Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (12 page)

Once his manager was gone Cotton turned and, as if noticing me for the first time, said, “You suppose you could do me a favor, young man?”

“Of course,” I said.

“I need to get some medicine.”

“Sure,” I said.

This would make awesome color for my story. What could be better than fetching medicine for a dying, legendary bluesman? I pondered what sort of medicine the old fellow might need. Hopefully it would be something dramatic, such as nitroglycerin tablets.

“We gotta drive somewhere,” Cotton said.

He was whispering and so I whispered back, “Okay, let me get my friend. He has the car.”

“Hurry now,” Cotton said.

It did not occur to me to question why Cotton had entrusted this medical task to me, rather than (say) his manager, or a person in some way affiliated with his tour. I was really a very sheltered human being.
Nonetheless, I fetched Holden and Cotton stood up and placed himself in our custody.

“You all got a liquor store around here?” he said.

“I guess,” Holden said. “We can find one.”

The situation now dawned on me: my dying bluesman was in fact an alcoholic, dying, perhaps, of alcoholism. This put a certain spin on the current scenario, made it seem potentially less heartwarming and more sort of criminally negligent. At the same time, I felt I’d committed myself to the cause of James Cotton. He was the star and therefore in charge of the unfolding events and I was, in this respect, merely following orders.

And so we three proceeded toward a rear exit door, Cotton tottering along happily, until we heard someone address him from the other side of the stage. A brief low-speed chase ensued. The manager—not wanting to attract undue attention—walked briskly after us. Cotton reached for the door. “Hurry now,” he muttered gamely. His manager drew closer, softly calling, “James? James? Where do you think you’re
going
, James?”

I was not granted further interview time.

3. Regaling Dan Bern During His Pre-show Bowel Movement
Let me start by noting that my admiration for Bern dated back to an advance copy of his 1996 EP,
Dog Boy Van
, and quickly blossomed into full-scale dementia. Bern is best known these days as the guy who wrote the songs for the faux biopic
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
. But back in the late nineties, there was a small but stubborn contingent of us who considered him the heir apparent to Dylan: an adenoidal midwestern Jew who wrote brilliant rambling folk songs. “The day that Elvis died it was like a mercy killing,” he sang, and my chest went pitter-patter.

I’d been waiting years to see Bern in concert when he finally played a show in Cambridge. I showed up hours early and milled around
the merch table. I bought his mimeographed book of poetry. I waited. He eventually appeared and was set upon by a pack of smitten college kids.

“What is there to do around here?” Bern said. Someone mentioned candlepin bowling. He looked at the prettiest of the girls—she had short black hair and a generous bosom—and said, “What are
you
going to do?” The girl blushed. They agreed to meet up later. I was mildly disgusted and deeply impressed. Then Bern excused himself and went into the bathroom.

Why did I follow him into that bathroom? I suppose because I do not have a generous bosom and therefore assumed my only possible audience with Bern would be an at-sink rendezvous during which I could ask him to sign his book. This would segue to a broader discussion of literature and art, one so enthralling that Bern would insist we hang after the show, to hell with getting blown by the black-haired chick on lane twelve!

He was in the stall. I had a brief Larry Craigish notion: I could sit down in the stall next to him. But it was one of those giant handicapped jobbers and I couldn’t quite get myself there. I considered exiting the bathroom, but that struck me as a form of surrender. I was a fan, after all. I had pimped the man’s work far and wide. Without dudes like me, there were no easy blowjobs. If you really thought about it (and I was really thinking about it, there in the bathroom, as only a DF can), the guy owed me. Bern had been in the stall for a minute or two by now. So I said, in a loud nervous voice, the kind of voice you might use upon greeting someone at a crowded party, “Hey, Dan Bern!”

There was a long silence.

I guess it sort of goes without saying that I was not seeing things from Bern’s point of view.

“Yeah?” he said finally.

“I just wanted to say, you know, I love your music!”

More silence.

“I’m a big fan,” I added.

Bern said, at most, if I didn’t just make this up, “Thanks.”

“Yeah, I’ve got all your records, all the way back to
Dog Boy Van
. I reviewed a couple of them for the
Miami New Times
, the weekly down in Miami, I was the music editor down there for a while, though I’m a writer now, you know, fiction, poetry, that kind of thing, though I still do some editing on the side just to pay the bills, whatever, actually we might know a few people in common …” I began listing people we might know in common.

At a certain point, two guys walked into the bathroom. I was talking excitedly in the direction of a bathroom stall. They stared.

“Right!” I said. “Okay. We can talk later on, I guess.”

4. Nearly Getting Stomped by Kid Frost
I very much doubt you’ve heard of Kid Frost, but I spent most of 1990 listening to his debut,
Hispanic Causing Panic
. I was an Anglo carpetbagger living in El Paso and trying to expand my Spanish vocabulary beyond
chimichanga
. Listening to Frost’s raspy sermons about street life made me feel as if I were bonding with the city’s Chicano underclass. (I was not.)

When Frost’s name appeared as an opening act on a rap tour heading to El Paso, I arranged a phone interview. Frost did a lot of cussing. He was in a dark mood, he said, because his cousin had just gotten arrested. It was the sort of detail that made me feel we had bonded.

This, I suspect, is why I felt no compunction about approaching him when I spotted him swaggering through the lobby of the arena before his set. “Kid Frost,” I called out. “Mr. Frost, or maybe it’s just Frost! I’m from the
El Paso Times
. I interviewed you for the newspaper!”

Frost glared at me with his hooded eyes. He was radiating menace, as befitted a budding hip-hop star in a public setting. But my Drooling Fanaticism wouldn’t allow me to see this. I assumed Kid Frost had read my glowing profile and felt embarrassed. Kid Frost was
shy
.

“I’m a big fan of your music,” I said.
“Fanático grande.”

Kid Frost continued to glare at me (shyly!). Because I could think of nothing else to say and because I imagined referencing his cousin would somehow make me sound “down” with his “struggle” and that of La Raza in general, I added, “I hope your cousin is doing okay.”

His eyes narrowed. “What’d you hear about my cousin?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just that he was, you know—”

“Don’t fucking say
nothing
about my cousin.”

Frost scanned the lobby for potential witnesses.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was just, because remember we talked about—”

Frost flexed the fingers of his right hand and leaned toward me. The air between us was ripe with Paco Rabanne cologne, his, mine, ours. He murmured something in Spanish, of which all I could make out was a conjugation of the verb
chingar:
to fuck. Did Kid Frost want to fuck me?

He set his hand on my chest and gave a brisk shove.

Shit
, I thought,
I have somewhat misread this situation and am now going to get boot-stomped by a guy in patent leather shoes
.

But Frost saw something that gave him pause (a security guard, it would turn out) and brushed past me.

5. Smoking More Pot Than Bob Marley and Possibly the Wailers Before Entering Graceland
Why did I do this? Because I was secretly dreading Graceland, the preening necrophilia of the scene, that tawdry American knack for spiritual projection, for worshipping the wrong savior for the wrong reason in the wrong way. I figured getting stoned might make the experience seem more profound, and therefore less depressing. It’s the same doomed theory I continually apply to Hollywood films.

I needed Graceland to be profound, at least a little, because I had driven seven hundred miles to be there, as a favor to my lovesick friend Tina who was, unbeknownst to me, a Devout Elvis Person. It was a bit
like discovering someone is Born Again. You have to respect the purity, but you don’t really want to hear the rap. So I smoked bowl after bowl until I could no longer locate my mouth. We boarded a bus full of more Devout Elvis People, southern grandmas with big purses and sullen midwestern Goth kids and packs of cameraed Japanese. As we entered the estate, they fell into a collective and dreadful hush.

A female staffer (blond, hot-kinked, erotically nervous) met us in the foyer with our audio kits. I kept forgetting I was wearing headphones and yelling at Tina: “HEY! YOU KNOW WHAT THE JUNGLE ROOM LOOKS LIKE? IT’S LIKE AFRICA IF THEY SOLD AFRICA ON THE
HOME SHOPPING NETWORK!
WHY ARE THE WALLS COVERED IN TWINE? DID ELVIS’ PARENTS REALLY SLEEP IN THESE BEDS? COULDN’T HE HAVE GOTTEN THEM BIGGER BEDS? THAT’S FUCKED UP.”

This was Graceland in a nutshell. It was supposed to be about the grandeur of the King, but it kept being about his humiliation: Elvis sprawls on the white couchette in his media room with a plate of bacon, watching three TVs at once. Then he tries to beat back the fat with bennies and he can’t sleep at night so he sits up composing his list of enemies. Then he shoots at his radar range. Then he visits Nixon. Then he does karate and pulls something. Then he can’t get out of bed and they cancel the tour. Then he falls off his toilet and dies.

Devout Elvis People were everywhere, snapping photos of gold records. The reverence was suffocating. I retreated to the top of a carpeted staircase and found myself staring into a darkened room. Where was I? Where was Tina? Why was there a rope across the doorway with a sign reading
NO TRESPASSING
? Wasn’t trespassing more or less the business model at Graceland?

A voice beckoned me from the bottom of the stairs. “Sir!” A young man stood frowning at me. The name tag on his oversized blazer read
KEVIN
.

“Where am I?” I said.

“Those are private quarters, sir.”

“People still live here?”

Kevin said, “You need to come downstairs, sir. Right now.”

Kevin was right. I needed to come downstairs. I needed to flee Graceland and take a hot shower. But the pot wouldn’t let me. It kept telling me that I should leap over the rope and breach the private quarters and find the bathroom where Elvis breathed his last and drop a symbolic deuce. Bad pot.
Bad
.

“Are we going to have a problem?” Kevin said. He was trying to sound official. He touched at the tender spray of acne on his right cheek.

I found Tina outside and we proceeded from the shooting range to the nearby Meditation Garden. Elvis was actually buried in the Meditation Garden, which I did not understand at all. Did Elvis consider death a form of extreme meditation? I wanted to ask Tina, but she was weeping. Nearly everyone around me was weeping. They were weeping and taking photos of each other and I knew that, in a few weeks, when they got their photos from Graceland back, they’d gaze at these images of themselves weeping in front of Elvis’s grave and start weeping again. And this thought made me sad for America, the great disconnect between our personal causes for grief and our actual tears, and though I was not sad enough to start weeping myself I did flee to the gift shop where, in a final spasm of defiance, I shoplifted an official Elvis wristwatch.

5a. Failing to Recognize (the Very Next Morning) That the Man Preaching at Al Green’s Full Gospel Tabernacle Church Was, in Fact, the Reverend Al Green, Even After He Began Singing “Let’s Stay Together” Because I’d Assumed Al Green Was Fat Like Barry White
No, I was not stoned.

On the Varieties of Fanatical Experience

I’ve been trying to make the case—in my own discombobulated case-making fashion—for Drooling Fanaticism as a spiritual condition, that music is, for some of us, the chosen path toward what William James called “a larger, richer, more satisfying life.” James was talking about God, but I’ll happily regard that as a term of convenience for That Which We Worship with Irrational and Perhaps Head-Banging Glee.

In fact, I’m willing to argue at this point that we are all Drooling Fanatics, that every single human being carries within him or her the need for music and that we differ only in matters of degree and expression. If this were another sort of book—a book with intellectual self-respect, for instance—I would support this assertion with a tantalizing anthropological survey of musical devotion within indigenous cultures, and assorted neurological data vector astonishments. Instead, we’ll all have to settle for another bleak memory from my days as a bumbling lothario. This one takes place in various provinces of Eastern Europe, where I traveled in the spring of 1997 to woo a beautiful exchange student and was mistakenly bludgeoned by the Rosetta Stone of pop music.