Born to Run (61 page)

Every meaningless thing became the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness. All was lost. All . . . everything . . . the future was grim . . . and the only thing that would lift the burden was one-hundred-plus on two wheels or other distressing
things. I would be reckless with myself. Extreme physical exertion was the order of the day and one of the few things that helped. I hit the weights harder than ever and paddleboarded the equivalent of the Atlantic, all for a few moments of respite. I would do anything to get Churchill’s black dog’s teeth out of my ass.

Through much of this I wasn’t touring. I’d taken off the last year and a
half of my youngest son’s high school years to stay close to family and home. It worked and we became closer than ever. But that meant my trustiest form of self-medication, touring, was not at hand. I remember one September day paddleboarding from Sea Bright to Long Branch and back in choppy Atlantic seas. I called Jon and said, “Mr. Landau, book me anywhere, please.” I then of course broke down in
tears. Whaaaaaaaaaa. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me in lower Manhattan. A kindly elderly woman walking her dog along the beach on this beautiful fall day saw my distress and came up to see if there was anything she could do. Whaaaaaaaaaa. How kind. I offered her
tickets to the show. I’d seen this symptom before in my father after he had a stroke. He’d often mist up. The old man was usually
as cool as Robert Mitchum his whole life, so his crying was something I loved and welcomed. He’d cry when I’d arrive. He’d cry when I left. He’d cry when I mentioned our old dog. I thought, “Now it’s me.”

I told my doc I could not live like this. I earned my living doing shows, giving interviews and being closely observed. And as soon as someone said “Clarence,” it was going to be all over. So,
wisely, off to the psychopharmacologist he sent me. Patti and I walked in and met a vibrant, white-haired, welcoming but professional gentleman in his sixties or so. I sat down and of course, I broke into tears. I motioned to him with my hand; this is it. This is why I’m here. I can’t stop crying! He looked at me and said, “We can fix this.” Three days and a pill later the waterworks stopped, on
a dime. Unbelievable. I returned to myself. I no longer needed to paddle, pump, play or challenge fate. I didn’t
need
to tour. I felt normal.

SEVENTY-SIX

GARAGE LAND

The phone rings. Mick Jagger is on the line. I had a teenage daydream about receiving a call like this many years ago, but, no, the Stones do not need an ex–pimply faced front man for the next evening’s show. But it’s THE NEXT BEST THING! They’re playing in Newark, New Jersey, and have decided one extra New Jersey guitar man and voice for “Tumbling Dice” might get some
of the local fannies wagging.

By the time I was fifty, I’d met many of my heroes (Sinatra, Dylan, Morrison, McCartney, Orbison) and I’d enjoyed it, though I still gave them a wide berth. They still meant too much to me to surrender my star-struck feelings. And that’s the way I liked it. But the following evening I find myself walking into a brightly lit, busy reception area of a New York rehearsal
studio. The girl behind the desk gives me a nod and points to a door. I open the door to a modestly sized room where there’s a band in a tight-knit
garage setup against one wall. There are two guitars, bass and drums, and a B3 organ in a corner. The lead singer comes up, giving me a smile that still lights up the entire room. Mick welcomes me to rehearsal. Keith, Ronnie and Charlie (from back
behind his drums) follow with warm greetings.

They have their small Fender amps, set side by side, in the exact positions in which any band at the Fort Monmouth Teen Club would’ve set up on any empty sixties Saturday night. There are no fancy pedals, no mountain of speakers, just the barebones equipment for making rock music, pure and unchanged. There are few handlers, no entourage, and I am
suddenly transported back to the little dining room I rehearsed in daily with the Castiles, except . . . these are the guys who INVENTED my job! They have been stamped on my heart since the chunking chords of “Not Fade Away” came ripping off the little 45 I bought at Britt’s Department Store in the first strip mall in our area.

After some pleasantries, there are two mike stands alongside one
another, a few feet in front of the band. Mick, still all sharp edges and pragmatism, moves to the mike on the left. I take the right as he counts off and Keith, the man whose recorded playing taught me my first guitar solo, slithers into the opening riff of “Tumbling Dice.” I’ve come across many spirit-filled folk in my travels but no one as spectrally beautiful as Keith Richards. Some years ago
Patti sang backup for the Stones and on Keith’s first solo record. One night we visited him in the studio. He took Patti’s hand, looked me in the eye and, with great regard for her, said, “Oh . . . oh . . . this one.”

From my left, in the voice that’s wet millions of knickers comes “Women think I’m tasty, but they’re always trying to waste me” . . . I’m pretending to be a peer but it’s not easy.
Inside I’m reeling as Mick motions to me to take the second verse. It feels good. It’s within the meat of my voice, and if I can’t swing “Tumbling Dice” I should go back to my broom handle and my mirror.

A great group is always about chemistry. Up close the chemistry
amongst these players is unique. Keith’s guitar plays off of Charlie’s drums, creating a swing that puts the roll back into the
rock. This is the last of the rock ’n’ roll bands. Combine that with the most underrated songbook in rock history and the Stones have always stood heads above their competition. Still do.

I’m having so much fun and I can’t let anyone know! “You got to roll me . . . You got to roll me . . .” Mick and I are trading lines in the coda back and forth like a couple of white Sam and Daves, then it’s
over. Mick says, “That was great.”

We played it exactly one time.

I went home. On the way home I kept thinking, “I GOTTA CALL STEVE! He will completely, one hundred percent, full-tilt, rock ’n’ roll crazy understand.” He did.

The next night we did it for twenty thousand thunderstruck New Jerseyans in Newark. It was a thrill but it didn’t have the mystic kick of the night before, when I got
to sit in, in that little room with just those four guys, the GREATEST GARAGE BAND IN THE WORLD, in my small piece of rock ’n’ roll heaven.

SEVENTY-SEVEN

HIGH HOPES

When I’m on tour, I’ll often carry with me a collection of my unfinished music. I’ll bring a few unfinished projects along that I’ll pop on in the wee wee hours after the show and listen to. I’m looking to see if there’s something there whispering in my ear. I still had a nice set of songs from my production work with Brendan and night after night, they’d call to me, looking
for a home. This coincided with Tom Morello’s joining the band and suggesting we dust off “High Hopes,” a song by LA group the Havalinas that we’d covered in the nineties. “I could really jam on that,” he said. As we gathered in Australia at our first rehearsal for the
Wrecking Ball
tour’s resumption, I had an arrangement that I thought might work. This was going to be Tom’s first stint subbing
for Steve, who was busy with his acting commitments, so I wanted him to be able to put his imprint on the show. He did that. The arrangement caught fire live and we decided to cut it in a
Sydney studio along with a favorite song of mine by the Australian group the Saints, “Just Like Fire Would.” With the inclusion of these songs and studio recordings we made of “American Skin” and “The Ghost of
Tom Joad,” a real album began to take shape. I then recorded Tom onto some of our Brendan O’Brien tracks and things really began to spark. Tom proved to be a fabulous and fascinating substitute for Steve, melding into the band seamlessly while greatly increasing our sonic palette.

Before resuming the tour, however, I had some business to take care of. For at least the past five years I had noticed
the fingers in my left hand growing successively weaker with each tour. On a long solo my hand and fingers could fatigue almost to failure. I’d found a variety of ways to get around this so the audience wouldn’t notice and my playing didn’t suffer, but by the start of our
Wrecking Ball
tour it was becoming a problem I could no longer ignore.

Probably since my forties, some physical problem had
come along with every tour. One tour it’s your knee, then it’s your back, then it’s tendinitis in your elbows from all the hard strumming. These maladies appear and disappear quite frequently over the latter part of your work life and are rarely critical. I’d just find a way to manage them and continue on. However, the paralysis of my guitar-playing hand was something else. That was accompanied
by a numbness and tingling down my left arm, and I noticed in the weight room that I was now significantly weaker on the left side of my body.

I consulted a variety of physicians, had the MRIs done and found out I had some cervical disc problems on the left side of my neck, pinching and numbing the nerves that controlled my left side from the shoulder down. I found a great surgeon at the Hospital
for Special Surgery in New York and we set a date. The surgery went like this: they knock you out; cut an incision into your throat; tie your vocal cords off to one side; get in there with a wrench, screwdriver and some titanium; they take a chunk of bone out of
your hip and go about building you a few new disks. It worked! Because all of this takes place around the vocal cords your voice is gone
for a couple of nerve-racking months. Also you get to wear one of those whiplash collars for about two months. But sure enough, right on the doc’s timeline, three months in I was ready to work again. With my new discs and rehabilitated voice, we headed Down Under with just one instruction: no crowd surfing! But there is no fool like an old fool, so the first night I dove right on in. Everything
was fine.

•  •  •

About my voice. First of all, I don’t have much of one. I have a bar-man’s power, range and durability, but I don’t have a lot of tonal beauty or finesse. Five sets a night, no problem. Three and a half full-on hours, can do. Need for warm-up, light to none. My voice gets the job done. But it’s a journeyman’s instrument and on its own, it’s never going to take you to higher
ground. I need all my skills to get by and to communicate deeply. For me to sell you what you’re buying, I’ve got to write, arrange, play, perform and, yes, sing to the best of my ability. I am a sum of all my parts. I learned early this is not something to fret about. Every performer has his or her weak link. Part of getting there is knowing what to do with what you have and knowing what to do with
what you DON’T have. As Clint Eastwood said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Then forget about them and walk on.

I was teased endlessly in the Castiles and dismissed as a vocalist. For a long time that was fine with me. George Theiss was a great singer and I was perfectly content to work on my guitar skills. I always saw myself primarily as a lead guitarist anyway.

Then I got to where
I could carry a melody and, to my ear, sound half decent. At some point in the Castiles, George and I began to share more of the vocal duties. Once that band folded and I moved onto my next band,
Earth, I became a full-fledged playing-and-singing front man. I was still earning my keep as one of the few guitarists in the area who could half-ass Clapton and Hendrix, but I was singing everything
too. Then I began to write acoustically and I would spend my off nights singing solo, accompanied by just my twelve-string Ovation guitar, in the local coffee houses. I wrote a lot and got used to depending on my voice, along with the quality of my songs and playing, to carry the show. I thought I was getting pretty good. Then when George, my short-lived New York producer, invited me to his apartment,
he had that two-track tape recorder. One afternoon he said, “Let’s record some of your songs.” As I was performing for the tape, I was thinking, “Damn, I’m good!” Then I heard it back. It sounded like a cat with its tail on fire. It was out of tune, amateurish, dumb and unknowing. The sound that came back off that tape killed what little confidence I had in myself and my vocals. It was truly
demoralizing.

But what could I do? It was the only voice I had. And I decided after the Castiles I would never depend on another lead singer again. It was not independent enough for me. So I learned as I’ve mentioned that the sound in your head has little to do with how you actually sound. Just the way you think you look better than you do, until the iPhone photo your Auntie Jane takes cold-slaps
you in the face. Tape performs this same function for your voice. It’s a dead-on bullshit detector. You can’t kid yourself once you’ve heard yourself on tape. That, my friend, IS the way you sound. You can only live with it.

So I figured if I didn’t have a voice, I was going to really need to learn to write, perform and use what voice I had to its fullest ability. I was going to have to learn
all the tricks, singing from your chest, singing from your abdomen, singing from your throat, great phrasing, timing and dynamics. I noted a lot of singers had a very limited instrument but could sound convincing. I studied everyone I loved who sounded real to me, whose voices excited me and touched my heart. Soul, blues, Motown, rock, folk; I listened and I learned. I learned the most important
thing was how believable you could
sound. How deeply you could inhabit your song. If it came from your heart, then there was some ineffable element “X” that made the way you technically sounded secondary. There are many good, even great, voices out there tied to people who will never sound convincing or exciting. They are all over TV talent shows and in lounges in Holiday Inns all across America.
They can carry a tune, sound tonally impeccable, they can hit all the high notes, but they cannot capture the full emotional content of a song. They cannot sing deeply.

If you were lucky enough to be born with an instrument and the instinctive knowledge to know what to do with it, you are blessed indeed. Even after all my success I sit here in envy of Rod Stewart, Bob Seger, Sam Moore and many
other greats who can sing magnificently and know what to do with it. My vocal imperfections made me work harder on my writing, my band leading, my performing and my singing. I learned to excel at those elements of my craft in a way I might otherwise never had if I had a more perfect instrument. My ability to power through three-hour-plus shows for forty years (itself a display of my manic insecurity
that I’d never be enough) with a thoroughbred’s endurance came from realizing I had to bring it all to take you where I wanted us to go. Your blessings and your curses often come in the same package. Think of all the eccentric voices in rock who’ve made historic records and keep singing. Then build up your supportive skills because you never know what’s going to come out of your heart and find
its way out of your mouth.