Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) (11 page)

B
ack from the gig. I just sent this e-mail:

From: Donald Fagen

To: Irving Azoff

Subject: Jeez . . .

i can't believe the dumps we're playing—

the paramount in denver—

hot as hell—

no proper dressing rooms—

and here i am, as old as my cigar-chomping uncles when they started dropping dead walking up grove street in passaic—

that's it: i'm leaping dimensions—

i'll see you on july 11, 2 pm, in the year 6004 at the corner of higgs and unix in celestion city—

and bring some rye bread . . .

df

From: Irving Azoff

To: Donald Fagen

Subject: Jeez . . .

Donald. You need to do steely dan if you don't want to play dumps. You guys as dukes have no profile, no record, no dvd, don't play the tv press game. Unless you whore yourself out you get to play dumps. Sorry. People don't give a shit about live shows anymore unless you really work it.

From: Donald Fagen

To: Irving Azoff

Subject: Jeez . . .

see you in celestion city—

df

A lot of well-known bands play “privates,” which is to say private affairs and parties, because the money is usually excellent. Often you're asked to “meet and greet” the organizers, pose for some photos with some guys and otherwise show how glad you are to be there.

The worst are corporate gigs where the band is hired to perform in front of several hundred or a hundred or even fifty suits at a convention or company party. They usually sit at tables, dinner theater–style, maybe with their wives or, just as often, hired escorts, and consume a lot of hard liquor. If they've hired a top band, it means they've had a good year and the leadership has invested in a real blowout, a wang dang doodle, although they never look as though they're having much fun. The hookers like to get up and dance.

Because these gigs are so depressing, I (and Walter, when out with SD) usually pass on the offers. First off, I have a hard time being around wealthy types and, as I'm a terrible actor, it's hard to fake it. Then there's the way rich people usually treat musicians. Aside from a couple of years playing in the rhythm section for the pop group Jay and the Americans in the early seventies, Walter and I never had a lot of experience as “the help use the back door” types. We just weren't in the same world as the players who did weddings and bar mitzvahs and such. Occasionally, we were talked into playing a studio date for an advertising agency or something like that. But we never had to participate in too many sessions that didn't involve our own music.

When our job as staff songwriters at ABC/Dunhill Records failed spectacularly, the boss, Jay Lasker, gave us a budget to
record our own album,
Can't Buy a Thrill
, which hit big right out of the box. So, compared to the way most fledgling musicians and songwriters are treated, we were pretty spoiled. And anyway, talent aside, we were perceived as artists just by virtue of our wisenheimer personalities and transparent resentment of authority.

Now, the Dukes' gig at the Vilar Performing Arts Center in Beaver Creek, Colorado, this evening wasn't a private. But it felt like one. Maybe it was the altitude, but as soon as I got to the venue, I started to get my paranoiac-anarcho-surrealist freak on. It's a deluxe little theater built by the Vail Valley Foundation for the community. Beautiful lobby, comfortable seats, good sound system. And yet, the food that catering served the band and crew was god-awful, the worst on the tour so far (this happens quite often at privates, too). Plus, instead of a proper dining hall, or even a room set aside that's connected to the kitchen, they set up a few tables on the loading dock right off the wing, stage left.

By curtain time, I was ready for action by any means necessary. If these people could only see into the mind of the viperous Robespierre they had invited into their midst . . . (I think my expression might have worried a few of the band members, but, mostly, this radical fairy tale was just going on in my head.) Aside from throwing some withering glares at the stewed, swaying ski chicks in the second row and the fact that I kept messing up the song order, I got through the show okay. But by the time we got offstage, after enduring the not unenthusiastic but not quite authentic response from the tanned and strangely dissociated crowd, I had entered a kind of merciless fugue state. I imagined it was early morning and I could see the chunky,
now hungover blond princesses and their defeated fathers standing in the rickety open carts, hands bound behind their backs, as they rolled up to the Place de la Révolution to be guillotined by the brawny, black-masked executioner.

Ah, waking up in Tulsa on a midsummer morning with a wicked sinus headache. I was too tired after the flight from Denver to deal with the thermostat, so there's a lot of dry, cold air flowing in from somewhere. Or maybe it's the altitude change. Let's see, where's that Canadian codeine? Also some Claritin, I think.

This room in the Hyatt is dang ugly, cowboy. Isn't there some design rule that says the floral pattern on the wallpaper can't be duplicated on the carpet? I feel like I'm living inside one of my aunt Lotty's doilies.

Eight forty a.m. central time now. I'm putting on the Stravinsky and going back to sleep.

Bastille Day. Apparently, our bus, traveling to Tulsa while we flew, broke down somewhere in Kansas. A part needs to be FedEx-ed from Canada to Wichita to get it moving again. So Vince and I are now glomming a ride to Dallas on McDonald's bus. Our bus should meet us there.

I feel a lot better now that we're at a normative altitude. I've had symptoms of altitude sickness in the past but, because I'm an idiot, I left those pills in NYC. I guess oxygen depletion in the brain can cause all sorts of psychological aberrations that
are the same as the items on the ATD list, so there are too many variables working here to really know what's what. Moreover, I've had bizarre anxiety symptoms all my life, as a kid, as a teenager and in my thirties and early forties. After ten years of therapy and, bolstered by a powerful daily cocktail of psychotropic pharmaceuticals, I've been doing pretty well for some time now. Yeah, it must have been the altitude.

•   •   •

A
Japanese promoter, the mighty Mr. Udo, wants the Dukes to do a few dates in October. If Irving can get the price up, I guess we'll go. It's not easy to finance an Asian excursion for a band of this size.

It's only for a week or so, which is fine, because Japan is rough for me. First of all, to a Westerner, it looks like an amusement park on Mars. You might as well be trying to find your way around the inside of a pinball machine. Plus, American musicians complain about the killer jet lag—the day-for-nighttime change—and the stress of communicating with a radically different culture. For someone like me, who freaks out in, like, Beaver Creek, you can imagine how unhinged I feel in Japan.

Again, it's the island nation problem, and again there are some parallels with British culture, though Japan is an extreme case. The intensely formal code of courtesy, especially when dealing with foreigners, causes a lot of misunderstanding. Here's a Japan story our guitarist likes to tell:

Late one night, Jon and a few other players walked into a restaurant and asked if they could still get something to eat. The waitress looked slightly upset but said, Oh yes, come in. Is there a table available? Oh yes, please sit here. Could we get some
menus? The waitress, almost in tears, brought the menus. Can we order, please? She finally bowed her head and came out with it: Oh—so sorry, we closed.

There you have it: because there are apparently no words in the language that actually express the concept
no
, the promoters, the club employees, the drivers, even the sympathetic translators, are all forced into lying about almost everything. My wife, who, for various reasons, including one or two unreliable parents, is severely allergic to mendacity or any sort of equivocation, no matter how subtle, can never go there again. I guess I can endure it for a week for some easy green.

•   •   •

O
kay, I'm back on my own bus, heading to Austin. It's all good. The show at the Verizon Theatre in Grand Prairie, a suburb of Dallas, was disappointing, especially since the venue's acoustics were so slick. The previous night in Tulsa had turned out to be a gas, a great crowd. Tonight, though, too many TV Babies out there. They mainly wanted to hear the hits they knew from when they were kids, or from their parents' vinyl collection, or classic radio. Those sleek, tipsy Dallas babes with the expensive dresses and coifs and earrings, you know they'd be real goers if they weren't with their spouses. One of them in the front row in a white dress would get up and dance for a minute with her eyes closed and her arms in the air and then, reined in by the hubby and the other couple she was with, would sit back down, defeated. Every night, there's always some chick out there who'll yell, “We love you, Michael,” or “I love you, Boz,” and once in a while I'll get one of those too. But usually, with me, because of the “musicians' musician” thing and various other
disqualifiers, it'll be some poor dude yelling “
DONNNNALD
” in a crazy, tortured voice.

Okay, okay, I confess. I've had a few cigarettes, but only bumming them at the gigs and from Geoff the driver. Today, at Austin City Limits, I smoked a Newport on the terrace, watching dark clouds roll in over the street, the beginning of a storm. I called home and Libby checked her various devices to see if there was a tornado involved, but I guess not. This is the third of another three-show stretch. I'm falling asleep standing up.

The last time I played in Austin was in the early seventies at a legendary counterculture rock palace called the Armadillo World Headquarters. We were opening, I think, for a group called Rare Earth, a white group signed to Motown that became successful doing covers of Temptations tunes. They had a good singing drummer. It was a big, funky room filled with reefer smog, good clean fun. Now it's a parking lot or something. Today, on the private dining menu at the Four Seasons, you can order something called a “Hippie Salad.”

After a show, if it's a longish drive to the next location, I'll sleep on the bus for a while. When we arrive, we move into the new hotel in the wee hours. While Vince gets the keys at the desk, I stand in the lobby, bleary eyed, watching the cleaners vacuum the rugs and wax the floors with those big chrome machines. This morning, when we stepped into the elevator, a young
black guy was polishing the metal ornaments with a product called “Brite Boy.”

Most of the time, McDonald and Scaggs save money on hotels by having the bus drive straight to the parking lot of the next gig—in other words, they never get off the bus. I've tried that a few times. It felt more like the lifestyle of an insect than a human.

Exhausting show in Houston. Outdoor gig with a rare airconditioned stage, but the humidity was still crushing. The effect was that of an irritating polar draft in hell. The whole Oklahoma/Texas run has been a grind. Again, I'm starting to wilt. And the luxury hotel in, say, Houston isn't what you might expect. It's a depressed town right now, and the hotel is old and ailing, like me. I keep thinking of that Jim Thompson novel
A
Swell-Looking Babe
, in which the young protagonist gets a job as a bellhop in an Oklahoma City hotel and is initiated into a shadowy world of sin and corruption. I was never that comfortable with big-time sin and corruption, and now that I'm old and ugly and pooped out—well, I said good-bye to all that some time ago. Now it's just cold meat and rice on the bus after the show.

When I went for a swim this afternoon, there was a young, long-legged girl in a pink bikini getting some sun. Dark, gorgeous, Persian or Israeli, perhaps. Her fingernails and toenails matched the suit exactly, and so did her BlackBerry, on which she seemed to be texting the whole time. A major TV Baby, Satan's daughter.

I sat under the burning Texas sun for a while, reading the
Times
. I finally caught a Mexican waitress's eye.

“Could I order a lemonade, please?”

“Yes, sir. Absolutely!”

Once again, the ambling ghost of Fess Parker intersects our path. In 1955, the elders of San Antonio, Texas, after noticing the influx of tourists following the final episode of the Davy Crockett series—Davy buys the farm when the Mexicans invade the Alamo, which is right here in town—got some Disney architects to look at the river, resulting, many years later, in a sort of San Antonio Land, which is the present-day River Walk. Our hotel is on the River Walk, and that's why I was awakened earlier than I wanted to be by a loud mariachi band just outside the window. I wrenched myself out of bed and stumbled outside, having noticed a pool in a Spanish garden the night before. In daylight, this turned out to be a shallow pit filled with greenish syrup and jammed with children.

Okay, some food. Strolling along the River Walk, I realized I'd left my wallet in my room. I walked back, now in a black mood, hating the tourists, especially the ones wearing T-shirts that say things on them, walking billboards for companies and stores and teams and bands and health clubs and who knows what all. We sell our own at the gigs, for chrissakes. Also hats, cups, mouse pads, all that garbage.

•   •   •

I
'm back from the show. The house was a legion of TV Babies, maybe tourists from Arizona. I don't know. Probably right-wingers, too, the victims of an epidemic mental illness that a British study has proven to be the result of having an
inordinately large amygdala, a part of the primitive brain that causes them to be fearful way past the point of delusion, which explains why their philosophy, their syntax and their manner of thought don't seem to be reality based. That's why, when you hear a Republican speak, it's like listening to somebody recount a particularly boring dream.