Attempting Normal (11 page)

We had one gig as a band that I can remember. We said we would play at one of those parties where a family had just moved out of a house and one of the kids got hold of the keys and had half his high school over to destroy the house. I’m not sure what the band was called at the time. I think we were Change. Our regular bass player, Lee, wasn’t available to play that night. He was a sweet guy who wore a floppy hat. He always seemed to have a good time bouncing around smiling like a teenage hippie clown. I think we played four times with him total, so it wasn’t like he was irreplaceable. The other bass player we knew was this guy Monte. He said he could fill in for the gig. We all got to the house and Monte had a lot of equipment. He had a bass, an amp, and a couple of other large console components that I didn’t recognize. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He had dark circles under his eyes. He was wearing a big down jacket and chain-smoking Marlboros. I had never met him before and I can’t seem to forget him. He laughed out of context.

I remember we were in the basement playing our four songs:
“Takin’ Care of Business,” “The Needle and the Spoon,” “Sweet Emotion” and “Tush.” Monte was great, better than the rest of us. We put our instruments down and we all disappeared into the drunken throng to try to make out with girls, drink keg beer, and/or help destroy the house. About five minutes had passed when an explosive sound came from the stage. It was jarring. Everything stopped, as if something horrible was about to happen. Then there was a thunderous cacophony of rapid-fire bass notes that began to loop and echo. The house was literally shaking. The source of the sound stood solitary in the corner of the basement where we had been playing. It was Monte. The assault of bass went on for about fifteen minutes, building layers of looping bass noise that peaked like an earthquake. Nobody knew how to process it. I had never seen anything like it. When he stopped no one clapped. No one talked. He put his bass down and walked through the crowd and out of the house. I followed him. We stood outside. He lit a cigarette and started laughing and said, “I’m on acid.” It was one of those moments when I knew there was something out there that was wild, unmanageable, and accessible to me; if I hadn’t been paralyzed with fear of it I would have been there in a flash.

I used to buy
Guitar Player
and eventually became something of a gearhead, one of those guys who hangs around guitar stores. I was fascinated and obsessed with equipment. I had gear that I didn’t know how to use, really: wah-wah pedals, distortion boxes. I’d save up a ton of money and get something custom-made. I took the neck from my Telecaster and I put it on a Schecter Explorer body and had the guys at the shop refinish it. I finished it off with some fancy pickups, but I could never play that thing beyond my basic knowledge. I could never live up to my guitar. When I was sixteen I wished I was a wizard, but I never had the focus.

I eventually put the Tele back together, had it painted candyapple
red, put a brass pick guard on it and two humbuckers, and just loved looking at it. I still had that guitar in college, when I sold it for drug money to a guy who used to sleep on my couch. It was his first guitar and he loved it so I didn’t feel so bad. He was a genius, just not a guitar genius. He’s a pretty important poet and cultural critic now. I went to a reading he did at the New School in New York, and I was like, “What happened to that guitar?” And he said that his buddy’s daughter’s in a lesbian punk band, so he gave it to her. I felt pretty good about where it ended up.

More than a musician, I’ve been an obsessive fan. Throughout high school I was obsessed with the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Tom Waits, Bowie, Eno, Muddy Waters, Iggy, Skynyrd, and on and on. Sometimes I would just become obsessed with an individual song. I would play the records over and over again, the music like an aural IV that changed my brain chemistry and paced my heart, taking me where I needed to go depending on my mood. There was driving music and there was sad music. Driving had to be done and sadness needed to be managed. Music transformed both into magical journeys. Add drugs to either and you had a day’s activities on your hands, if not a lifetime’s.

By the time I got to college I had a fairly arrogant attitude about music and my place as a music critic. Before I left home I had become friends with an avant-garde musician in Albuquerque who led me through the noise: Fred Frith, the Residents, Robert Fripp, the Eno ambient albums, Jon Hassell. In college, in Boston, I became coke buddies with a guy named Bill who was tied into the art scene and loft music movement there in the mid-eighties.

One night I was at a party with Bill at a loft. I was maybe twenty, he was a bit older. I thought I could hold my own with artsy types. I had known them in Albuquerque when I was growing up. Hell, I thought I was one. The pretension was thick, as it always is with
unknown and struggling artists. Most of their energy is dedicated to crafting an aesthetic disposition in preparation for the day when people actually begin to buy their bullshit, if they ever do. I was sitting next to a heavy guy wearing horn-rimmed glasses. This was like 1983, so it was long before the horn-rim explosion that we are just now seeing ebb. He was talking about local bands and declaring certain bands transcendent, misunderstood.

I blurted out, “There’s never going to be another Buddy Holly. He was the best.”

Horn-rimmed face snapped back, “You’re a fascist.”

Bill stepped in and changed the subject, but I was hurt and shocked. I had no clear idea what fascism was at the time, but I knew I’d been slagged in front of Bill and his ridiculous friends. We left the party, but I couldn’t get what that guy said out of my mind for twenty-five years. It was genius. He had shaken my worldview with those three words. It had been drilled into me by the ghoulish mythmaking of the music industry and by my own father that Holly was the best, a martyred god. Horn-rims commited an act of deicide and patricide all at once. But he did create room in my mind for new things. That’s where Lou Reed came in.

I had been into Reed’s Bowie-produced
Transformer
album, but when my buddy Rob gave me
1969: The Velvet Underground Live
my mind was blown. So simple, so layered, so nasty. I had to have everything they did. They represented a gritty New York psychosexual dark good time that I missed and yearned for though I probably couldn’t have cut it had I lived through it. That’s what your heroes do for you—lift you victoriously above the dirty work of life and conjure a different way of being.

This was what music was to me, magic. But it was a kind of magic I wanted to actually touch myself. It’s the irony or maybe the tragedy of being a fan that it’s not enough to let the music enter you like a drug or define and shape the world for you. You also want to somehow touch it and have it affirm you in more
direct ways, whether you’re playing a riff like Chuck Berry or singing like Buddy Holly or buying Keith Richards’s guitar—or actually meeting your idols.

In 1984 Lou Reed came to Boston to sign his album
New Sensations
at Strawberry Records in Kenmore Square, which at the time still had some grit to it. I had to go. I thought, “I’m going to go meet Lou Reed. What do I wear? How do I make an impression? How do I get Lou to validate me?” Some part of me believed it was just going to be him and me and we were going to have a conversation.

I got to Kenmore Square and saw a line of people stretching out the door of Strawberry Records and winding down the street. I got on line behind a six-foot-five guy wearing a white jumpsuit. He had an amp strapped to his back and was playing Velvet Underground songs on his guitar. He was freakish looking. I should have spaced myself a few people behind him but I was excited. I didn’t know how I was going to follow that. I assumed that Lou would just move him along. A one-man tribute wearing a mock space suit is not necessarily the most flattering honor. I figured those kinds of people had to frighten Lou Reed because their weirdness wasn’t sexy, just weird.

I wasn’t too worried. All I was thinking about was what I was going to say to Lou. How was I going to connect? I’d only have a moment to do it. My mind kept cycling through possibilities as I waited on line for about forty-five minutes, grasping my
Transformer
album in my sweaty fan hands. I finally got to the counter. I picked up
New Sensations
out of the bin on the way up. Some members of his new band grabbed both it and
Transformer
from me and signed both. Wait, what did they have to do with
Transformer
? It pissed me off.

I finally got down the line to Lou. We were face-to-face. I hand him my records and I say, “How are you doing, Lou?”

He says, “Good, man. What’s your name?”

I say, “Marc.”

He says, “Hey, Marc, how are you doing?” as he signs my records.

I say, “Pretty good, Lou.” There’s a beat. I seize my moment.

“Hey, Lou, what gauge pick do you use?”

A little guitar talk. That was my big question. That was what was going to set me apart from the rest of the fans. And God bless Lou Reed, because he looked at me and said, “Medium, man, you’ve got to use a medium.”

Contact. I’ve been using a medium pick ever since.

  10  

My mother always told me that I was a diaphragm baby. Which in my mind means I have an innate ability to overcome obstacles. In a race of 400 million, I was the winner. And
then
I had to bust through a diaphragm. God, I was ambitious when I had a tail. I had a biological imperative then, a goal. It was my job to propel bipolarity and a slight underbite into the next generation.

As an adult I have been passionately banging and thrashing up against the ovum of show business for twenty-five years. I’ve been passionately banging and thrashing in general. It’s what I do. It is not unusual. I know you’ve probably heard that in show business it can take twenty years to create an overnight success but what you don’t hear is that that is the exact same amount of time it takes to create a bitter failure. You just don’t know what it’s going to be until the night before. It doesn’t have to be brought on by anything specific. Dreams don’t die with any sort of cacophony; there is no parade. The wind is just sucked out of you in a last sigh and you surrender.

I’m beginning to realize that some things aren’t going to happen the way I had planned. That’s part of being an adult. All right, maybe I’m not going to be an astronaut. I’m going have to let that go. I’ll put it on the back burner. I’ll be mature about it, keep it as a hobby.

Some people don’t even realize they’re bitter. If you don’t know whether you are or not, here’s a quick quiz you can give yourself. If you ever wake up in the morning and the first thing you say is “Oh, fuck, not again,” you might be a little bitter. If you find yourself in conversation with someone you know and that person brings up someone you both know and before he says another word you mutter, “That guy’s a fucking asshole,” you might be a little bitter. If you find yourself dismissing universally acclaimed landmark achievements, saying, for example, “
The Godfather
is an okay movie,” you might be bitter.

Everyone is a little bitter. We’re born bitter. The personality itself is really just a very complex defense mechanism. A reaction to the first time someone said, “No, you can’t.” That’s the big challenge of life—to chisel disappointment into wisdom so people respect you and you don’t annoy your friends with your whining. You don’t want to be the bitter guy in the group. It’s the difference between “I’ve been through that and this is what I’ve learned” and “I’m fucked. Everything sucks.” That said, be careful not to medicate bitterness because you’ve mistaken it for depression, because the truth is, you’re right: Everything does suck most of the time and there’s a fine line between bitterness and astute cultural observation.

I had many dreams as a teenager. One was to be an artist—any kind of artist, preferably a comic. And if I was a comic, I wanted to be on
Saturday Night Live
. I loved John Belushi and Chevy Chase. Nowadays, that dream doesn’t even make sense to me: I
never really did characters other than the one I am becoming and I certainly haven’t watched the show in years. But back in 1994 it almost happened. I had a meeting with Lorne Michaels.