Adios, Motherfucker Read online

  Matt and I occasionally drove to Brighton, to Dwayne’s, Matt’s blissed-out, dreadlocked, muumuu-wearing manager at the coffee place, to listen to music. Listening to music was a primary activity, something you drove or rode the T somewhere to do.

  Dwayne’s apartment was floor-to ceiling with records, CDs, cassettes, and all manner of counterculture ephemera, alphabetized and organized in his own Dewey decimal system. It was customary there to smoke debilitating chillums of hash—perfect, said Dwayne, expounding lotus-legged, for “clearing the mind of shadows.” Each record Dwayne put on the turntable (invisibly white-gloved, fingers never touching the grooves) he accompanied with his own, extensive liner notes. Early blues and Depression-era reefer jazz—Bill Broonzy, Oscar Peterson, Jelly Roll Morton (Jelly Roll Morton sledgehammered the piano at neck-break tempos, singing If you don’t shake, you don’t get no cake/If you don’t rock, don’t get no cock/You don’t fuck, you don’t have no luck, on a 78 record as thick as a manhole cover, pre-everything, and accompanied by a clarinetist who also happened to be a contortionist—this made an impression); Dwayne could, and did, go on about Sol Hoopii, king of Hawaiian steel guitar, who we couldn’t get enough of; German experimental rock like Can, and weirder; Ornette Coleman and other free jazz wackos; the Skatalites’ ska and proto-Reggae and early Bob Marley were predictably an area of expertise for Dwayne, and the deeper you dug there the better it got; and, if Dwayne’s living space wasn’t tribute enough, he kept his prized collection of Alan Lomax field recordings in a special bookcase. Dwayne was also something of an authority on Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, who we could listen to all day, flipping through Dwayne’s Freak Brothers comix and back issues of Mad magazine, while Dwayne reposed in his breakfast nook with superlatively exotic tea, and feathered hash cakes with the tea pick.

  3

  AN UNBAND

  Matt lived in a duplex in a village on the other side of town. His room was in the eaves, a refuge full of records and books behind a couple of Indian blankets hung for a door. You could only stand fully upright in the middle of the room because of the eaves. His record collection dwarfed mine (Stones, Mission of Burma, Gregorian chants, Frank Sinatra), and he had a stereo system suitable for audiophiles; components, and vinyl care accessories. We spent a lot of time up there, scrutinizing Thelonious Monk, Pretty Things, Beefheart, Velvets, Peter and the Test Tube Babies, Sidney Bechet, Venom. Matt had just hit legal drinking age and would sometimes have a six-pack at home. He liked his beer imported, bitter, milkshake-thick, that I’d wash down with Scotch from my flask. Often I’d stay for dinner with Matt’s family. His father, Harry, was an attorney with an anti-authoritarian streak and an ethical backbone (some lawyers would say polio) that sometimes made him gavel the dining room table with a chicken drumstick regarding the tribulations of the Little Guy. If he went too long or too far, Matt’s mom, Barbara—like my mother (also Barbara), non–New Englanders might mistake her sarcasm and natural practicality for two different traits—might signal him to wind it up, by invisible tomahawk. Harry would oblige, apologize for raising his voice if he had, check that everyone was getting enough to eat, and either drop the matter or proceed to his summation, often re-incensing himself. Matt’s sister was in the same class at North High as my sister, and he had two younger brothers, one of whom wore Coke-bottle glasses and a Red Sox jersey, home or away, depending, and seemed unusually organized and responsible; his youngest brother held a fork upside down in his fist sat on phone books, and that’s as much as he let you know. Matt was the black sheep. If the concept even applied at the Pierces’ table, it wasn’t a negative.

  We were playing in earnest by now. He had songs, I had songs, others we would make up together, if not expressly writing any. There was no process, you held instruments and did it, without discussion. Then you had to go find a drummer. Locating one was no problem; you could spot them on the street. They wore T-shirts printed with drum equipment logos and air-drummed all the time. Some carried drumsticks and went around practicing repetitive drumming patterns as loud as they could on trolley seats, school desks, and car steering wheels, when they were sore from doing it on their thighs. If you saw one sitting on the T twirling a drumstick and accidentally made eye contact he might stick his chin out at you and say, “You lookin’ for a drummer?”

  Matt was particularly burnt when it came to drummers, having gone through something like eleven of them in a year in ASF. I suggested we try getting something together with Danny Harris, who played drums in the frat rock-ish band I played in. Unlike a lot of drummers, Danny maintained a standard rock drumset (not one with bell trees and tunable tom-toms, chimes . . . ), and didn’t hit the cymbals gratuitously, though he admitted that was due to his fear of losing the beat. He also had access to a place to play for free, in the basement of his folks’ house, a serious consideration.

  Danny was clean-cut, gregarious, college bound, and dating a cheerleader, all around likely to succeed, and he and Matt, suit jacket and air of raggedy erudition hardly disguising that he was a punk rocker, looked at each other with the mutual bafflement of an uncontacted tribesmen and an astronaut. To Matt, Danny looked “like a TV weatherman” (and so he soon would be) and privately Danny asked me if Matt’s accent was Eastern European, and if he was wearing makeup. Matt did sometimes employ a sort of drawl, for emphasis, and his non-Irish side was Hungarian. Hungary, Danny pointed out, was not far from Transylvania, “As the bat flies.” We wouldn’t be a permanent configuration.

  We started auditioning lead guitar players. We were after the right kind of lead guitar. “You Really Got Me,” and “Taxman,” as opposed to showy solos. Unfortunately, most lead guitar players didn’t aspire to Dave Davies and George Harrison, or even Jimmy Page. Most had to be Eddie Van Halen, or an unrelenting “shredder,” like Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen. There was usually a hold up while they plugged in a ton of effects pedals, delays and phasers and things, and then tried to figure out why they didn’t work, and after every song you found yourself standing around while they tried to perfect some pseudo-classical finger-tapping thing for a half hour: Diddly-diddly-KAAANG . . . “No, wait, hang on, I got it,” . . . diddle-diddle . . . “Shit! Wait, it’s like,” diddle-diddle . . . “Shit! Wait, no . . .” And so on. Either that or they were expert at it, and scribbled weird scales all over your songs indiscriminately. It soon became clear that lead guitar players were neither necessary nor tolerable and we did the first show as a trio, in the cafeteria of my high school.

  While we loaded our meager equipment onto the huge, linoleum-tiled stage, Matt mentioned that Eugene, the singer from Afghanistan Spoon Festival, might come down to sing the Go-Go’s cover we’d sort of learned, “Our Lips Are Sealed.” Eugene did come down and sing, as in leap, thrash, mosh, flail, flip, spring, punch, dive, roll, and scream. He was as good a punk singer as people said he was—better. He’d also brought a drum kit with him, a starter kit made for seven-year-olds, it looked like. He set the kit up next to Danny’s and bashed along with the rest of our set, winging it. Danny looked on confused, not least because he found himself barely audible on a kit thrice the size. The next day on the phone Danny said that Eugene’s drumming sounded like bowling balls rolling down a flight of stairs. He agreed that was a much better fit for us, and nobly bowed out.

  Eugene, whose last name, Ferrari, turned out to be his birth name, not a stage name, skated. He had a knack. He didn’t drink, smoke, or use drugs; as long as no one needed him for anything, he’d be in his driveway working on his ollie, or zipping around an empty swimming pool. He wore camouflage cutoffs, a short rotation of T-shirts (his handmade A.S.F. shirt, and one or two others), sweatsocks, and a pair of Vans, almost no variation, and took all his clothes off to play drums for the same reason he took them off to get in the shower, so they didn’t get wet. He carried no money on his person (when you turned to him in the supermarket line he’d say, “Jo junney,” his own rhyming slang, or he’d just make a quick squeak with his li
ps), could subsist on sliced bread and peanut butter, seemed virtually impervious to physical pain and duress, and when he was tired, once every few days, he simply deactivated himself, lying down on the spot to sleep, whether amps cranked all the way up were a foot from his head, or he was beneath an active skate ramp. It was as if he’d been created by a secret military experiment, a punky supersoldier.

  Eug lived with his parents, an engineer and an English professor—father and mother, respectively—in a turn-of-the-century Victorian, a maze of formal rooms, and not-so-formal rooms. He had the top floor to himself, and his bedroom was more than enough space for a band. And he kept it neat—ascetic compared to Matt’s and mine. The longest wall of the room was papered with hundreds of flyers for shows he’d been to. Meatmen, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Black Flag, Meat Puppets, Circle Jerks, Descendants, Fear; and local bands—SSD, the Freeze, Gang Green, Jerry’s Kids, Anal Cunt (A.C. in mixed company). He and Matt went to the hardcore matinees at the Channel, the Paradise, skate parks, VFWs, wherever; a scene I heard about mostly adjunct to hearing so-and-so got his head kicked in at a thing at a place. Hardcore kids had rules up the wazoo and it seemed they were always crawling up people’s ass something or other. Clothes, music, underdeveloped dietary ideas, whatever. And Straight Edge hardcore punks crusaded against alcohol and drugs, sometimes violently—no ringing endorsement for categorical sobriety. Eugene was Straight Edge but the only thing he was dogmatic about was not being dogmatic. And hardcore was dead. There had been proclamations, and puzzling (to me) obituaries, circulated in Xeroxed zines. For how long it had been dead was still debated, with fists. Eugene could trace the pathology along his wall, and had narrowed the time of death to an area near his window that represented a four-month range, about a year prior. The onset of rigor he could nail down to the hour, pointing to a single flyer. “Right there.”

  Summer then: cruising, coffee. We played music almost every day, whenever we were around musical instruments, between fits of laughter that several times made me wonder if anyone had ever been hospitalized for one. Songs came quickly, between marathon viewings of “The Young Ones,” Python’s “Flying Circus,” and This Is Spinal Tap, often a byproduct of trying to make each other laugh using only musical instruments. Any hesitancy about how a particular song should go, whether an original song or one we’d decided to cover (Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, the Vapors, Gary Glitter, Black Flag, Zeppelin—kind of), would be immediately interrupted by Eugene’s hyped count-in: “It goes like this,” then smashing his high hats, doubletime onetwothreefour. We’d shut up and barrel into it, always for the best. We kept the music fairly basic if not exactly straightforward (maybe the reverse of that), and lyrics were literal, and personal in the sense that they often described an object or experience occurring in the room with us at the time. “Where Are My Pills,” for example, was a hectic rave-up, yet simple enough to play while continuing to search around for a particular Altoids tin. “Wake Up, You’ve Been Asleep Too Long,” a Bavarian-sounding number, was composed as Eugene napped behind his drum kit, which he sometimes did, suddenly. You’d hear the drums drop out and look over to see he’d deactivated and curled up. It wasn’t uncommon for us to make music until we all passed out. Sleep deprivation was as much a creative tool as the vats of coffee that supported it.

  Saying we were in a band felt affected, and beside the point, so we said we were an un-band. We didn’t intend that to be a band name. It was just how we felt relative to your average band around us at the time.

  4

  GOOD MUSIC

  Take that record off, it sucks.

  Put this one on—shut up!

  Why do you shake your head?

  Didn’t you hear what I said?

  I said good music.

  —The Unband, “Good Music”

  At one of the mini-mansions skirting the golf course five-hundred-plus recent graduates were flailing, humping, vomiting, ramming their heads together, pissing, keeling over, and drinking potentially lethal quantities and combinations of booze through giant funnels attached to rubber hoses, commensurate with educational acheivement. In the ravaged formal dining room a mush blowhard called Spats botched a flaming shot, deleting his unibrow, and social standing, maybe forever. He wailed, disfigured, people chanting his name.

  Somewhere a band was playing Hendrix’s “Fire.” Coincidence? Maybe. I went to check it out. On my way through the kitchen a guy wearing only Reddi-Whip and a hockey helmet bowled himself through a pyramid of empties and straight through a cabinet door, where he lay egregia cum laude. I went down onto the lawless lawn.

  Up on the second-story deck the singer—fingerless gloves, tank top, white-guy funking Hendrix’s verse, “spicing it up,” took his hand off his sparkle-finish Charvel bass just long enough to overtly scratch himself when he sang “itchin’ desire.” Suggesting he had crabs, in case the Charvel and the fingerless gloves hadn’t. You could see how baked the drummer was from any vantage, including space, but he held on. The guitar player was the show, though—pogoing all over the deck in a Carnaby Street flower shirt, windmilling and pummeling a Gibson Standard Guitar, blind drunk and probably a lot more than that, headlining his own private Woodstock. Townshend’s flight-suited acid freak-out came to mind. He pulled a violin bow from somewhere and ground it across his guitar strings, producing a monstrous, psychedelic whinny, then smashed the bow to splinters against the porch rail, to wild, crapulous, acclaim and upthrust plastic cups below that seemed to inflate him physically. He tore off his guitar by the neck and detonated it against his amp—a Peavey, of course—and rammed the pieces through the speaker grille, then kicked the whole clanging, reverberating mess over and grabbed somebody’s drink as he walked through the slider and disappeared into the house, leaving the unholy Peavey-Gibson feedback creature shrieking on the porch—to more upthrust cups and wild, crapulous acclaim from the crowd below. The other two band guys, who the guitarist may or may not have known he was playing with, had their hands over their ears going what the fuck. That guitar player had a lot going on.

  Later I caught up with him—Mink Rockmore. Didn’t sound like a birth name, but neither did Newt Gingrich, or Eugene Ferrari. These were strange times. Mink sat in the passenger seat of the drummer’s pickup. We passed a bottle of Jack through the window making conversation about him coming to play some guitar with Matt, Eug, and me. Lead guitarists were still tits on a boar, but Mink was more event than lead guitarist. Not that he couldn’t play. He was beyond good—he sounded original. Mink said many things; very few were what you’d call conclusive, and exactly none confirmed whether he was actually British, or what decade he presumed to be living in. The drummer got in the truck, grumbling, and started the engine. As they pulled away Mink snatched the bottle from me, assuring me, for some reason, that I had nothing to worry about, he’s a professional. I wasn’t worried, it wasn’t my bottle. A wasted guy in a mortarboard with puke on it jogged after the truck, angrily wagging the destroyed violin bow. “What the fuck! You said you’d be careful!” and something about antiques, and explaining to his dad. Mink leaned out the window (his head narrowly missing a tree trunk), definitively British. “You must be looking for the violinist, dahling! I play the geetah! Tally O!” The bottle slipped out of his hand and smashed on the street. Mink let out a prolonged agonized scream all the way down the block. Porch lights flicked on and dogs started barking, as they do.

  When Eugene’s parents were at their cottage in the woods, which they often were, we would set up in—all over—their house and play for days on end, cycles of guests, a continuous, low grade bash. One long weekend we rented an eight-track tape recorder, a professional machine the size of a kitchen table. It looked more like a flight than a step up from the cassette four-track we’d been recording to (piling dozens of overdubs—accordion, sound effects records, party ambience, farts), but it was a natural progression and Mink knew how to operate it. To control sound reflections we constructed rooms-w
ithin-rooms with blankets and quilts and couch cushions, using skills and techniques learned a decade earlier, when you called it building a “fort.” Audio cables snaked up and down the bannisters, microphones dangled from chandeliers. We put on the first of a hundred pots of coffee, and commenced a recording session-cum-house party that ran most of the summer, until whenever it was that Eugene’s folks pulled into the driveway. We called the new demo tape Good Music.

  5

  A CENSUS-DESIGNATED PLACE

  Across the Charles River from Harvard Square is Allston, a student ghetto of brick row houses anchored by a dodgy roast beef takeout and a humongous, central packie. I was living there in a typically Allstonian one-bedroom with touch-and-go knob-and-tube wiring, getting knocked out by random gas leaks all the time, and one night I went out for a smoke on my balcony, where it was safer to strike a match. I was on the second floor and on the street directly below a junkie was rifling the glove box of my car. Statistically Allston was a high-crime area, particularly when it came to cars. I could have taken the guy without spilling my Scotch if I’d been down there. He was old and his limbs looked like dirty pipe cleaners. But, as he pointed out after I’d gotten his attention, he’d be long gone by the time I got down the stairs to do anything, and he knew as well as I did that the cops never came around for any reason except Twin Donuts, or shots fired. So I told him where I hid the cigarette boxes of change, and we negotiated the remainder of the robbery. I smoked and sipped, he robbed. A couple of times he asked me what I thought a certain thing was worth before putting it back in the car or into his pocket. When I asked him to leave me the sixty cents for the toll in the morning he paused in thought, then said, “I can do twenty-five.” The guy at the pet store who always had a rat on his shoulder (they looked alike—same eyes) told me one day that “someone” could easily dispatch an army of rats to wreak havoc throughout the city by utilizing a little-known subterranean system of pneumatic tubes once used for the mail. He said that when that day came Allston would be “a bloodbath,” but I wasn’t holding my breath for that. The slobbering droves of BU meatheads roaming around yelling Hootie and the Blowfish lyrics were a definite nuisance, and you couldn’t be too careful crossing the trolley tracks—the body count there was alarming. But whatever the statistics, Allston wasn’t dangerous as Boston neighborhoods go—Mattapan aka “Murderpan,” Roxbury aka “Glocksbury.” Allston was merely sketchy the way anyplace cheap, noisy, and open late is. It was, almost automatically, where you lived if you were in a band.