Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (15 page)

Unfortunately for Kevin, we ended up listening to a tape of the show on the drive home. And, once we were able to actually hear him sing, realized that, even with his awesome rock look, he sounded kind of like Yoko Ono with a bad cold, so we cut him loose. He was a little bummed at first, but once we explained to him that thing about how rock ’n’ roll can be a cruel mistress, Kevin was cool about it and we were able to remain friends.

Shortly after we gave Kevin the boot, I was approached by a guy named John from Queens who lived in the same dorm and, since we practiced at deafening volumes in my room at the time, couldn’t help but hear us.

“You’re in Sons of Elvis, right?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I mumbled, playing it cool.

“You should have me be your singer.”

“Can you sing?” I asked him while trying to pretend that I wasn’t even going to listen to his answer.

“Yeah, I can sing my balls off.”

John was handsome, confident, and owned a leather jacket—three key ingredients to being a singer in a band. On top of that, he actually could sing his balls off. All of us, himself included, just assumed he was our new singer a few minutes into his audition. We even went out and bought beer and stood around drinking it together after practice, just like real rockers do. It was really, really cool.

As loud as we were, it didn’t take long before school officials banned us from practicing in my dorm room anymore, so somehow we managed to talk our friends Tom and Brian into letting us practice in the kitchen of their off-campus apartment. By then, I was really getting into playing the bass, so I agreed to play it full time instead of switching instruments with Tim every few songs. I had also recently read that Bill Wyman got more chicks than anyone else in the Stones, so given the relative absence of women in my life at the time, I couldn’t afford to take any more chances. We began practicing two or three times a week, writing as many songs as we could while ripping off the Replacements, Aerosmith and whomever else we considered to be gods whenever possible. Before long, we were the best band on campus as far as we were concerned (the fact that we were the only band on campus seemed entirely irrelevant), and didn’t waste any time letting everyone else know we thought so. It was kind of like we were Oasis, only without any of the fame, success, or cool hair.

The new and improved Sons of Elvis played gigs in Manhattan wherever and whenever anyone would have us, usually borrowing a friend’s car to take our equipment and however many band members could fit, while whoever was left after that hopped on the subway. By the time graduation neared, we knew we wanted nothing to do with anything most of our friends were planning on getting involved with after finishing school—stuff like jobs, haircuts, and other unthinkable acts.

“Where are you planning on sending your résumé?” a classmate would ask.

“Nowhere,” we’d respond.

The plan was just to get a big record deal and take over the world with our unstoppable rock attack. We expected a bidding war as soon as all the big record labels in town heard even a couple notes of our music. An entertainment lawyer named Keith thought we were almost as awesome as we did and agreed to play our music for every label in town. We assumed it would probably be just a matter of weeks before we were driving cars into swimming pools, dating eighteen-year-old Brazilian models, and firing pistols at television sets (you know, stuff total rock stars do).

Unfortunately, however, none of the big record labels seemed to hear what we were hearing on that demo tape, and the bidding war we were counting on never really escalated beyond a brief misunderstanding at best. Eventually, however, we managed to get signed to a small independent record label that consisted entirely of a guy named Joe who rented a one-room office with a single telephone in SoHo. The important thing, though, was that he thought we were almost as awesome as Keith did, which made him the second biggest Sons of Elvis fan we had ever met.

“You guys are great,” Joe told us.

“Yeah, we know,” we responded.

With the money Joe gave us, we loaded up our equipment into a van and dragged it to a recording studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, to record what we assumed would be our multiplatinum debut. Keith’s friend Doug, who had worked with bands like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and others we dreamed of becoming more popular than, flew out from Wisconsin to produce the album. Together, we worked night and day for a week and a half, sleeping only occasionally in an apartment above the studio. There was almost no time for rock ’n’ roll debauchery, though one night John and I drank enough cheap red wine to think it was a really good idea to run around the block naked (for some reason, no one seemed to think it was as funny as we did, though).

We decided to name our debut album
Glodean,
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after Barry White’s
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wife since we listened to him constantly at the time. It was released about eight months later and we braced ourselves for the sheer pandemonium we expected to ensue. Instead, however, Joe’s record label ended up going out of business a couple of months afterward and for a while we just handed out copies of our album to friends, whether they wanted it or not. Fortunately, however, Keith and Joe managed to get Priority Records, a hip-hop label best known for putting out albums by N.W.A., Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, and other guys we didn’t sound that much like, to rerelease the album a few months later.

Despite not arranging for us to hang out with gangsta rappers as much as we had hoped, Priority succeeded in getting our album into stores and our songs on the radio, especially in mine, Pat, and Tim’s hometown of Cleveland. One day I was driving down the street and heard our single “Formaldehyde” playing on two different stations at the same time. I almost drove into a tree.

“This must be how the Beatles felt,” I told my mom.

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

Maybe even cooler than hearing our music on the radio was seeing the video we made for the song on MTV, which—being 1995 and all—still meant something. After all those years of being glued to MTV as a kid, it was awesome to actually see ourselves on the channel, even if it was almost always after midnight when our video came on. We also got to be the musical guests on an episode of Jon Stewart’s late-night, pre–
Daily Show
vehicle
The Jon Stewart Show,
where they gave us our own dressing room filled with mini candy bars and as many cold cuts as we could handle. We felt like kings.

Sons of Elvis also hit the road for our first national tour. Priority loaned us money for a van and we used it to buy a massive state-of-the-art circa 1982 black conversion van complete with a tiny television, VCR, and CB radio. We also hired a tour manager named Pete and a roadie named Mark, who both dressed in black at all times, even when they slept. Pete and Mark had also just finished working for the seemingly Satanic metal band Danzig, which made us feel like we were in really good hands.

“If you want, I’ll see to it that only chicks are allowed backstage,” Mark would tell us. There was rarely anyone—male or female—wanting to come backstage most nights, but we still loved his can-do attitude.

The Sons of Elvis rock assault on the United States lasted six weeks, during which we played just about everywhere east of the proverbial Mississippi. After years of playing mostly to our friends, it was great to finally play in front of a room full of strangers, even on those rare nights when there were more people on stage than in the audience. Along the way, we also managed to play a handful of huge outdoor radio festivals with bands such as Bush, Alanis Morrissette, and other people who sold several million more albums than we did. And even if most of the twenty thousand or so people in attendance might just have been waiting for the headliner to come on while we played, it was easy to pretend they were all there just to see us. We also believed it was only a matter of time before that was actually the case.

One of my favorite shows we ever played was opening up for Slash, who was doing a solo tour while the original lineup of Guns N’ Roses was slowly falling apart.

“Hi, I’m Slash,” he said to us before we had a chance to introduce ourselves.

“Uh, yeah, we picked up on that,” I thought.

By then Slash had already long been one of the most recognizable musicians on the planet, so I thought it was cool of him to actually tell us his name rather than take it for granted that we knew exactly who the guy standing there in a top hat and shades was. As if that weren’t enough, Slash let us take as many sandwiches as we wanted from his sprawling deli tray backstage, which made me feel like my bandmates and I had officially arrived. I wasn’t even hungry, but I still ate a couple anyway just to celebrate. They were especially delicious, too, because they tasted of achievement.

“I’m sure I’ll see you guys again soon,” Slash said as we shook hands at the end of the night. I almost had a seizure. As shocking as it may seem, Slash and I haven’t seen each other since, but I still loved that he made us feel like his rock ’n’ roll peers, if only for one night.

Just as it seemed like things were poised to explode, the endless parade of free sandwiches, Motel 6’s, and teenagers who had gotten a ride to our show from their parents began to slowly die down not long after that show we played with Slash. Our label wanted us to stop touring, ostensibly to make a new album, the one we were counting on to go platinum since the first one ended up selling about 964,578 less than needed to make that happen. Naturally, I had assumed we’d release that new album, hit the road again, probably meet up with Slash at some point, and soon enough the big bucks would start rolling in. It seemed like a solid rock ’n’ roll game plan to me. However, we had been assigned a new A&R
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guy at Priority and he didn’t seem to share my band’s opinion that we were writing hits.

“I, uh … hate it,” the new A&R guy told me on the phone one day, struggling for words to accurately describe how he felt about the new tunes we’d cooked up so far.

“Oh, um, okay,” I replied. “What exactly do you hate about it?”

“Mostly the guitar, bass, drums, and singing, I guess.”

This didn’t seem necessarily good. Not long after that, I got a phone call from Tim.

“We’ve been dropped from the label,” he told me.

Impressively confident under the circumstances, we figured some other label would snatch us up as soon as word got out that we were free agents, but that, well, never happened. We never officially broke up, but after having tasted the sweet life, we were unable to keep the rock machine running much longer under those grim and entirely unglamorous circumstances. And since my parents had started hiding their wallets from me by then, I eventually had to break down and get one of those jobs my mom kept talking about.

To avoid actually giving in and working for the man (a very nonrock thing to do), I ended up starting my own one-man house-painting business (a very rock thing for the broke rocker to do, you know, as far as actually getting a job goes). Most days, I drove myself to work in Sons of Elvis’s nearly broken-down touring van, the symbolism of which was completely lost on me at the time.

One day I was hired to paint a fifteen-year-old girl’s bedroom while she was away at summer camp.

“Would you like a radio to listen to while you work?” the girl’s mother asked as I stood there in my paint-spattered work clothes, bracing myself for the task at hand.

“Sure,” I said.

She returned a few minutes later with a large portable CD player. It was hard not to notice that there was a giant Sons of Elvis sticker plastered to the side of it.

“Ouch,” I thought. “That’s gonna leave a mark.”

It seemed like just a few months ago I was playing with my band in front of tens of thousands of people at huge, outdoor music festivals where everyone wanted our autographs and sometimes even more.
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Now here I was painting butterflies, flowers, and whatever other girly stuff I could come up with on some teenager’s bedroom wall, my once luxurious, post-grunge rock ’n’ roll mane now encrusted in dried paint and spackling paste. As I stood there letting all that sink in, it dawned on me that rock ’n’ roll can not only be a cruel mistress, it can also be a total fucking bitch when it wants to. But then I thought about it a little more and chose to look at the situation a little differently.

“Whoa,” I suddenly mused. “This girl is away at summer camp and has absolutely no idea that her favorite member of her favorite rock band of all time is painting her bedroom right now. She’s gotta be the luckiest kid in the whole wide world. If she only knew, if she only knew.”

Sometimes it really is all about perspective.
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A Funny Feeling

Being “in the arts” is never easy. In addition to all the clove cigarettes, scented candles, and ultimately regrettable haircuts, the artist is almost guaranteed to experience firsthand either clinical depression or addiction, or maybe even both at some point in his or her creative life. To its credit, though, addiction has plenty of plus sides—addicts often have great parties and even better outfits, for example. But, aside from rapid weight loss and enhanced cheekbone definition, depression just kind of sucks. I learned that for myself shortly after college, a popular time, statistically speaking, for that sort of thing to kick in whether you are thinking of forming a band or going to school for graphic design or not.

Looking back on it, depression had likely been plotting its attack on me for a while. Not only was I a fairly anxious and worrisome kid, but I also come from a long line of people who furrow their brow and grit their teeth for no apparent reason. For the most part, though, it seemed like depression just decided to show up one day like an annoying relative I never even knew I had.

It was a Saturday morning and I had spent the night before—as I did most Fridays—loading up on all-you-can-drink wine and assorted fried things with friends at a Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side and then stumbling around Manhattan until we were either no longer certain we were going to live forever or one of us passed out on the sidewalk, whichever came first. I don’t blame any of those things for what happened next (though the gallon of wine probably didn’t help much), but when I woke up the following morning I felt extremely off. Sure, I had a hangover—those had been business as usual since college (high-five!). But, in addition to that familiar headache, grogginess, and begging of one of my roommates to buy me a burrito, a tidal wave of paranoia, panic, and despair had also shown up for brunch.