Adios, Motherfucker Page 9

  The radio in the Valiant works about half the time. Local stations include Hootie 105FM, Coolio 93FM; particularly detestable, Tool 101; a chaotic Vietnamese station, and all the rest are mariachi, mariachi, mariachi, todo y siempre. We have a drugstore boom box and a few cassettes. Current favorites are Trio, which is like listening to a couple of German expressionists playing Atari Pong, and The Shaggs, another trio of New Hampshire girls who, based on the Diane Arbus-y cover photo could be in high school or their thirties and either way play and sing like toddlers. Sounds almost like they’re throwing instruments around the room. Blowfly for President is also in rotation, and we just picked up some AC/DC, Powerage and Flick of the Switch. Lord Riley, of Butterfield, known to baby-talk to his piranha while feeding it McDonald’s cheeseburgers, pizza, or Matt’s girlfriend’s angelfish, sent us right coast sundries, including the latest Upper Crust album (accompanying note was sappy, for Lord Riley—“Suck donkey foreskin, jerks”). Another masterpiece. The album. Good social barometer, too. A band dressed as 17th Century French courtiers who sound like AC/DC and sing about servant insolence, formal lunches, and syphilis, is totally baffling to most Californians. If it computes on any level, they’re probably all right.

  Palm trees are not native to Los Angeles, by the way. They were imported from the tropics and planted all around so everyone would forget that they’re at the mercy of an ecosystem with a prime directive of kill and erase, and order the twenty-dollar salad.

  JUNE 11

  Tim’s office, called Interscope Records, is across Wilshire in one of those towers. Sizable operation; shares a floor with Death Row Records, Interscope’s murder-rap arm, Snoop and so forth. I’m at Interscope most days lately, making follow-up phone calls, printing flyers, assembling press kits, sending faxes. Divvying all this with Tim, as his time allows, and trying to make myself useful around the place to justify my presence. Cleaning out the fridge, fresh pot of coffee, so forth, beating the interns to it when I can and trying not to fuck things up too much. Best to give the impression that I actually am an intern, without having to say it. Interscope has decent coffee, and there’s a drawer in the kitchen area with peanuts and granola bars in it. One day last week the drawer was empty except for those unholy fruit roll things that look like a giant scab, inedible, so I popped across the hall to Death Row to see what they had kicking around over there in the way of snickedy-snacks. Not much in the Death Row kitchen worth getting dangled out a window for eating, not that anybody would do that. Deserted cubicles, 808 bump. My way out was blocked by a guy I met, silently, in the elevator a couple times. A gargantuan homey who probably sleeps in his sunglasses, if he sleeps. He said, “Yo,” handed me a joint and the dregs of a bottle of Cristal, said “Peace,” and walked off. And there you go. Lunch.

  On my way home I saw Liza (aka Busty), laughing, holding a bouquet, and Eug, in a kilt with his face painted, walking toward the theater across the street from the building, where Braveheart is playing.

  JUNE 24

  Janitor was emptying the bin next to my desk, which is neither mine nor a desk, and a letter dropped onto the floor, one of what looked like thousands he was dumping into his trash cart. The letter was open so I read it. Fan mail from a teenage girl to a band on the label. Huge band, not my cup of crap, to say the least. In fact if I were running the show they would long ago have been ground up and fed to Gila monsters. But it was a perfectly nice letter and I thought it wasn’t quite right that she hadn’t gotten a response, so I took care of that. At length.

  JUNE 29

  Keep hearing this place Spaceland is the gig to get. Liza drove me over there, east of something, west of something else. No idea, I long ago gave up and lumped the Thompson Guide; a five-pound art project, no good to anybody. The booker at Spaceland wasn’t around so I gave our demo tape to the bartender. He said he’d pass the tape on, believably enough. A few days ago Liza drove me back there to follow up. Same bartender, same clothes, maybe washing the same glass, says again that the booker isn’t around. I wrote a note on a cocktail napkin, left it on the bar, and went to leave but he stopped me, and said the band name. I said yeah and he pointed to a guy over at the sound booth. “He wants to talk to you.” The guy’s face shrank and twisted when I introduced myself, and I noticed our demo cassette on the soundboard. The cover art is stacks of hamburgers and the title, Grunge, in script. The overall style is “wiseass.”

  “You aren’t really from Northampton,” he said.

  I told him we were. He snatched up our tape and rattled it at me. “What is this? Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  I was about to answer but he went on. How offended he was by “everything we stood for,” whatever he thought that was, how it baffled him that the town that produced Sebadoh and Silver laws could bear us (I reassured him, it can’t); how we should quit playing music. He went on like this for a while. Seemed genuinely upset.

  I got in the car and Liza asked how it went. “No gig,” I said. “But we’re definitely onto something.”

  Gig would be better, of course. As the man says, be thankful for what you got.

  Eugene and Matt’s getaway up north seemed to do them some good. But after the drive the Valiant is in rough shape.

  OCTOBER 5

  Savings long (long) gone, babysitting gig keeping me afloat, and sane. Legos. Reading Peter Pan. Arranged to get paid in cigarettes, saves me a trip to the store. Matt and Eug are working at the movie theater around the corner. Pretty smart uniforms—red jacket, black pants with a stripe down the side. I went to the theater’s uniform annex and said I’d just been hired and was issued same, so we have those as stage outfits. Gig the other night in some abyssmal part of the city we’d never seen (Los Angeles is inexhaustible with these). Eugene played an empty beer keg, Matt played kazoo, I played guitar, and we all told jokes. Our circumstances provide a lot of material.

  The girl who books the Troubadour still won’t give us a show but she took me to her brother’s wedding. Her brother’s LAPD. Reception in a post-apocalyptic jewelry district that these people call “downtown.” During the dinner every guy in the place had a pager on the table; people were checking their watches, going into group huddles. No conga lines, very little dancing, even when “Celebration” came on. A hundred jittery cops in the room, a lot of them armed, waiting on the O.J. Simpson verdict. Forecast was for riots. Verdict came, riots didn’t. I had the fish.

  OCTOBER 8

  Jaren drove us over to Beverly Hills to this bizarre gig. Huge Tudor estate in a gated neighborhood, the home of a respected sportscaster. Revered, they say. Character, too, from Jaren’s typically top-notch impersonation. The party planner met us in the circular drive, jacked out of her mind, on Fen-Phen, probably. You knew she was talking to you and not someone on the other end of her headset mic when she rapidly snapped her fingers in your face and said, “Wake up!” Till then you were guessing.

  A stream meandered through the backyard, little walking bridge over it. Fountains, sculpted shrubbery, caterers winging around, families. Occasionally someone who looked like and was a professional athlete would stroll through. I was standing looking at koi, or poi, wondering what they tasted like when a kid who was maybe seven came up and said something. He was wearing a vest too big for him and a baseball cap with the brim flipped up. I asked him to repeat himself, figured I’d heard him wrong.

  “I said, what kinda pager you gots. You deaf?”

  I said I didn’t know, I didn’t have it on me. “We share,” I told him. He burst out laughing and walked away. A server came by with a tray of something I took five of. Eventually we got up and dicked our way through our version of backyard cocktail music for twenty minutes then took a break, to general relief, it felt like. The pager kid approached.

  “No wonder you sharin’ a pager, yo,” the pager kid said. “You suck.”

  His friend, also swimming in athletic gear and topped with goofily cocked hat, agreed. “Yeah. Your shit is whack, yo.” (These ar
e white kids, of course. If you were black at this party you were a famous sports millionaire or you were carrying hedge trimmers.) Matt asked the kids if they thought they could do better, and they said, “Hells yeah,” they could, if they knew how to play instruments. Playing instruments is by far the easiest part of being in a band, we told them. We took them over to a corner of the yard and handed them our guitars. We taught them how to play an E and bend a G into an A (“That’s it?” they said. “That’s it,” we said), then told them to come up with a band name. They played the next set, Eugene on drums. They weren’t bad. I forget what they called themselves.

  When we played again we turned up some and played more or less normally. People dropped things to cover their ears; there was running. Children too young to have pagers froze in place wailing and were scooped off to safety by adults. Can’t say we know the girl who hired us well at all—I kicked a raspberry margarita onto her while leapfrogging tables during our show at the Malibu Inn, she hired us then. Looking around at the size and demeanor of the house, the property, the properness, the fact that she was the only one cheering holding a champagne bottle in the air amid an obvious social disaster—not a stretch to imagine we were doing what she hired us to do.

  OCTOBER 4

  We went next door to Monty’s last night. Sunken bar, skyline view, old guy on the Casio piano with the built-in rhythm machine perpetually set to Samba . . . Quiet night. Band meeting. I knew it was coming: Matt and Eug said they were done, going home. It was easy enough to see why. Naturally, this afternoon the guy from the Whisky A Go-Go finally calls back. So that’ll be the last one.

  OCTOBER 12

  Drove to meet everybody at the club. Very much alone driving the Valiant through Hollywood, out of patience, energy, money, and beyond late, of course. I could hear the coolant boiling in the radiator, the “knock” we’re used to, contrapuntal to the rattle. The car shook more than usual climbing the steep grade of La Cienega toward Sunset, getting noisier and louder. Toward the top it started juttering and bucking like a mule, and right at the top there was a horrible jolt as the bottom of the car dropped into the street. In the rearview mirror I saw the exhaust system shooting down La Cienega like a missile, throwing sparks in all directions. A spinning hubcap hopped after it, and ricocheted off someone’s hood.

  11

  POX AMERICANA

  I’m off the bandwagon. I hope those three pukes fall flat on their smugly little faces and back into the gutter where they belong.

  —Bombpop Garcia, Masslive.com

  Ruffino said in an interview from a pay telephone that he has plenty of issues.

  —Hampshire Gazette, November 1–2, 1997

  NOVEMBER/NORTHAMPTON

  Down at Sheehan’s, having a drink one of the bartenders named after me, licking my wounds from a failed mayoral run. The speech I winged on the steps of City Hall was nothing short of lunatic—not that I’d change that—and from the start my campaign (last-minute, write-in) was dogged by this Intrepid Reporter from the Daily Hampshire Gazette, who said he was sure he’d find something on me, and he did. News to me I wasn’t a registered voter. I learned the name of this town from a parking ticket, seen my name on countless city documents since—who can keep track? The drink is like a Long Island Iced Tea, but twice over. It tastes like monkey piss but it’s a real time-saver. You order your second one from the floor.

  APRIL

  Nothing cruel about it, not overtly. Something else in bloom. We can still pack a room, but the odd, veiled—or not—insult, or cold shoulder in the bars. Mutterings. Indistinct, but not imagined. Matt went to a party where, he says, apropos of “nothing” (Matt’s word), J. Mascis, who is nearly as famous for Buddha-like wordlessness as he is for being the Jimi Hendrix of indie rock, called him a “pussy.” “It was like Ru Paul calling me a transvestite, or something. But . . . negatively. It made no sense,” he said. Not so hard to believe. A few letters critical of us in local papers lately, and there is an ongoing thread in a chat room (a what now? Mal had to explain it to me), apparently real time, local communiqués, between educated, worldly, people suggesting that a lyric like Matt’s I can’t move my limbs, but I party with my friends, is “idiotic.” F. Scott Fitzgerald drank himself into an early grave trying to figure out how to write whole books just to say that. Look at it—it’s a world.

  The “alt-country” mania otherwise known as “Americana” a phase four epidemic now, the towns wracked with it. It came on fast, and fierce. Sub-Pop (wisely, it’s true) signed our whisper-quiet, mandolin-wielding Scud Mountain Boys, and the scene went into the expected transitional phase: it’s as if the town’s had flesh infected by a super-aggressive deer tick—the symptoms of Americana are very similar to Lyme disease: lethargy, labored movements, derealization . . . All at once half the musicians in town started dressing like the Brawny man and every pedal steel player in the valley was double-booked—all bands absolutely, positively, have to put pedal steel on every song now, or failing that, a plaintive, volume-knobbed guitar solo, during which it is common at live gigs to be angrily shushed by people around you if you cough or joke or try to order a drink, in a bar. Sometimes the same people who a few months earlier would have turned out to barf Jäger on a guy playing a trash can lid and an air horn look at you funny if you don’t drink whiskey—vodka is inauthentic—and low-rent American beer, and “get” Townes Van Zant who, in my experience, would prefer you get him some heroin, if anybody’s going to be getting anything. In the music store banjos and mandocellos in the window, Fender Mustangs (Cobain who?) and Gibson Standards kicked to a back wall to dangle shamefully by the keyboards. On toilet tanks all over town, you’ll find the latest issue of a poignantly lo-fi zine called No Depression, about a foot and a half above from where it belongs, cover-to-cover with the most pretentious, woebegone bullshit you’ve ever read in your life, and in any issue of any music magazine, anywhere, all pages featuring Uncle Tupelo are cemented together with multiple loads of semen. And it’s best not to cut through the alleys downtown. You’re bound to interrupt a circle of rhythm guitarists in fresh Carhartt overalls furiously jacking off onto a copy of Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

  This is worse than the stretch a few years prior, when that rye fungus was going around, or whatever it was that caused people to believe feigned disinterest was a measure of refinement and not something that made you an insufferable twat, and people collapsed into two-handed self-abuse at the mention of a Pavement side project. (Those could be friends, too—this is just business, amigo.) In any case people going on about “authenticity” . . . flatly unacceptable.

  Parried via an interview with the weakly (sic) paper, compulsory smack-talk about the scene, irked some people. As Mal said after one show where we failed to play even one complete song, “Won’t hurt rep”—

  Stools just went flying. Cockeyed loudmouth from downriver just grappled to the floor by the two lipstick lesbians he’s been trying to harangue into his pants for the past half hour. His nose is gushing and they’re giving him the pummeling of his life, Tom Jones’ “She’s a Lady” is on the jukebox. Welcome to Northampton, douchebag.

  Broke in the new club in town, up by Smith. Packed room, totally upside down on the fire codes, very heavy drinks action as usual. People lobbed marshmallows at us, Matt dumped the sack of prop cocaine over the head of a guy with a mouth on him at the front of the stage. The marshmallows kept coming, but on fire and no longer lobbed but whipped at us, splattering and sticking to whatever they hit, like napalm. Side-stage a cheap curtain ignited; flaming scraps of it went airborne through the club, joining the usual array of flying bottles and bodies. The giant, untested stage prop someone built for us, a six-foot pole topped with a pinwheel made of Roman candles, suddenly activated. The room blazed with white light as the contraption whirled out four-foot jets of flame, screamed, chain reacted, surged . . . We learned later that the guy who had the fake coke dumped all over him had wiped himself down with all the paper products in the
men’s room and in a misguided effort to tidy up effectively stuffed the plumbing full of papier-mâché, which is what flooded the bar area and shorted out the cash registers. Liquor was yanked off the shelves as the bartenders worked out the tabs longhand. Onstage, amps were overturned from a stage-dive gone awry, I’d accidentally kicked Matt’s guitar cable out, again, distracted by the mini Roman candle duct-taped to my bass, which had misfired, the white-hot ball of phosphorus sputtering on my headstock ignited my shirt (Rayon) and it had begun to fuse with my thorax—we’re playing “Paranoia” by the Kinks, by the way—and all the time uninvited “guest vocalists” are on stage knocking into things. Eugene, completely naked, had his head held back by that new wastoid guy (files his teeth) while Tim(s) poured Goldschlager down his throat through a funnel, and Matt, lately been into drinking Robitussin cocktails (“ ’Tussin out” he calls it), was tackled and violently depantsed by somebody, and was droopily wrestling his assailant, rolling around the stage. Freeze-frame here and you have a fairly representative picture of an Unband show these days, average-crazy, still in the realm of manageability. Unfreeze, and someone opens a box of mice. Some people said it was a dozen mice, others said half that, or just one, still others insist the place was inundated—however many, it was enough mice to achieve a critical mass. Unmanageability; cops. All that. Wrapping cables with the place cleared out and the lights on, watching two bartenders try to corner a mouse scampering through the wreckage—it felt like a cue.

  12

  L.E.S. IS MORE