rat Pack style. They hadn’t really ever hung out with anyone in New York, and now that they had a house in LA, I think they liked entertaining their friends and bringing a certain group together.

  There was a small guesthouse where the roof hung out over the pool. TJ, Eddie Vedder, and I would climb up the back fence, scamper over the sunbaked roof, and jump out and over the patio into the water. It was a bit challenging, ill advised, and dangerous. We did it until Eddie slipped and hit his head. They asked us to stop, and we did, but not before dozens of successful jumps were made over the years.

  John and Linda were the perfect rock-and-roll hosts. They tried to keep everyone’s favorites on hand. If someone mentioned a preferred brand of potato chips or beer, it was there the next week. There were vegetarian and fish options available off the grill. The ball game was on the TV, some vintage rock music was on the stereo, and everyone chatted away and got along well. This was a punk rock So-Cal version of a salon. Everyone there had been through it all on their own time and had lived to tell in a nonpreachy way. There was no darkness, no drug vibe, and no one was there to pick anybody up or do any business. I think that after years on the road and living in cramped quarters in New York City, they genuinely enjoyed being in sunny LA, entertaining and bringing together interesting groups of people that they were friendly with. Britt and I had done this when we lived on Doheny Drive, so I related and respected what they were doing every weekend. I also appreciated the good home-cooked food that TJ and I would get without going to the Rainbow.

  Linda was the queen of her pink-and-green castle. She would cater and serve everyone while always tooled up in classic designer miniskirts and boots under an apron like June Cleaver–meets–Nancy Sinatra with a twist of Debbie Harry. The queen’s accent and expressions never softened.

  “Wadda ya need, Slim? Yoo got wot ya want?”

  “All good.”

  I liked ginger ale, and TJ liked root beer.

  “I got Canada Dry and Schweppes.”

  “Whatever. They’re both fine.”

  “Well, which one?”

  “Um, Schweppes.”

  “Coming up.”

  A glass full of ice and ginger ale complete with lime wedge would appear with a cocktail napkin underneath.

  When it came to the root beer and dealing with TJ, John got really involved. He liked root beer, too. Each week he would stock a new brand, and he and TJ would sip and compare like wine connoisseurs. TJ had a Ramones-style pageboy haircut, and the sight of the two of them in their bathing suits comparing notes on root beer is a classic image in my mind. These afternoons were good for me to unwind, as TJ would swim with the others and hone his skills of being able to hang with anyone.

  One time, John asked TJ what he thought of that week’s selection.

  “It’s okay, but last week’s was better,” TJ answered as he shrugged and slurped.

  “It’s the same kind; you said you liked it last week, so I got the same one this week,” replied John in his clipped tone.

  “No, it’s not; this one is different,” answered TJ.

  “The same,” said John.

  “Different,” said TJ.

  This went back and forth a few more times, and it was starting to get like a school yard argument. I saw this from across the room and stepped in to tell TJ to back off and not argue with an adult. Linda had also seen it and told John, “Leave the kid alone, John. Who cares?”

  There was one last round of disagreement before I glared at TJ, and he told John he was sorry and that he was thankful for any root beer. John accepted the apology, and we moved on with the day. John was forty-seven, and TJ was eight.

  Next week, we turned up as usual for a barbecue and a swim. There were a few of the gang already there, Dion and the Belmonts were on the record player, all was cool on another sunny Sunday. John greeted us, said hello, and then gave TJ the come-here motion with his finger. TJ obeyed and followed John to the kitchen. John went to the counter and presented a tray with a white napkin over it. He pulled the napkin off like a magician doing a flourish to a trick. On the tray were three Dixie cups, each with two ounces of root beer in them. Each had a little index card to correspond to the cup.

  “Drink this one,” John said as he handed the first one to TJ.

  This was repeated three times, and after each one, John asked
TJ to identify the brand of root beer and then turned over the index card to reveal the brand name, written in his perfect little printing.

  “A&W,” TJ said.

  “Wrong; it’s Dad’s,” answered John dryly.

  Next one, TJ guessed, “Barq’s, definitely!”

  “Wrong again; it’s Hires!” John confidently answered.

  Last one, TJ sipped and offered his expert opinion and guessed wrong again. John defiantly stood in front of TJ like a prosecuting attorney who had just gotten the criminal to confess and said, “I rest my case; you don’t know the difference!”

  TJ was momentarily flabbergasted, as were Linda and I. Then I was flattered that John had gone to all this trouble to prove his point to my kid. I think that TJ was the first, last, and only child that John ever interacted with. He needed to prove his point even to an eight-year-old. That was who he was. TJ said, “Okay, you win,” and went off to jump in the pool.

  John had a two-toned blue-and-white 1957 Ford convertible with a retractable hard top. This car was heavy and hard to stop, start, and steer. It was a real beast to drive. I have always driven old cars and am familiar with them. John, being a native New Yorker, didn’t like to drive in general, but this car was supercool, and he liked being in it. I would get the chauffeur’s job, and we’d all pile in for cruises along snaky, scenic Mulholland Drive.

  When John got very sick, a few of that gang would go and visit him. We sat on the leopard-skin couch and watched baseball games and talked about everything except the fact that he was terminal. He just wanted to spend as much time as he could in the house that he loved, to pursue his hobbies, go to baseball games and good restaurants, and entertain some friends on the weekends. He looked at rock and roll as a job, saved his money, and wanted to retire in a civilized way. He was one of those cats who, like me, is very happy and proud to be from New York but really understands and loves living in LA. You can turn on the New York when it’s needed but have had most of the rough edges rounded off by traveling the world. It’s unfair that he worked on the road for so long and brought such great music and attitude to the world only to have his retirement spoiled by illness.