Lucking Out (19 page)

Later, Tina and I even went on a couple of movie dates, one of the art-house choices being Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s
Fox and His Friends
, a homosexual-pickup social Darwinist morality tale about a carnival worker (played by Fassbinder himself, without his Fu Manchu mustache and usual gunnysack slouch) who wins the lottery and attracts a new host of buddies who proceed to peck him until their vulture beaks have picked him clean and he dies in the subway, a couple of punks (the old-definition no-good kind) stopping by to rummage through his pockets. A feel-bad diagram of sexual-economic predation that made
The Boys in the Band
look candy-hearted,
Fox and His Friends
was one of the world’s worst movie-date ideas for any male-female pairing and proof that ulterior motives weren’t working any levers when it came to movie selection. Unlike some others, who gnawed the insides of their wrists over the unfairness of it all (why him? why not me?), I wasn’t jealous of Chris, even when Tina stage-whispered to him one night in front of CBGB’s about something special being on the menu later that night, and she didn’t mean food. Unlike some bandmate boyfriends one could mention from the underground scene, Chris was so obviously not a snake-weasel-leech piece of future deadbeat material, bitching over his favorite coke spoon being missing or some other domestic crisis staged on a floor mattress where sheets were optional. Moreover, Tina had sisters who were datable, not that I ever did.

It turned out that the Heads were sharing a loft on Chrystie Street that I visited with my then girlfriend. Reaching Chrystie Street, south of CBGB’s and pointed toward Chinatown, was not a stroll undertaken in the midnight hours without all of one’s bat faculties primed. The bordering Roosevelt Park was well stocked with furtive hands ready to reach out for a rude gimme, and the nearby remaining Bowery flophouses, these remnants of the Depression with their last-stop Dreiserian stale aroma of defeat and spiritual malnutrition, drew panhandlers and derelicts to those cheerless streets looking for drink money if all the indoor cots were taken. The area also featured what Byrne would describe as the skankiest hookers in New York, though of course that’s a subjective evaluation. But I had never been invited to an artist’s loft before and was a total Heads convert when the invite came.

Loft living then wasn’t the luxury alternative that it later became with the rise of SoHo and gentrification with a vengeance in Tribeca and beyond, as lofts became synonymous with airy storage units of flooding sunlight, gleaming bowling-alley hardwood floors, and quirkily amusing, slayingly chic art pieces chosen and arranged just so as tribal taste trophies, a photo layout of a setup perfect to raise a super-race of test-tube babies. Loft living in the mid-seventies was still in its pioneer post-factory, rat-haven phase, the elevators lowering and lifting like a large, groaning apprehension (as if operated by Marley’s chain-hanging ghost from
A Christmas Carol
), the thick-piped plumbing still in its early Soviet phase, these industrial garrets too hot in summer, too cold in winter, but spacious enough to carry a bowling-alley echo. What I remember of the Heads’ loft was the purposeful clutter of instruments, amps, tape recorders, and reading materials strategically stacked, with a rope hung down the middle to divide Tina and Chris’s personal digs from David’s, reminiscent of
It Happened One Night
without the curvy shadow-play peep show. Although they were artists from an art school living in an art loft, they weren’t slumming, trying noble poverty on for size; they were making their place in the outdoor urinal of downtown as hardily as any glue-head fleeing the czarist oppression of Queens.

Even so, what wasn’t clear from the Heads’ fledgling performances was how much infantry stamina and pilot altitude potential they possessed, or whether they were future sugar dispensers, their encore cover of the bubblegum hit “1, 2, 3 Red Light” raising questions of how campy-cute they might go. (One of the three also expressed a fondness for “Chewy, Chewy,” though I don’t believe they ever pulled that molar-remover out of their candy box to perform.) Critics love dealing with raised questions, especially if they’ve raised them themselves from tiny qualms. I should have heeded—I later did—Pauline’s great throwaway perception in her review of Mailer’s cinema-verité Cassavetes-style police station psychodrama
Wild 90
, in which she compared Mailer’s Renaissance ambitions with Jean Cocteau’s multi-artistry as poet-filmmaker-novelist-designer. Mailer may be a two-fisted macho hombre, Pauline wrote, but those wiry cats like Cocteau are tougher than they look, making Mailer the moviemaker appear all blubber. No band or Symbolist poet wielding a Stratocaster below Fourteenth Street was carrying a blubber load, but compared with the cloudy turrets of the interior castles Television was climbing or the wood chipper the Ramones stuffed their sound into, the Heads could look deceptively light, a model airplane with an erratic flight pattern. But while so many others kept drilling the same woodpecker holes until their beaks bent funny, it was Byrne who would emerge as the Cocteau-esque Shiva figure—a visionary soundscaper (
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
, his collaboration with Brian Eno), movie director (
True Stories
, which didn’t receive its due and still doesn’t), gallery artist, conceptual book designer, composer of string quartets and a song cycle about Imelda Marcos (with Fatboy Slim), America’s unofficial ambassador to Brazilian music, and, his hair now holy white, an apostle of urban sustainability, globally light-footing-it through his blog and the travel collection it produced,
Bicycle Diaries.
Byrne’s ambition was harder to spot at first because his voice broke like a choirboy’s and his head was always bobbing or askew, not Fixed in Purpose or rapture-lost. He was as willful as Verlaine, but his willfulness wove outward, toward the honeycombed world, whereas Verlaine’s narrowed to a shrinking portion of what he sought and fought to control. Byrne’s very accessibility, his approachability, set him apart from Verlaine and (later) Patti, whose don’t-bother-me-I’m-an-artist signs on their faces deterred those who might idly come knocking. One night a CBGB’s regular named Valerie, a gorgeous speed freak whose chat accelerated into gibberish the longer she hung at the bar, said to me, spotting Byrne, “I’m going to pick him up and swing him around.” “That I’d like to see,” I said. As David headed toward the stage area, nodding his bashful hellos, Valerie grabbed him around the chest in a skilled grappling move and twirled him around, and as he spun, he said, “Whoa!” like a teenager on an amusement park ride, and when she stopped, he pretended to act a little dizzy, as if bopped on the head by a fuzzy hammer. Had she tried that with Lou Reed, he might have burst into mummy dust.

As a unit the Heads got tighter, tougher, and yet looser, their Tin Man joints lubed, Byrne breaking out some funky-chicken moves as Chris and Tina laid a deeper bottom to their sound. They held their own on a billing with any band, even bands that acted as if they came up from the gutter and brought the gutter with them. And there was a personal tension that ticked between Tina and David, captured cunningly in a YouTube video that cuts between their faces as they perform “Warning Sign,” the dueling close-ups indicative, prophetic, of a hairline fracture building to something bigger. If I can pinpoint the moment the Heads burst through the attic and pointed north, it was the night when they introduced a new number, “Pulled Up,” where the joy-whoop of “you pulled me up, up, up,
up, up, up
!” expressed a giddy, salvational energy that left Warholism behind like a toy-model village as Astronaut Byrne shed gravity and saw angels knocking around. Not Blakean angels, like Patti’s, but Japanese toy ones.

The scene filled up, the club filled up, more and more of the sidewalk out in front of CBGB’s being taken up between sets as the more bodies inside made greater the need to air out. With no flash-mob mentality or YouTube clip-load rushing everyone forward in random abandon, the slower pace of print and word of mouth allowed the scene to develop organically, roughly coalesce into what Brian Eno would call “scenius,” the genius of a communal mind in group neurotransmission. There was a buzzy atmosphere of something happening but no bent ceiling of overriding importance or heavy expectation to suffocate impulses before they could give themselves a try. Rising to the moment can be overrated, unless we’re talking fifth-set tiebreaker. CBGB’s taught me that some of the most momentous performances occur when not much is on the line, nothing’s immediately at stake, and the rest of the world dissolves until there’s only us campfire girls gathered. Television’s insomniac second sets, late into the a.m. after most had headed home—if splinters of Verlaine’s solos don’t flash before my eyes before I die, I’m going to feel cheated.

I knew Lester before I met him, talking to him on the phone long-distance in his role as one of the editors of
Creem
, the rock magazine located in Birmingham, Michigan, between the bicoastal, bipolar musical power points and yet exerting a journalistic-critical-cultural goofball influence as infectious in its parodic whammy as
Animal House
or Mort Drucker’s movie parodies for
Mad
magazine. “Talking to him” is a slight misnomer, since Lester did most of the talking; he nearly always did the bulk of the dialogue, like an all-night DJ in a record-strewn booth with an inexhaustible bag of spontaneous bop and enough stimulants on hand to make it to dawn with mind and mouth still going. I did some reviews for Lester at
Creem
, including one that still makes me happy to discover tucked away on the Internet, a review of Eno’s solo electronic album
Discreet Music
, its ambient sounds and its gentle wash of alpha waves not yet the New Age wallpaper for every yoga class, massage studio, and meditation enhancer. “This must be the first piece in
Creem
that quotes Balanchine,” Lester said. I had cited Balanchine’s Apollonian quip, “Some like it hot and some like it cold, and I like ice cream,” and unlike so many other editors Lester didn’t ask for references to be trimmed because the readers wouldn’t “get it.” (Today it’s assumed the average reader won’t get anything that isn’t TV related.)
Creem
was a great place to write because they gave your enthusiasms galloping rein (pro or con), appreciated humor that ricocheted out of nowhere, and didn’t fly-bugger every comma in your copy or try to get you to round off your opinion phrasings, “like those fuckers at
Rolling Stone
,” as Lester said.

But there was one oddity to Lester’s nocturnal calls: he would sometimes repeat in successive conversations, once
three
times in a single week, anecdotes that he had told me the previous time we spoke. From distinguished old bores who had sat at many captain’s tables, this might not have been unusual, but Lester wasn’t old and almost never a bore, at least for the first hour. The initial time it happened, I just let him unfurl it as if I hadn’t heard it before, figuring he talked to so many people he had simply forgotten. Then it happened again, and this time I thought it might be some kind of put-on, like an Andy Kaufman routine, testing how far he could take it. I didn’t interrupt this time either, going along with the gag. Only it wasn’t a gag, it was some other inscrutable sub-modality of performance. All people repeat themselves, there are dreaded hostage takers who entrap a dinner party or casual get-together with the same vine-covered story they’ve told since Moses was beardless, but what was different was that Lester wouldn’t stop even after you said, “Oh, yeah, you told me about that,” proceeding as if he hadn’t heard you and telling the story the exact same way he had before, with the same pauses, the same inflections, even the same anticipatory laughs as he relished the next bit in the story (as if they had been written as italicized cues adjoining the dialogue in a radio script) and sped up toward the payoff line. I would later know cokeheads who wouldn’t brake their spiel even as I put down the phone, tiptoed to the bathroom, peed, washed my hands like a priest before mass, and then picked up the phone again as if I had been there the whole time. But it was never the
same
spiel, as if the playback button had been pressed. I filed Lester’s repetition compulsion away as a minor interesting anomaly until he came to New York on a record-company junket, I believe, and a group of us visited him at the hotel he was being put up at and he entertained us with a boom box—a ghetto blaster was the parlance in favor then, until the term made liberals nervous in their service, to quote that distinguished theologian, Reverend Ike—which was loaded not with music but with a tape of Travis Bickle’s mirror monologue from
Taxi Driver.
“You talking to me? You talking to me? You talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here.” I can’t say this was a speech that won its way into my heart when I saw/heard it the first time in the actual film—I’ve always thought it smacked more of an actor’s improv audition than a prize scene to be set on the mantel next to Brando’s wounded lament to his brother in
On the Waterfront
(“you shudda took care of me, Charley”)—but even if it had earned a spot on my personal Oscar shelf, it wasn’t something I wanted to hear replayed at DEAFENING VOLUME until each vowel cracked and splintered with static. It also made conversation nigh impossible, which may have been Lester’s passive-aggressive intention, his perverse way of dominating a discussion even without having to say anything. Whatever the explanation, assuming there was one, it smacked of mind-fuck, though in fairness Lester never pulled anything like that again, at least in my vicinity.

It must have been later that year—1976—that Lester moved to New York from Michigan, ready to take the next ramp up in his career, one that led away from strictly rock reviewing and tour de force rampages (however fantastically baroque and comic a canvas he had made them for his paint-gun blasts, as in his much-beloved “James Taylor Marked for Death” and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves,” in which Lou Reed was valentined, among other things, as “a panderer living off the dumbbell nihilism of a seventies generation that doesn’t have the energy to commit suicide”) into a dressier salon of journalism, where you weren’t treated as an itinerant peddler. Lester had a much more difficult freshman orientation experience than I did, because I came to New York a nobody with no reputation to live up to, whereas Lester had a well-publicized clownish side that made fans anticipate/expect antics, of which he had a Santa bagful. Sometimes the hijinks bubbled up out of pure ebullience, other times it was the alcohol/cough syrup/whatever taking to the stage for a sweaty workout. This may have been no different from the way he behaved in Michigan or on press junkets. What was different was that in New York in general, the local rock scene in particular, and CBGB’s in super-particular, he found the audience less receptive, and he in turn was less entranced by his newly adopted milieu: the recipe for a sour letdown. He would watch some band performing in the beery late hours and complain, “It’s not exactly Iggy,” meaning Iggy and the Stooges, and, true, no one onstage was rolling around on glass shards and flaunting Adonis abs for the greater glory of the sun god; likewise, he would compare some hard-charging unit unfavorably to the MC5. He would go on and on about how Television was essentially no diff from the Grateful Dead with their endless guitar ragas, a way of putting down Television without conceding a few points of originality. And it may have had more than a little to do with Lester’s having bumped against Verlaine’s bug repellent of fine-meshed, inviolable indifference, Lester’s attempts to engage/amuse/mildly goad Verlaine (at least those I witnessed) deflected with a shrug and a James Dean drag of cigarette. Lester got along better with CBGB’s rockers—members of the Dictators, for example—who appreciated his gags because they had their own humor routines going, a burlesque bombast that enjoyed strutting the wrestling ring.