Lucking Out (18 page)

He fared no better in a later run-in with a more lucid adversary. One night Lisa Robinson, rock journalist extraordinaire, came up to me with the winged-Mercury enthusiasm of someone with some really good gossip to share and asked: “So did you hear what just happened? Verlaine just confiscated Lou’s tape recorder. Went up to him and demanded he fork it over.” Which Lou did, like a shoplifter surrendering a pack of cigs.

Such a heartwarming display of lèse-majesté by Verlaine, putting Lou on notice that his seniority and status didn’t count, not in this saloon, not in Verlaine’s musical jurisdiction, not where Television and its signature riffs were concerned. Verlaine must have suspected in advance that Reed was packing, foraging for inspiration, unless of course Lou was flaunting the handheld recorder in full view, making the recording-angel rounds like Warhol, who carried his around like a little air freshener. Then again, suspicion was slivered deep into Verlaine’s nature, which was flecked with paranoia. Wariness seemed wired into the very tilt of his head, the angle at which he appraised whoever approached him.

(Even when Verlaine got angry, he was methodical. I remember once watching him destroy an uncooperative amplifier during a performance at a bar called Mother’s. Most guitar heroes would have made a big
Rocky Horror Picture Show
of equipment wreckage, but Verlaine simply began tilting the amp forward and knocking it into the wall as if it were a vending machine that hadn’t dispensed the candy and wouldn’t give him his money back; interrogating it with his hands, as if trying to shake out information, until it was clear he wasn’t going to get anything out of this holdout and polished it off for good. It was a set I remember well because for some reason Patti, sitting next to me, had been reading about the Mormons and the name Brigham Young seemed to rebound off the wall as Tom gave the amp what for.)

Although Verlaine was also not one to court the press or any other species, he and I got along fine, he wincing with irritation only if I rattled on too fast as if the curtain had just been pulled off my parrot cage, which I didn’t take any more personally than I did Cale’s death grip, since Verlaine winced at every speed jabber. Offstage, his sense of humor had a touch of the gallows. Once I was standing on a subway platform, leaning slightly forward to check if the twin lights of an approaching train were coming around the tunnel bend, when a hand pressed into my back, as if to push me onto the tracks, then gripped my jacket to prevent just that. I whipped around and it was Verlaine, cackling with amusement. Just his way of saying hi.

At CBGB’s, rough democracy reigned. There were no separate tables for press seating (unlike at the Bottom Line), no backstage VIP playpen, no caste system, no dress code, everything informally in flux, not even any strict restrictions on entering and reentering the club, which allowed everybody to circulate, spread their germs. The one checkpoint that had to be crossed was Roberta Bayley’s station at the front of the club. (It was probably she I was talking to in my mini-moment in
Blank Generation.
) Reddish haired, pale white, thin, beautiful, smart, quick, Roberta was (to put it in
Mad Men
terms) the Joan of CBGB’s, the goddess gatekeeper who had the authority of decree, the power to banish. I always marveled at how Roberta could accelerate in mid-sentence to spin someone around without touching him or her. “Joey was here earlier but I haven’t seen him [dopey-looking dude appears in doorway]—
I told you you couldn’t walk in here with a bottle take it back to the street and if I have to tell you again—
[dopey dude sheepishly disappears] so he might still be at Phoebe’s.” When the Runaways—that hotsy-twatsy jailbait band put together by the West Coast impresario Kim Fowley whose first hit, “Cherry Bomb,” established their truant image—played CBGB’s on a special-event night, there was more press frenzy than I’d ever seen at the place, proof of how the horniness of men drives news acreage, at least then. As I and a few others entered with expressions perhaps a trace too shiny and eager, I heard Roberta say as we trampled past, “You should all be ashamed of yourselves.”

I stopped and said, “Well, you know, I’m here strictly in my role as a reporter.”

“Well, try to remember to take notes while your tongue’s hanging out.”

Roberta was also a no-fuss photographer, her cover shot of the Ramones for their debut album one of the most representative debris-imbued images of the period. It was the Warhol Factory aesthetic, aiming the camera straight ahead and not dicking around with technique, pricey state-of-the-art equipment, masterpiece aspirations. Record the moment and never mind the mess. One of my favorite photos of Roberta’s, one of the most snapshot-y, caught the sweet incongruity of the
Punk
magazine mascot and interloper, Legs McNeil, wearing a Ramones T-shirt, chatting with Norman Mailer, who, after seeing the Ramones onstage disturbing the peace, had proclaimed, “They’re heroic!” This, from the man who thought the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” was overrated and anticlimactic, was no small endorsement.

In the beginning they were more Bowery Boys than Braveheart.

One night I was at CBGB’s to catch the Ramones, who were top-billed. I had seen them before but was laughing so hard the first time that much of their set blurred. Headlong blur was their objective. Their sets were blessedly, blazingly brief, setting land-speed records for most songs in the shortest span, each song launched with a 1!-2!-3!-4! count as if dropping the go flag on a Thunder Road drag race. At first the Ramones looked like a novelty act, as cartoonish as the Archies, but instead of gee-whiz varsity sweaters they were rigged out in matching monikers (Tommy Ramone, drums; Dee Dee Ramone, bass; Johnny Ramone, guitar; Joey Ramone, lead singer), leather jackets, hole-poked jeans, flat-soled sneakers (Keds they looked like, or Converse), mop-top haircuts, and, as if to complement the Beatlesque bangs, Joey’s lispy Liverpudlian accent, which resembled Ringo’s on the Saturday morning Beatles cartoon series rather than the real-life item. The arch enunciation of Joey’s vocals defused the belligerency of lyrics about beating on the brat or the clenched warning of “Loudmouth” (“You’re a loudmouth, baby/You betta shut it up/I’m gonna beat you up”), especially since the spindly Joey, holding on to the mike stand as if for support, as if it were a sturdier spinal column, looked so much like an awkwardly assembled praying mantis that one couldn’t imagine him throwing a punch that wouldn’t completely creak him out of alignment. They saved their antagonism mostly for each other, like feuding brothers. Johnny and Dee Dee looked like the genuine reform-school sluggers, often barking onstage at each other before, during, and after numbers, looking as if they might have a throw-down right then and there, using Joey as a pike to thwack each other. (Tuning up at CBGB’s became its own subgenre of psychodrama for the Ramones, as if they were taking batting practice before swinging aggression outward.) The uniform persona and unison attitude, the slashing zoom of their chords and lyrics, the ritualistic formalism of each set—“It’s like a set of karate stances,” Albert Goldman later observed with his customary cackle.
Kiai!
The intensity of the Ramones, the relentlessness of their chain-saw attack and paroxysms of anger that erupted whenever that attack was interrupted because a guitar strap snapped loose, was the intensity of a methodical strike force that didn’t want to waste a second or a note or a needless word. The mark of mission accomplished for a typical Ramones show was looking pissed off as they left the stage, the exchange of well-done grins and tired beams of satisfaction having no place in their pit-crew operation. (I remember seeing Dee Dee backstage after a New Year’s Eve concert where he was slumped against the wall, a model of exhaustion. I asked him about his holiday season. “Gonna take a few more days off,” he said, “then it’s back to writing those hits.” I thought he was kidding, being self-deprecating, given that the Ramones hadn’t had any real hits yet. But, no, irony wasn’t the language he spoke. This was simply the work he had waiting for him at the assembly plant in his head.)

Even then, in howling embryo, the Ramones were a tough act to follow and a tough act to precede. Whoever opened for them might as well have been setting out the paper plates on the picnic table, so innocuous would they look by comparison. The band that opened for them that night looked innocuous even without anything as contrast. A trio, two smoothie-faced young men in preppy Izods or Polo tops and a young woman with short strawberry blonde hair who strapped on her bass as if donning a white lab coat, took the stage, looking as if they had wandered into the wrong campus bar. Or Pop-Tarts that had popped out of the same toaster. They didn’t seem to belong in a Bowery dive where the very air seemed sometimes to be ovulating with amoebic dysentery, and yet they threw off no awareness or discomfort that they didn’t belong, and so slid right into a slot that was theirs for the slitting. The lead singer, whose voice sounded as if perpetually about to break, his Adam’s apple working like a baby’s rattle, introduced the group: “The name of this band is Talking Heads, and the name of this song is ‘The Girls Want to Be with the Girls.’ ”

“These people call themselves Talking Heads,” I wrote in the
Voice.

They were strange, but straight-strange, a collegiate facsimile edition of a set of bland-seeming Warholian ironies about everyday objects, brand merchandise, and candy-pill colors bestowed on its citizens by a big, shiny, bountiful milkshake-machine America. “Don’t Worry About the Government” went one song title, a sentiment that cut against the paranoid grain of the post-Watergate era, when
The Parallax View
and
Three Days of the Condor
sent their heroes into furtive phone booths to make desperate calls and Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s
Conversation
ripped his apartment apart like an archaeological dig in a futile effort to locate the electronic bug. But this pose of benign acceptance, like Warhol’s, laid a curved sheet of glass over a grid of nervous tremors, putting the aesthetic on a minimalist feed:

There was also a TV-kiddie-show rinky-dink troubadour echo of the influential cult band the Modern Lovers, whose lead singer, Jonathan Richman, who went solo, once did three encores of “Ice Cream Man” strolling up and down the bar aisle of CBGB’s, strumming his acoustic guitar as if leading a campfire sing-along. What I didn’t know, watching the Heads for the first time, was that David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth had all attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where experimental artiness and eccentric presentation were encouraged rather than roughed up in the hallways, as happened at lesser institutions where jocks and unaffiliated louts committed acts of unsportsmanlike conduct upon those suspected of sissy aspirations or other faun tendencies. Not that there was anything fey about Talking Heads, or that it would have mattered much if there had been, the New York Dolls having broken up that stigma for scrap metal. But in the hobo boho jungle preserve of the Bowery, the dilettanti were given a thorough surface inspection, and the collegiate clean-cutness of the Heads was regarded with skepticism until they played enough sets (it didn’t take long) for the regulars to recognize in Byrne a fellow misfit weirdo. His vocals, interspersed yips, head jerks, and boogie-down hip action suggested Norman Bates hitting the disco, and as soon as he began strumming the opening to “Psycho Killer,” his certification seemed complete. “David Byrne sings tonelessly but its effect is all the more ominous,” I wrote in the
Voice.
“The uneasy alliance between composure and breakdown—between outward acceptance and inward coming apart—is what makes Talking Heads such a central seventies band.”

And then there was Tina Weymouth, about whom nothing appeared haywire. My crush on Tina was instantaneous. It was the only correct way to respond. Everyone got a crush on Tina, apart from those who preferred their rock women in a gaudier state of disarray, more lip-licorice-ish and torn-stockinged, a downtown Anita Pallenberg type fished out of a Dumpster. Those Dutch-boy bangs, those blue eyes that crystal’d through the swimming murk of CBGB’s, the smile that broke mostly offstage, when her bass duties didn’t require her monitoring David’s every ostrich move—Tina was sexy precisely because she wasn’t striving to be sexy, her not-trying coming across not as a feminist statement or a de-gendering decision to function as a unisex tablet but as an efficiency model that any young woman could look cool emulating. Female rock stars were rare, the codpieces and princely egos still ruled, but female instrumentalists functioning as equals onstage were rarer. Tina was a small revelation. That (everyone soon learned, with a deflated sigh) Tina and drummer Chris Frantz were girlfriend-boyfriend made the crush even nicer to let slush around in the mind since that knowledge kept infatuation on a happy, unattainable plane, fancifully out of reach.