Hamell On Trial

HAMELL'S BLOG HAS MOVED!!!! Please read

2009-09-17T01:50:51Z

Hello everyone, this is KC, Hamell's little Web Ogre. Please see the important announcement below.

Hamell On Trial's Blog has moved to:: http://feeds.feedburner.com/hamellsramble

***BE SURE TO RE-SUBSCRIBE!!!*** Hamell is currently writing and posting 30 songs in 30 days.
The new site has been launched ( http://www.hamellontrial.com -or- http://www.hamelltv.com )
He's already at #6. All new songs are posted on the new site under the "30 in 30" tab.

Sorry for any lag times if you haven't been getting your subscription... We're hoping you find the new site user friendly and easy to read. Also, we'll be launching an extensive digital download store in the near future so stay tuned.

Ramble on,

kc

WHAT DID YOU YOU DO OVER YOUR SUMMER VACATION?

2009-08-25T16:11:42Z

Getting ready to pack for a two man crew to go to the Porcupine Festival in the backwoods of Wisconsin. Those two men in question are going to be me and my son Detroit. Picking up a third man, the invaluable Ricki C in his hometown of Columbus Ohio. I've taken Detroit before, obviously, but this is about 20 hours in the car so it has the potential to be quite eye opening for the both of us. Not to mention Ricki C. Had a great weekend though. Did a little video shoot in Stoudsburg at Sarah Street, you probably read my (hopefully) humorous blogs about the training camp in Wildwood New Jersey. I had decided that I would play 3 1/2 hours straight, or as long as I didn't break any strings, which ever came first. No strings were broken, but believe me they were both caressed and tortured and I'd venture to say everything in between. I had utilized some suggestions from my Facebook page that friends and fans had sent about their favorite Hamell songs, (very flattering) and revisited my catalog, relearning songs that I hadn't done in many years. Hadn't done First Date, Confess Me, Disconnected, The Vines, Uncle Morris in many moons. Have a boatload of new stuff I've been cultivating over the last year or so, so it was no problem coming up with the 3 1/2 hours, as a matter of fact I've been kicking myself in the butt remembering material that I could have come up with since. Good crowd, I'd been talking it up as you well know, but as fate would have it the weather wasn't as cooperative in the Poconos as it could have been. There was a small tornado warning that morning with some power outages and Dave the owner had called to say there was a possibility that we would have to cancel. I was going to be playing a house concert in Maryland the next night so I was going come Hell or Highwater, luckily the weather turned out fine. We'll see how the video turns out, it's hard not to believe that I won't have 90 minutes of superior material in all my rockings, can't tell you where it'll end up, maybe one off the wall thing on You-Tube, some on my new snazzy website that's in the process of being designed, and the whole thing as some kind of bootleg for the serious fans that have to have all things Hamell. (Once again, very flattering.) Spent the evening at the owners house, a stunning abode that he has been working on over the last five years. Looks like one of those architectural wonders that you see in the magazines. We looked through some of the other videos he has shot, he had failed to mention that the camera man was a hard core Republican and member of the Christian Right. My show was certainly going to be different than the Weddings and Baptisms he was used to. If this video never sees the light of day it's probably because this guy destroys it in the hopes of escaping the fires of Hell, in light of "conspiracy" charges. Dave and I ended up talking into the wee wee hours of the morning, (5 A.M. to be exact) about the state of the union. Baby that'll depress ya. It pretty much ended up with a check mate, both of us trying to convince the other that we had to embrace the positive, be thankful for the incredible blessings we had and move forward. You know, the usual crap. Up at noon on Saturday, hop in the car and make the 4 hour trek to Maryland. Do you like Crabs? I mean eating them. Not "getting" them. I like eating them so I was headed to right place. Lots of back roads and torrential downpours resulting in floodings but I had bought the newest Stooges album while in Stroudsburg so I had the ever inspirational Iggy telling me to press forward at all costs and of course I did. Even had an extra hour to take a nap in the car. Nothing will put you to sleep like rain on the roof and exhaustion. Cool house concert. Once again a beautiful house, once again the work of the owner Matt, big old beautiful turret in the front, very close to the ocean's shore. The guests were seated initially at a picnic table in the back eating. They had bushels and bushels of freshly steamed and spiced crabs dumped on newspaper and people were digging in heartily. Shrimp, fried chicken, corn on the cob completed the feast. I got a tour of the house, helped myself to the culinary delights, put new strings on my guitar, the crowd moved out to the seating in the garage and I ripped it up acoustically. Played a darn good set if I do say so myself. Only about three of them were familiar with my material so it's always cool to see the virgins "get it" and start laughing. All in all a wonderful time, wonderful people and a job well done. Was able to get home, 30 miles above New York City in a record 4 hours and 15 minutes and that was including a lengthy gas stop in Jersey. The next day the wife, son, and I headed into Manhattan where Lincoln Center was hosting some free outdoor live music. The wife had seen Allen Toiussaint the night before and been completely blown away. We caught The Texas Tornadoes in a tribute to Doug Sahm. I lived in Texas, so it helps, but you only have to be a fan of great music to know that Doug Sahm was a genius and his son has kind of taken over for him and was pretty much leading the 8 piece band complete with the incredible Flaco Himenez and Augie Meyers. An evening of great music. That early Texas rock and roll takes in a lot of influences, R & B, gospel, 2 step, polka, country and western, just quality stuff. Well, it's back to packing for the big road trip and I'll keep you posted. For my buddies in Wisconsin: We'll see you there!

TONED

2009-08-21T05:14:30Z

It's finally come to an end. After a grueling two week stint out here at Cus's fortified training compound he thinks I might be ready to play the greatest show of my life. He never exactly comes right out and says this however. Lord knows he'd never utter a genuine word of praise. I can tell that he's proud, or at least has some satisfaction that he's turned what he calls, "A man with the spine of a smashed banana" into a lean mean fighting machine. The day started out as any other. I'm awakened at 5:30 A.M. with the sound of Deep Purple's Machine Head blasting away from giant stacks of JBL speakers powered by six 500 watt amps. Cus sprayed me with freezing cold hose water and I lunge into the pool to do 200 laps. We then hit the music room where I jump on a trampoline with my guitar slung over my shoulder and play at a deafening volume until I peel the paint off the walls and then enter the tiger's cage to fight until lunch. Cus kept pouring kerosene all over my veggie burger but he's kept me so ravaged and starved I didn't care and I ate through the flames.We popped the water blisters with needles, ran through the lyrics of a hundred of my songs while jumping rope and here's when I got my first indication that Cus might have thought I was ready. He had invited a couple of other manager and trainer types over to check out my set. He had set up this real cool theater style auditorium while I ran through my tunes. I'm not sure but when I reached mid-point I actually thought I heard Cus clap and when I looked closer to acknowledge where the sound was coming from I swear I thought I saw a tear in his eye. A genuine tear. The old bastard's getting sentimental in his twilight years. When one of his old school buddy's coughed during the quiet parts he cuffed him upside the head as if to say, "Have some respect for the boy." I played for 6 hours straight while Cus watched enraptured from the front row. In the words of the great Chuck Berry, it goes to show you never can tell. Afterward Cus blindfolded me and whispered in my ear, "I have a little surprise for you." I didn't know where I was headed and I gotta admit I got a little nervous. I had talked to one rocker who Cus had trained for a similar event and he told a story about Cus throwing him blindfolded into a pit of poisonous snakes to "teach him a lesson." I had talked to this other young woman who had aspirations to be a rocker but after one of Cus's blindfolded sessions where she swears she was made to eat the brain of a live panda she quit the music business altogether and went into interior design. Her boyfriend snuck up on her once with a blindfold in the hopes of "broadening their sex life" and she groin kicked him into a six month stay at the hospital. Cus always thought I had some Goddamn lesson to learn so my stomach started to do somersaults. I could smell sea water, old moss and tow rope. Turns out Cus had rented a party boat! He ripped the blindfold off and I couldn't believe my eyes. SURPRISE! He invited a couple hundred of his closest friends, mostly felons, retired strippers and midgets to help me celebrate. The air was thick with cigar smoke, perfumed body odor and napalm. He had raw clams, absinthe and bar-b-que and had the band Ratt playing. Not Steven Peacy's Ratt but the other one with Bobby Blotzer and Warren DiMartino. He told me later that originally he was going to have the Brett Michaels band play but after the success of the guy's TV show on VH1 he couldn't get him on the phone anymore. It really pissed Cus off too because he was the one who trained Brett Michaels for his big comeback after Poison couldn't play at a high school dance in Pennsylvania without being laughed at. Cus said that Michaels came to him crying like a little girl, very similar to the scene in The Godfather where the Sinatra guy is sobbing and trying to get the movie deal and the horse's head ends up in the bed. So Cus took pity on him and he said because he secretly always liked C.C. DeVille's guitar playing and whipped his little girl ass into shape. Of course now that he was a half-baked star again he wouldn't return Cus's calls. Cus took me into the bow of the ship and showed me some pictures of Brett Michaels without his doo-rag. It was not a pretty sight. Here's a guy whose bare cranium would made Michael Jackson look normal. He had plugs that didn't take so he had this weird chemotherapy vibe going on with splotchy dirty blond hair every 8 inches or so like a doll that's been left out in the rain and run over in your driveway and then he had tied extensions to that, but it was before he got his royalty check for "Every Rose Has It's Thorn" so it was like a bad tangled beef jerky that had caught gangrene under a cesspool. He tried tattooing the bald spots but they kept getting bigger and bigger and then his head got infected so that had to cut a third of his skull away and fit a piece of molded plastic in there with a lime green Poison logo and of course the dye ran into his brain which had to be removed just prior to the filming of his television show. All the producers admitted that he was infinitely more docile after that, and that probably contributed to the success of the show. Anyway, it was a great party, and to the sounds of Ratt doing "Round and Round" we danced and ate and sang until dawn. Then when Ratt played "Round and Round" again Cus gathered everybody around and presented me with my diploma for his training camp. I'm not gonna lie. It was a proud moment. Ratt then launched into, "Round and Round" and everybody cheered for me and threw me overboard and tried to grab my guitar but I think the steroids got all weird on me because I lept on the boat and started tearing people limb from limb. Nobody touches the guitar. I might have blacked out. All I can remember is Ratt launching into, "Round and Round" for the 7th time in a row and me coming to with Cus pouring champagne over my head and telling me it was going to be alright as soon as Dr. Nick got there with my shot. I laid back and relaxed and took in the warm feeling of a training job well done and listened to Ratt as they started "Round and Round". Tomorrow, the gig.

UNTIL TOMORROW

2009-08-18T05:33:21Z

looking at the pillow
looking at the bed
thinking about the crazy demons
resting in my head

THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

2009-08-18T04:00:18Z

some of us can't get to sleep
the clock just ticks away
they'd tell he was the wickedest
let's see what he has to say

TRAINING CAMP

2009-08-18T03:47:09Z

I know some of you are thinking that I’ve been watching an awful lot of videos today for a guy that’s supposed to be in an isolated training camp getting toned for my video shoot. Don’t worry, old Cus, my trainer is like a mad dog drill sergeant. He hoses me down after a long sprint and then blasts these U-Tube videos for me to study. Then after a three minute rest it’s back to the grind. Today was especially grueling. For those of you that are familiar with the ins and outs of the guitar you probably figure that I use some heavier gauge strings on my instrument and you figured correct. I beef up my “A’, “D” and “G” strings from a regular heavy gauge set so they can stand up to the rigorous torment that I administer on a nightly basis. There’s a whole ritual that goes on prior to any gig where I change the strings nightly, and go over material etc. Cus strung my guitar with the same material they make chain link fences out of. This is like the scene in “Kill Bill” where she punches away at a board with her fingers. After 6 or 7 hours of playing away at this telephone cable your bloodied up to your elbows and my mop boy was passed out on cheap wine in the corner bunk so I had to hire a temp worker who seemed a little gun shy at all the red. If I whimper or drool Cus starts screaming “Squat thrusts! Squat thrusts” until he bursts blood vessels in his eyes, and as I don’t want to lose him as a trainer I bend and give him a quick 100. Maybe he throws me a bone to gnaw on and then it’s back to playing “Hamell’s Ramble” for 2 hours straight. Just the riff. No words. It’s like water torture. Cus just laughs and goes back to watching the Home Shopping Network in his office and puffing on cheap cigars. There’s a quarter mile track that he has me run around on through the oily smelling dirt. I do 15 miles a day, but he didn’t like my attitude today. He thinks I have a problem with authority and I don’t play well with others so he tied pork chops to my ankles and had me chased by a hungry Doberman. It’s true; you really do pick up the pace. We slaughtered the Doberman and ate it for dinner and then Cus started mumbling and cursing, going round and round in circles like some weird Tasmanian dervish saying, “Ballads! More Ballads”. Cus goes to bed at 9 and he wants me to sing him to sleep for 5 or 6 hours. I don’t have 5 or 6 hours worth of ballads. I barely have an hours worth of ballads. “Write more!” he screams. When he jumps up and wails like this in the middle of the night it makes all the wolves in the hills start to howl. It’s very eerie. He’s also hyper-critical of my writing, even in his sleep. He’ll start out tossing and turning in his cot, “Bad couplet!” “Cheap rhyme”, “Where’s the chorus?”, “False emotion”, “Sounds like Phil Collins”, “Sounds like Barry Manilow”, “Sounds like Richard Marx”, (Richard fucking Marx? How old IS this fucking guy?), “Cliché chord changes”. Jesus, give me a break, I’m improvising most of them on the spot and the guy won’t shut up. Can’t be a very sound sleep. I’m still banging away at these industrial size guitar strings too by the way. Ankles all puffy from Doberman bites, although I did get the last laugh on Fido. Plus Cus wants more rockers written by morning. I beginning to have second thoughts on doing the greatest gig I’ve ever done. Maybe I set the bar too high. I look out into the steamy night of Wildwood New Jersey and see all the happy people on the Boardwalk coming and going and I envy them. Why can’t I just enjoy myself? Why must I go through this torture day after day just so I can say I’ve played to the utmost best of my ability? But then I remember an email I got the other evening through my website from a Little Timmy Caruso in Indiana. He wrote that the bank had foreclosed on his daddy’s farm and he and his parents and his 19 brothers and sisters, their grandpa and third cousin Leroy, plus his Aunt Ethel and Uncle Rick were all living in their dad’s truck. It was crowded some nights and they often didn’t have enough to eat. None of them had showered in weeks. Aunt Ethel weighed 600 pounds and despite the forced diet still seemed to be gaining weight which was putting everybody in a foul mood. Luckily the C.D. player still worked. Little Timmy went on to say the only thing that brought the whole family together, that gave them hope that there was going to be a light at the end of the tunnel, that dad would get a job again, that someday they would find a public shower, Aunt Ethel would stop gaining weight and they’d get back to the farm that had been in their family for generations, was to gather around the CD player and listen to “The Pussy Song” at top volume. Over and over again in a continuous loop, laughing and square dancing, tongues out pantomiming the song's chorus, feverish with joy until they found themselves sobbing and holding each other in the hot Indiana night. Timmy implored me, “Mr. Hamell, never give up. If you ever do a video of a live show please make it the greatest gig you’ve ever done. My family’s counting on you.” And so, this Friday night, in Stroudsburg Pa, at Sarah Street, for Little Timmy Caruso, his dad, his 19 brothers and sisters, his third cousin Leroy, his uncle Rick and yes, especially for his big fat smelly Aunt Ethel, I intend to play THE GREATEST GIG OF MY LIFE. And now I must get back to training.

kid=zzzz

2009-08-18T00:59:02Z

i put the kid to bed
slumber here he comes
he'll dream of fender stacks
and meg white on the drums

BOBBY FULLER R.I.P.

2009-08-17T23:37:07Z

I'm looking for a dessert
after dinner time
I'm thinking about all my friends
who lived the life of crime

WHERE'S JERRY'S BOW TIE?

2009-08-17T21:49:11Z

i sit down for dinner
my how time flies
i like this video's pyro
and the rhythm section's bow ties

HOW DO YOU GET THRU YER DAY?

2009-08-17T18:26:33Z

Lunchtime I started to sag
Around nap time I began to drag
I needed this video to pick me up,
I drink espresso from my favorite cup.

HOW 2 START THE DAY

2009-08-17T15:17:31Z

2 cups of coffee
this video
shower

i like the part where he hugs the crowd

FACEBOOK QUERIES

2009-08-17T04:28:39Z

A lot of people asked me questions. It’s very cool that people know the material and wonder what goes on behind the songs. Everybody has a story.

Brother Franklin was written just as I left my hometown of Syracuse. I always thought that maybe I could “make it” out of there. At least I think that’s what I thought. Maybe I was just not brave enough to move to a more “music industry” town earlier. My wife pretty much dragged me out by my ear. I left kicking and screaming. I laugh at nobody’s dream now, ever. The first move wasn’t far either. It was only about 3 hours away to Albany. It provided, in retrospect, a perfect little oasis for me to try out a solo one-man musical experiment, known to me now as Hamell on Trial, but it was a lot of shooting in the dark. A lot of mistakes were made, a bunch of trial and error. The bar that I was working at prior was a great source of entertainment; it had drama and intrigue of huge proportions every night. I just naturally assumed I was going to devote my life to music but I didn’t know how I was going to do it, to develop something that was uniquely my own. Brother Franklin was just me saying “this life is making me a ton of money, and I love my friends but if I’m ever going to do anything I got to get the fuck out of here.” It was written in about 15 minutes. I had the lick running around forever, one day the words just came and I was hanging around with a folkie crowd when I first got to Albany and they responded heavily to it so it just stuck around in the repertoire. Once I got the taste for moving it became like a blood lust. Once I had the show I couldn’t wait to get to Austin to show it off.

Fast forward to New York/Brooklyn where I had lost my major label deal and needed to come up with something that was going to slap people in the head. Inspired by Pulp Fiction, and with absolutely nothing to lose, I did Choochtown. Choochtown was probably my old home town Syracuse, or a conglomerate of the small towns I was visiting and playing while on tour, constantly, in my car. I lot of it was recorded in my friend Billy Nigorski’s basement with his mom cooking upstairs. They’d let me sleep on the couch or if there was a spare bed and I’d do as much of it as could be allowed with tour, family and his situation in mind. He had a cool one inch 8-track for you audiophiles. He did it all for free God bless him. Then somebody lent me an 8-track and I’d sneak down in the basement of the apartment that I was living in, and on a dirt floor next to a coal heater I’d record.

All the male voices like the shout outs are just me sped up or slowed down. The female voice was done by my pal Janeen Turano who was my brother-in-law's girlfriend at the time. I think my wife very drunkenly chimed in too, although she started demanding union scale and we had to toss her out. I was gonna pull an “Ike” but thought better of it.

Z-Roxx was about a million bands that I shared the stage with, particularly at the beginning that would give me attitude when I’d show up alone to a punk rock club with an acoustic guitar. At the time they all wanted to be “grunge”. I’ve watched a lot of them come and go, I’ll tell ya. There was no one that made enough of an impression on me that I’d remember their name I’m sorry to say. I make a joke on stage about how I’m like Velcro for weird shit but I don’t really think that’s the case. If you ask the right questions you can pull people’s life stories out of them in about 10 minutes. As I said before everybody’s got a story. Nobody has a normal life or if they do they’re bored to tears. There’s always an Uncle Freddie that’s in jail for screwing a goat or something similar.

Yes, there was girl and her dog, actually there were two girls and two dogs on two separate occasion’s distanced by both time and geography but we won’t get into that. And yes, I always have time for a cup of coffee because you my friend have a story and I, my friend, probably want to hear it.

IDIOT TORNADO

2009-08-16T04:14:20Z

My son was playing a video game on my computer. I monitor what he plays because he’s seven, it’s my computer and I’m usually right next to him. There are a lot of questions about spellings and what certain things mean. Sometimes I’m not there. I admit it. I didn’t know that Roblox, the game he was playing had an open chat room. If you have questions about the game you can ask others who are playing. Their names are right there to let you know who’s playing right at that moment. It’s kind of fascinating. Let’s see, we have eight other players right now. There’s Little Timmy, Alex, a Free-head, an Oxbow, a Bulletin Boy, etc. One would assume that’s his Roblox “handle”. Do I seem outdated if I relate to the internet as some kind of giant C.B. radio where the whole world now gets to be like ‘10-4 Good Buddy!’ to every 14 year old in the world? Then my son asks me what a “noob” is. I’m like, spell it. He does. He has to do this a lot because in the job where I work I have a 50-watt amp trained on my ear at a sterility inducing volume and as I’ve been doing this for the last 15 years or so the hearing has eroded. My wife, and I swear to this, has a voice that only dogs can hear on their best days so I get a lot of shit from her because she doesn’t have the time to waste repeating herself. She’s a busy gal. Loss of hearing is just a hazard of the trade. You know, like coal dust. Let me cough up a lung and continue. We go back and forth on this, my son and I, and then he tells me to forget it, and he’ll just pose the question to one of the guys in the chat room. The answer: a noob is a “new player who doesn’t know what’s going on”. I get it. Sort of like new boob. Say it real fast 100 times. They do it in L.A. all the time after the reconstructive surgery I’m sure. My son writes back, “Thank you”. He’s been taught to be polite. He’s all proud, showing me this stuff and then the kid writes back, “Idiot”. It bummed my kid out enough to go to another game. He couldn’t figure out why the kid wrote the word idiot. I know why he wrote it. Because he’s 12 and he thinks it’s cool. Here’s where it gets weird. My head went to a dark place. Very dark. I sought revenge on Bulletin Boy. As in: Double B I’m going to feed you your genitals. That’s right, I know you thought you were anonymous but I’m going to hire a hacker, find out where you live, yank you away from your computer and tie you up in my basement. Go watch ‘Silence of the Lambs’. You’ll want to have it in your memory because after the things I’m going to do to you, you’ll be thinking of it as ‘The Good Old Days.’ Remember Hannibal Lecter? This will now seem like a Disney movie to you. Yes, there’s going to be a video of you on You Tube of you eating your own body parts. Did I go overboard? You betcha. Here’s a “Bulletin” for you boy: Remember the cop/ear/ Michael Madsen/ Steelers Wheel part of Reservoir Dogs? That will be an after school special on Nickelodeon compared to what I’m going to do with you. Daddy and Mommy can’t save you. You’ll be eating them too. This parenting thing really brings out the best in my imagination.

I’ve secluded myself in a boxer’s training camp in Wildwood New Jersey to train for the big event. We’re doing some videotaping at Sarah Street in a couple of weeks. I’m on a strict diet of wheat germ and steroids. I’m starting to feel like Alex Rodriguez and Madonna’s been calling but I’m not allowed to have sex. My trainer, a Cus D’Amato look alike has up at 6:00 to run six miles and then back to the fortified compound hut which is an exact replica of Gitmo to play guitar from 9:00AM until noon. I have to do the Uncle Morris and Sugarfree licks a thousand times each. I can feel the muscles in my arms growing to Hulk like proportions. I decided that I should play the greatest gig in my life and capture it live on video, I mean since they were filming it anyway, why not? If you’re in the neighborhood you should a weekend in the beautiful Pocono’s and watch history being made. If you’re reading this in like, Wales, and you don’t think you can make it don’t worry, I think I can twist Righteous Babe’s arm and get it put out as a DVD and you join in the fun at home and also share with your more open minded friends. Sarah Street is one of the few bars that I still play and there’s a reason for this, it’s pretty loose there. I get to play as long as I want whatever I want, make shit up, I think there’s a reason that there’s some boot flying around from there that people have downloaded like 20,000 times. (No, really.) (See Wikipedia). I spend the rest of the afternoon jumping rope and barking out lyrics and then after dinner, which I have to catch from the ocean with my bare hands and eat raw, I chase roosters around a small track. I brought my son down here to watch his old man being tortured into a mean lean tanned and ready machine. Cus gave me yesterday afternoon off. He told me I deserved it, so I brought the boy over to The Boardwalk and specifically the water park. The kid’s a fish. He was in there for three hours. My phone rang. It was my friend Louis. I didn’t pick it up. I knew somebody had died. Half the time when Louis calls, maybe even more than half the time, somebody has died from my old hometown or maybe some celebrity that we had in common. Despite my high training regiment and viewing the wonderful positive results I think these are weird times. There are a lot of changes in the air from people that I know, and in my own life yadda yadda yadda. I’ve been clinging, although you never let the kid know of course, to some little threads of mental stability, like I could fall over into “anxiety land” at any moment. (That’s the little adventure park I will have if I ever achieve Michael Jackson fame proportions. Instead of Neverland I’ll have Anxiety Land.) So the place in my head is just constantly dark, and although nobody on the outside would know it because in the Smokey Robinson/ Tears of a Clown best sense of the song, I keep a brave face. Trust me, though, you wouldn’t want to be inside. You find joy and thankfulness in different places, and believe me I’ve always got my nose in the air; it keeps me infinitely more sure footed. Often it feels as if I’m hanging on by my fingernails. When Louis called I just couldn’t pick up the phone. I thought I hope it’s not somebody we both know personally, some member of his family, or an old mutual friend. I hope it’s some celebrity and I hope it’s not Keith Richards. That’s all I’d need right now is to have Keith go. He’s supposed to outlive us all. Piss on all our graves. Later when I retrieved the message I saw that Les Paul had died. He was 94. He had a good life. He invented the electric guitar, sound on sound recording, echo, a whole slew of things. And my buddy Jackie the Jokeman had introduced me to him one time and I got to play with him and talk to him for an hour or so after. It was a thrill of a lifetime. If any of us could achieve a fifth of what he did in his tenure here in the physical form we should be satisfied so I was relieved. God Bless Les. And then, as I was pondering mortality and existence and looking at all people around me in this huge amusement park atmosphere, and finding if I wasn’t careful I’d start to sink again, I got a sign. The music that they play at these places should appease the crowd right? Upbeat, maybe modern pop, or old disco, or metal, I mean this is people having a good time to music that they’re familiar with right? I’m listening but this is what I hear: Psychotic Reaction by The Count Five. Holy shit! Why, tell me why on earth would this song be playing? I’ll tell you why. It was a sign from God to me. I know what some of you are thinking. Those of you in the Rock and Roll know. You’re thinking, Oh Hamell is pulling a Lester Bangs. What a blatant rip! Honest, that’s not what I’m up to here. I had a true epiphany on the Boardwalk. There is no way in the world that song should have been playing. There was only one person in that place that recognized that song. I looked around. There were a lot of people with Michael Jackson T-shirts, a few Bon Jovi because after all we were in Jersey, and then a lot of Jonas Brothers and Lil’ Wayne and that kind of stuff. There were no Count Five T-shirts. The only person that would wear a count Five T-shirt, (if they exist) is me. Why was that song playing? There was no logical reason for it unless God was trying to talk to me. Just me. Here’s the thing: I’m not usually so self-absorbed that I think that God can help me out these days. God has a lot bigger fish to fry than little old me. Maybe God was just kicking back from all the things he/she had going down and thought “Oh shit, I might as well throw Hamell a bone and send him a message that everything is going to be alright, let’s see if he’s smart enough to pick it up.” What kind of a noob would I be if I didn’t realize that only one person could relate to Psychotic Reaction and that God was saying everything is going to be alright? That was a special message to me. Look at all those people jumping into the waves of the ocean under that bright yellow sun. Look at all the families enjoying the day with their kids. Look at the smile on my kid’s face. It’s all gonna be fucking alright.Thanks God.

SONGWRITING

2009-08-10T04:46:16Z

Before we get back to the trials and the tribulations of The Roadie House, The Band, assorted run-ins with The Law, The Gigs, The Gals and The Hangovers I have a question: Have you ever read Moby Dick? Probably not and why would ya? It’s long, it’s boring and except for the part about the Captain that’s killing himself to get that nasty White Whale there’s a LOT of chapters about the minutiae of whale oil. The price, the dividing of the capitol, the putting into barrels and unless you have some weird vocational yearning for Yankee candle making on Ebay from SCRATCH… I mean out in the boat with a net, a spear and a dream, SCRATCH… then you probably haven’t read it. Maybe there’s a parallel here or maybe not but in this epic Moby Dick like tale of Rock and Roll here comes some whale oil info at ya: The Songwriting part.

See, while I was enjoying the ins and outs and tastes of being in my first band I was learning, (and unfortunately I didn’t know it at the time) the craft of songwriting. The obvious has often, too often, eluded me. The most important part, the part that’s going to last the test of time is The Song. And if you’ve got vision, or genius or just plain common sense you’ll realize this, study the masters at an early age and cash in. Don’t recoil here. I don’t necessarily mean “cash in” in the most literal sense of the word. It nice when art and commerce collide, and whether it’s rare or not I’m in no position to say, but I mean cash in and write a “good” song. Here’s where it gets particularly tricky because “good” means different things to different people. But let’s settle on a definition that might appease everybody who enjoys music: We’ll call “good” a successful achievement of what the songwriter set out to do. In other words, if the songwriter wanted to have his song covered by Miley Cyrus and go to #1 on the charts, (are there even charts anymore?) and he or she achieves this then he or she can consider that a “good” song. That seems fair. If the songwriter set out to successfully give some sincere and distinctive insight into some emotional aspect of their soul and they write it and somebody in a small club comes up and says, “You know, I think I was in a similar place one time. I never dreamed anybody else was. It’s kind of cool that I don’t feel as alone as I did 45 minutes ago when I walked into this dump. Thanks.” Then I guess that can be considered a “good” song. And all the millions of shades of grey in between.

Unfortunately, at the time of this band, when I was writing my first thousand or so songs my vision and ambition were very limited. I thought I was writing songs that were hopefully going to help The Band achieve more success but really I was just writing songs that were keeping people entertained and on the dance floor in bars. The only real positive thing I had going on, and this has helped with the tenacity over the years, is that I knew I had to achieve a distinctive songwriting voice of my own. The search was on. I wish, and of course we all have 20-20 hindsight, that I had taken the time and had the insight of a Dylan who painstakingly studied Woody Guthrie and millions of others, and Lennon and McCartney who said their original aspiration was to be Goffin-King. They studied the Brill building songwriters like it was the Holy Grail. Later on, when I finally sobered up and did all the studying, (I mean Jesus, you still study everyday) then I realized how much damn FUN it was. But in the beginning at best I was just overwhelmed by the sheer joy of the music, the power of the sound, I was stupid enough to think that it was some glorious mistake. At worse I was too drunk to notice. Ah…live and learn. But these were the beginning years and man, I was a late bloomer. I knew it at the time. I really didn’t write my first song until I was 25. A bunch of the greats were dead or damn close at that age. There’s a feeling that I got when I wrote my first batch of songs that is very similar to a scene in a Woody Allen movie called, “Play It Again Sam”. There’s an imaginary Humphrey Bogart character helping the Woody character woo Mia Farrow on the couch. Bogart says, “Tell her she has beautiful eyes”. Woody says, “I can’t tell her that. What a cliché, she’ll think I’m an idiot.” Bogie gets tougher:” Tell her she has beautiful eyes!” Woody turns to Mia and says, “You have beautiful eyes.” A very taken and flattered Mia says, “Really? You think so? That’s wonderful of you to say.” Woody excitedly turns to Bogart and says, “SHE BOUGHT IT!” That was very similar to the feeling I had when I was showing The Band my first songs, and they actually bent down to their instruments to learn the song. Same feeling I got when we played the songs out at bars and people watched, danced and clapped. It was like, “How in the fuck are they buying this?” It becomes second nature obviously after awhile but I still remember the sheer incredulousness I felt in those early stages.

So anyway, let’s get to the meat. What do I think might be a good kind of song I might want to write? Quick answer: It’s cool when you write a song that moves a bunch of people that you got some respect for, or feel like, “Hey, these people got some smarts and integrity let’s see if I can move them.” Because often people with smarts and integrity have seen a lot of stuff in this weird and wacky life we live and they’re a bit tough when it comes to being moved. Whether I have or haven’t written these songs or “the one” or a group of masterpieces has yet to be proven. But you got to keep trying, that is the life blood man, keep learning, keep listening, keep searching. Songs you’ve already written when you were younger can speak to you in different ways when you get older; it’s weird, cool, astonishing. I’ll give you a case in point, and I’ll use another guy’s song to prove it.

So last night I played this house concert. Well, it wasn’t really a house concert, it was a house party. In the J. Geils Band sense of the word. It was out in the middle of nowhere, I even got lost going there, and I pride myself on my navigational skills. I have been doing this awhile. These fuckers were out in the HILLS of Pennsylvania. Supposedly this was a Stroudsburg area party, and I guess it was but man this was an isolated area. This is an area where people obviously don’t want to live around other people. This is an area where the original settlers crossed an ocean from Europe, dropped a couple grandparents in the sea because they didn’t make it, crossed the Midwest and had to shoot the mule for meat, fight apaches and bury “Little Jimmy” because of small pox around Indiana, keep moving until Aunt Sarah’s leg had to be amputated and used as a paddle and they still kept moving to get away from people. This was an area where you go on a date with a girl in the city, and you end up back at her place on the first date and you’re in bed doing it when all of a sudden you reach around and there’s something furry in bed with you and you quickly realize it’s a chimp. It’s her chimp! You say out loud, “This is kinda kinky, I’m into this!” and she says “You’re into this?” and you say, “Yeah!” and she says “Well shit, we gotta get married and move out to the country!” See, that’s the love of Independence right there. That’s America, chimps and no nosey neighbors up your butt. That’s where I was playing last night. It was a total heavy metal crowd, all tattoos and black T-shirts and metal through the P.A. and piercings and an opening band that was total metal. Enough of them had heard my stuff where I was confident that it was going to go over well. Good people, you could just tell by talking to them, friendly, unpretentious, smart and off the fucking wall. So I play a couple of hours, and they’re into it, and actually more familiar with my material than I would have thought but the opening band are watching me pretty good like, “What the fuck?!?!” because for better or worse they’ve never heard anything like this in their lives. (If I may be so bold) So, I figure I’d drop a couple of covers and do like The Ramones and Clash and MC5 but here’s when I hit a giant epiphany. I do “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash and I’ve been doing it for years. I did it before it was “cool”, way before Rick Ruben was doing it, way before the movie and I always told the story about how I was a kid and I hear those convicts getting their humanity back for 90 minutes and how they cheered at the “Just to watch him die” line and this crowd of metal people went bullshit. It gets wilder. When I sing the line, “I bet there’s rich folk eating in a fancy dining car…” the line made more sense to me than it ever had before. I’m the first to tell you I don’t know much about metal. I ride around in my car with my metal buddy Luigi and he only listens to the metal station on SIRIUS and he knows every fucking band and every fucking guy and there’s a bazillion
of them. One thing I do know though, metal guys get no respect. The critics, the “cool” magazines, the college radio stations, you know the areas of which I speak; they don’t get the thumbs up. For years, years now, their attitude has been, “We don’t give a fuck.” It’s true, metal never dies. I realized while singing the song, (I mean I knew this to some degree) but the attitude of Johnny Cash’s song was total metal. I had never sung it to a crowd before, be it punks in Europe where I’ve done it, or dykes in huge theaters where I’ve done it, to criminals in Florida where I’ve done it, where it made more sense. Johnny Cash: Total Metal. Who knew?

I want to write a song as good as “Folsom Prison Blues”. I’ll keep trying.

HOUSE CONCERTS IN COMPLETE FORM

2009-08-07T14:37:51Z

So I really got get back to writing my book but I had to pitch the house concert thing
and I wrote like some extra verses that I didn't have time for in the little video
and I know a lot of you get together and have big Hamell sing along festivals
and you might want to sing the extra 5 verses of the House Concert song. So here they are, enjoy, yer pal, Hamell

HOUSE CONCERTS
C / G / F / C / C / G / F / C
(CHORUS)
[House Concerts (4X) I love ‘em, (7X) ] (2X)

(1)
It’s amazing to think that people let me in their house with their valuables and their children and their wives underwear in the top drawer there/It’s amazing that they don’t run the Judge Judy test on this; before the case is dismissed Judy would watch the DVD of me and then scream “were you living in a dream?” At you /because you let this bald guy through your….(CHORUS)

(2)
If you’re the kind of folks that love songs and love jokes and don’t mind a coupla pokes, drink a coupla beers, let out a coupla cheers, and empty your wallet at the merch table there /and your wife gets drunk as a skunk and takes off her clothes and everything she’s got she shows to your nosy neighbor Jim and although you never liked him you liked your…(CHORUS)

(3)
You want to have me in your house, don’t ask me why, maybe you’re a Republican guy, who’s wanted to get me alone,/ so you figure you’d invite me in your home /and there’s no chairs set up /and you’re in your Nazi get up/ with spurs and a whip/ and then I get hip / to the fact that there ain’t no concert Jack, the Nazi’s on my back, and this could be my concert last /if he screws me in the….(CHORUS)

(TAG)

(Am)
I won’t humiliate you by eating with my feet in front of your friends
Remember an indictment is not a conviction
I’m a good guest if I emptied your ice cube trays I’d fill them up again.
(SHORT CHORUS)

(4)
You got a favorite family friend, a dog on which you so depend, and who’s wacky idiosyncrasies you’ll defend, he does tricks /you get a kick/ out of how he’ll sit up and beg, but during my show he makes love to my leg, and my leg doesn’t take a shine to him, and there’s no orifice there for him to begin, and you look at me with chagrin when I take my guitar and start to tear him limb from limb and with a bloody mike stand and you paid me a fricking grand and I beat your beast and ruined the feast at your… (CHORUS)

(5)
Here’s a neat trick, if you got a brother in law Nick, who you think is sick and a complete dick, and you’d like to pay him back for all the verbal attacks he’s made at family events, about how you can’t afford the rent, all the money your parents lent, all the car bumpers you bent, about the rehab place you went, about how little your life meant, so we put in the front row, and at him I have a go, and proceed through my whole show, to talk about he’s low and vile and trite and quite the parasite, he don’t screw your sister right/ because his dick is 6 inches light/ of seven inches causing him to go out every night/ and cheat with trailer trash /using all the cash /that he should in fact be using /for her hospital bills because he’s abusive /and though there’s family tears your friends will give me cheers because you didn’t hire a heart warmer you hired a brutally honest performer who paid back your nemesis Nick at your…(CHORUS)

(6)
Some of you say with no delays, that it’s perfectly okay, when I come your way, that I should say what I say, so you bring your kid that day, and they turned seven last May, and because you want to show, that any progressive mom would know, that for an independent kid to grow, you stick them in Hamell’s front row, and years later at the psychoanalyst, when your daughter’s really pissed, about how the nightmares continue to persist, and she’s got me on her list, of people she wished didn’t exist, she didn’t understand it all but she got the gist, all the dark overtones, and the anal sex groans, and the fact I made no bones, that we could be on this earth alone, and that’s tough for a little kid, /I would say “Don’t bring her out” but you did /and she shows up my door with a loaded .44 and screams get down on the floor and blows my brains until they pour /on the dining room table of the people next door /who look up from their rice and say “That wasn’t very nice, she must have seen him twice at a….(CHORUS)

(7)
I’ll try not to make your event/ the house concert where I went/ into your medicine cabinet and made a dent/ into the prescriptions your doctor sent/ I get really bent, on percocette and lent, your car to your neighbor Kent, who had given up for lent, all his vices and really meant, to keep his holy vows, but the sheer joy of the Hamell concert somehow/ had sent him off the wagon, and he comes back with your car and the tail ends draggin’, be had scored heroin and was jaggin’ and we both get up a jones, that requires mortgaging your home, and the next year I’m alone, on a grassy plot with my cell phone, thinking there’s no one goin’ to this (CHORUS)

(8)
Maybe your house concert could be something grand, I mean that is my plan, to make every show special I demand, of myself as a man, but what I’m saying here, to make myself perfectly clear, is at YOUR house it finally happens, after thousands of gigs through Mapquest, every mile every turn, every lonely tire burn, every bead of sweat, too many to forget, every strum, every chord, every house I couldn’t afford, that I have a heart attack, wouldn’t that be totally whack, I’m dead from playing so hard, so you bury me in your yard, with a monument you make out of an old board, and you paint “Here Lies Hamell The Chord Was Mightier than The Sword” and one summer night, when a full moon is in sight, and your drinking beers on the patio, with your best friend Fatio, and he says who’s under that mound of dirt, where your dog is peeing and playing with my old shirt, and you say it was this guy who played the greatest….(CHORUS)

NEW SONG :: HOUSE CONCERTS!

2009-08-06T21:00:17Z

HAMELL GETS FACEBOOK ON YOUR ASS

2009-08-05T15:05:00Z

So here's the deal:
Over on my Facebook page, which I never look at, honest,
but this is NO way to depict any kind of condescension
I just don't have time. But plenty of people use it to communicate with lost amigos etc and i'm all about communicating. (and lost amigos)
so actually,(hold on to yer seats) i think facebook's kinda happening
but don't get all ping on me or twitter, i'm not gonna defend one against the other
like some kind of neuromancer cyber paper, rock, scissors vibe
i like seeing some guy putting lenny bruce up as his own picture so you feel
hey, look at that, this guy and me would be friends if we met at a bar.
someone should figure out a way to have like a "virtual" facebook saloon, where the bartender
supplies drinks, and then finds a like minded soul on facebook
"Let's see, this guy in San Diego likes Nick Cave, Mark E Smith, Dashiell Hammett, John Cassavettes, and Ava Gardner
and this guy in Miami likes Nick Cave, Mark E Smith, Dashielle Hammett, John Cassavettes, and Ava Gardner, I should hook them up, get 'em drunk
and see what happens..."
Well, as any good bartender would tell you, initially they'd be all stand offish and challenging , then they'd have a couple of drinks and argue with each other,
then they'd be life long friends. And how would this manifest itself?
Somewhere in San Diego and somewhere in Miami you'd hear a couple of guys singing Pogues songs at the top of their lungs through open apartment windows into hot summer nights.
(Sidenote: I know a guy who's father introduced Groucho Marx to T.S. Eliot and they became lifelong friends. A story for another time....)
Now lets take this a step farther: the same bartender notices a woman in Toronto that has those exact same tastes in the arts as well
and thinks, "Hmmm, let's throw her into the mix and see what happens." So he introduces them and they become friends on facebook.
She sends her picture to the two guys and sure enough she's a dead ringer for Ava Gardner in her prime.
So the bartender serves them up all Martini's, (You know, REAL Martinis, made with, um, GIN) (I haven't figured out how you'd do this "virtually" yet but do you think
Bill Gates had his shit totally together when he and Al Gore came up with the internet concept?), and the three of them get all drunk and now we got potential for problems see?
Because when you got two male friends that have just been introduced to an Ava Gardner look alike you could have a full blown fall out.
But, they're plastered and they get on Skype and drunkenly start singing Pogues songs and
Ava opens up her mouth....AND SHE DOESN'T HAVE ANY FRONT TEETH!!
End of problem. And they're all still good friends. Maybe better. See why I love facebook?
So, with that in mind, they're having a little "TOP TEN HAMELL DESERT ISLAND SONGS" free for all ho- down
on my facebook page, which is sorta helping me design set lists for upcoming tours.
who'd have figured you guys liked the older songs so much?
I didn't do them because i figured you'd think i was lazy or some shit and wasn't writing any new tunes.
I'll drag them out for you.
what the hell...http://www.facebook.com/hamellontrial
would it kill ya to be my friend?

LAUGHABLE ADVICE

2009-08-04T04:31:14Z

As I’m writing these blogs, or this book or memoir or whatever the heck this is I was trying to get a bead on what kind of man my father was and what kind of relationship we had. Damned if I know. I know, as I’ve said before, that he really valued his job as a mechanical engineer but I don’t think that he had any great passion for it. As a matter of fact I don’t think he had much of a passion for anything other than drinking and telling dirty jokes. And he really loved my mother. I don’t recall him having any great respect for any individuals, certainly no celebrities with the possible exception of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Jimmy Cagney, Will Rodgers and Thomas Edison. Those are the only guys I ever heard him give much more than a positive nod to. Which is weird because I’ve got a giant slew of authors, musicians, filmmakers, poets, artists, comedians that I respect and look to for inspiration. Neither of my parents was into reading and I was extremely passionate about it from an early age. When he wasn’t drinking which was all day up until 5:25 when he got home from work he was pretty irritable, at least with me, I doubt that he was with his co-workers. Once he started drinking he was in a pretty good mood until he hit the sack. Once he retired from his job he drank all the time, a good natured drunk, until his health caught up with him, although he was tough until the end.

I thought I might relate some of the jokes my old man would tell me, probably in a later draft of this book I’ll sprinkle them in chronologically for dramatic effect but I’m just going to lay them out here so you can get an idea of how my father might give me some advice, and what I was expected to ascertain through subtext. I think that I had mentioned earlier that he had ran the “A cannibal passed his brother in the jungle” line by me and when I laughed this was a huge rite of passage. I was like 8 or 9. So the advice here was, “Stay sharp. People respect intellect. Advanced vocabulary is important. A good sense of humor denotes intellect.” But there’s also some contradiction in this because my father, despite his great love for dirty jokes, never went for toilet humor. No fart or shit jokes. Not funny. So this joke is only funny because a child understands the definition of the word ‘passes’ in this context. Never really heard a racist joke out of the man’s mouth or a demeaning one to woman. There is a possible exception to the racist clause which we’ll talk about later.

When he felt I was “feeling my oats”, “too big for my britches”, “had too much moxie,” he would relate the following joke, which he did a lot. An old bull and a young bull are staring down at a field of cows. The young bull feverishly suggests, “Let’s run down there and fuck that cow.” The old bull says quietly, “Let’s walk down and fuck them all.” Yes, this is my father’s way of giving me advice. Now the message is obvious for any lame brain, ‘take your time, enjoy life, slow but sure wins the race.” But I was ten when he was telling it to me so the other message here was “don’t be a cocky asshole and you’ll benefit.” He used to quote Mark Twain a lot, (and once again I paraphrase here), “When I was 18 years old my father was the stupidest guy I ever met. When I was 22 I was amazed at how much he had learned.” When we were arguing about something, one of his favorite lines was to say, “You don’t like your opinions confused by the facts.” There was a very fine line between his definition of “cocky” and “assuredness” when it came to me. My mother was continuously bugging him about talking to me about the “birds and the bees” and he roared pretty good and shared the story with all his friends when he said to me when I was 12, “It’s time for us to talk about the facts of life.” And I responded, “Sure. Anything you need to know, dad.”

I tell a true story on stage about an epiphany I had while riding in the car with him when I was 10. The Beatles had come on the radio and were singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and this inspires him to tell me a joke about a serial killer in the electric chair about to get fried. The warden asks, “Do you have any last requests?” and the serial killer says, “I’m a little nervous. I want to hold your hand.” I’m not going to read anymore into this than is necessary. I don’t think he was intentionally saying inform your definition of rock and roll with other edgy art forms. And for God's sake don’t take anything too seriously, even that old inevitability, death. But that’s what it amounted to and I knew it right then.

When I was really young we had playful jokes. He’d say things like, “Walk a ways behind me. Somebody might think I know you.” That was good for a laugh. We had found this cartoon somewhere of a marooned man alone on a deserted island patting the air affectionately. The caption underneath read: “If it weren’t for you Rover, I think I’d go crazy.” For some reason this made us both howl with laughter and an imaginary Rover would pop up in our conversations constantly.

Here was one I heard a lot: “Guitar players are a dime a dozen.” This can be looked at from a couple of different angles and depending on which day you catch me that’s how I’ll interpret it. He could be saying, ‘Don’t get in the music business, there’s billion of you dreamers out there’. Or he could be saying, ‘If you’re bound and determined to be a guitar player make yourself something ultra-distinctive, it’s the only way you’re going to set yourself apart and sell it.”

I asked him once what he thought happened to us when we died. He said he thought they dug a hole, they threw you in it and they covered it with dirt. He was a brutally honest man. When I was a teenager a lot of my friends were getting lost to drugs, or going to jail because of drugs, or getting drafted and going to fight in Viet Nam, some not returning alive. It was a real depressing time in my life. I asked him if he thought that this was the worst time that he had ever witnessed. Without a seconds hesitation he said, “No, during the depression you could walk down the street, open the lid of a garbage can and see a discarded baby inside.” See? This was his way of trying to cheer me up.

There were a lot of jokes about drinking. Those were different times. He brought home a steady paycheck and had no problem with drinking, seemingly, so it was all in good fun. He’s tell the story of the guy being from out of town and getting rip roaring drunk, a complete black out of a night and he wakes up the next morning in a hotel room with a strange woman sleeping beside him. He remembers nothing. He’s hung over as shit but wants to get out of there as quickly as possible and so throws on his pants and puts a hundred dollar bill on the dresser. When he gets out in the hall he sees a couple of girls and says, “Hey, I left a hundred dollars for your friend.” The girls respond, “What about us bridesmaids?”

He was married to my mother for 50 years, he loved her dearly and I assume he was highly faithful. He never found men that “cheated” to be anything but contemptible. He was not, however, above being flirtatious, particularly in his golden years when my mother, who he lovingly and painstakingly took care of, was in the heavy throws of Alzheimer’s disease. He actually turned to my mother-in-law once at a dinner party and quietly said, “You know Ann, in my younger days I would have been in your pants more than you are.” She’s a good natured gal and attractive to boot so she was flattered. He also used to say that he didn’t hit bottom but that he could bang the hell out the sides. I don’t think he mentioned this at the dinner party. When he was 80 he’d tell the story of the 80 year old man that goes to confession and tells the priest, “I made love to an 18 year old woman.” The priest responds, “Are you sorry for your sins?” The old man says, “Hell no.” The priest says, “Then what are you telling me for?” The old man said, “I’m telling everybody.”

One of his favorite jokes was about the farmer who couldn’t get any of his chickens to lay eggs. His competitor down the road was doing amazing business and finally out of desperation the farmer goes down the road to find out how this guy can be so successful. He’s told that the secret is a rooster, a cock of the walk, a master of insemination. The humbled farmer rents the rooster and lets him loose in his barnyard. Sure enough in about 45 minutes this rooster has bedded down some 700 chickens. The farmer is getting nervous and starts to chase the rooster. “You’ll exhaust yourself! You’ll have a heart attack! Stop!” But on the rooster goes. It nails about 600 sheep. It has sex with 400 pigs. It tackles some 300 horses. It even polishes off the barnyard dog. The poor farmer is a wreck. He’s rented this rooster and he wants to bring him back unharmed, and now he can’t find him anywhere, when suddenly he sees buzzards circling the horizon. The farmer panics. Sure enough, there on the hill is the rooster, seemingly dead, eyes closed, slobber around its beak. The farmer is in a tizzy and starts screaming, “I told you! I told you you’d fuck yourself dead!” The rooster opens one eye and says, “Shhhh!” pointing upwards and whispering fervently, “Buzzards!!”

My father golfed. I find that weird because I don’t think he cared that much about it, but my mother liked it and I think he did it more for her. But he did like golf jokes. After he died I heard this joke about a month later and remember thinking how weird it was that I couldn’t pick up the phone and call him and tell him it. The joke goes as follows: A guy goes golfing everyday and brings his dog. One day, he, the dog and a golfer buddy go out to play 9 holes. The guy with the dog tees off and it’s a beautiful shot, right on the green, inches from the hole. The dog gets up on his hind legs, barking appreciatively and applauds loudly with both paws. The dog owner’s buddy is dumbfounded. He’s never seen anything like this. “Does he always do that?’ he asks. “Oh yeah”, the dog owner responds, “as a matter of fact when I do a bad shot he does a somersault.” “No kidding”, his friend responds, “How far up does he go?” The dog owner says, “Well, that depends on how hard I kick him.” My old man would have loved it.

I alluded to a racist joke my father used to tell. He was no saint. None of us are. Being a Hungarian Jew he seemed to occasionally have a problem with Arabs. I’ve been all around the world and I’ve come to this conclusion, assholes come in every color. And I also believe the just about everybody has some weird generalization or negative stereotype that is difficult to get rid of. Lenny Bruce used to talk about how a Northerner would feel if they woke up in the Emergency Room in Alabama and heard in a very harsh Southern accent, “Y’all wuz involved in a car accident and we’re gonna hafta perform brain surgery on ya!” Answer on how they’d feel: Less than confident. And Chris Rock talks about how some of the most racist guys he has ever come across are old black guys. Shaking hands one minute with their white employer and as soon as he turns his back, “Fucking cracker.”

Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had were with Arab cab drivers on my way to Heathrow airport in London. More often than not people are just trying to put food, shelter, and clothing together for their families regardless of nationalities. And when Arab cab drivers say, “We get a horrible image in your media over there in the U.S.A.", all I can do is agree. So with that in mind I relay this joke.

A Jew is captured by the Arabs and before he is to be put to death they decide to torture him. The set up three tents. The first tent contains a giant vase which holds the strongest wine known to that region. The second tent has a ferocious panther that has an excruciating tooth ache. The third tent holds an Arabian princess, a nymphomaniac who has never been sexual satisfied. The Arabs tell the Jew he must enter the first tent and consume the entire jug of wine; he must go into the second tent and extract the tooth from the vicious panther, and finally he must enter the third tent and sexually satisfy the insatiable princess. If he can achieve these three things he will be set free. The Jew enters the first tent and consumes the vase of lethal alcohol. He stumbles drunkenly into the second tent with the panther. Huge screams and growls are heard from the tent at terrifying volumes. Portions of human skin and bloodied animal fur are sent flying out the tent door. Finally, after 45 minutes of the ear piercing fighting has subsided, a gentle purring hum is heard from within the tent. Out comes the drunken slurring Jew who says, “Alright. Where’s that broad with the toothache?”

MORE GROWING UP

2009-08-04T04:03:44Z

I don’t know if any of the previous chapters in any way could have explained the lifestyle choices that led me to The Psycho Waitress and so many women like her. Child of alcoholic parents, drug and alcohol addiction, a steady stream of brown organic mescaline, the intoxicating allure of danger, people, places and things, blah, blah, blah. I just craved a non-stop roller-coaster ride. Not to sound like Willie Nelson but I often look back at almost all of the women with great affection and a ‘Where are they now?’ inquisitiveness. The first gal that ever really broke my heart, I mean trashed the living shit out of that vital pumping organ lodged in my chest so that I genuinely entertained the notion of taking “the big plunge” was Judy the Obscure in my senior year of high school. How ridiculously naive and futile it seems in retrospect. I sure was dead serious at the time though. We were together for a year and a half. She was a stunner and lived in one of those mansions on Sedgwick I talked about earlier. She was half Greek and half Italian, had had jaundice as a child so she had this dark golden-olive skin and jet black ringlets for hair, and was a music and literature fan. She was made to order with a gorgeously perfect smile. I think there were braces just prior to my meeting her if I remember correctly. Anyway she dumped me, spiraling me into a big ass Trent Reznor size teen depression. But everybody gets these corny ass high school dramas but that doesn’t necessarily lead to bedding knife wielding ghetto dwelling psycho hillbilly bitches on a near weekly basis. Or maybe it does, I should probably take a poll. You know how when you get dumped and you’re all mad and angry and you wish the worst for that person, like you’re thinking, “I hope they wind up homeless, toothless, old, gray, wrinkled and eating out of a dumpster somewhere?” I mean you don’t really mean it, your ego is like a bent and mutilated bumper in a auto demolition derby and you’re angry and hurt so you say a bunch of stuff you don’t really mean on a long term basis. Except this actually was how the girl ended up thirty years later. Shit. Does not make you feel good at all. I mean I’ve known dumpster divers in my life, and I’ve liked and befriended dumpster divers in my life, but I never dated any dumpster divers in my life. Well, I guess I have but no dating while they were dumpster diving. If truth be told, were I had been able to look into the future and seen her as a future dumpster diver I don’t think it would have inhibited my loving her one bit. We had a soulful connection. At least until she trashed me for a better looking guy. But nobody wants to think about some toothless 50 year old woman with bare bloodied feet walking her old upscale neighborhood trying to catch a squirrel for dinner and going, “Hey! There’s my old flame Judy the Obscure! I wonder how’s she’s doing?”

The only time I didn’t play in a band was a brief stint in college. I couldn’t devote enough time to either; both were suffering and so I stopped the music, got the degree and pursued music full time after I graduated. Immediately out of college I bought a van, a P.A., put together a rocking little trio and got a steady gig at The Amber Inn on Otisco Lake. This was my first indoctrination to “Lake People”. Let’s put it bluntly and accurately: Lake People are prone to partying. Really fucking hard. It’s in their nature, it’s a lifestyle and it’s generational. They are very non-judgmental. For instance, if you wake up in the morning, pour yourself a large double Vodka Bloody Mary, smoke a couple joints, do a shot of bourbon as a “bracer” and possibly a few lines of Peruvian Flake to steady your nerves and then proceed to fill an ice chest with imported beer, a couple flasks of rum and tequila, the makings for a dozen Martinis, pot, Quaaludes, Crystal Meth, some cold meat sandwiches and then load it into your boat with your water skis to get down to some serious partying coupled with water sports no other boaters are going to give you a hard time. The reason? Because they’re doing it too! It is “The Way of the Lake!” (Sidenote: Greatest makeshift bong I ever witnessed on Otisco Lake: Someone named Lumpy had taken a cooling fan from a computer, about 12 inches in circumference, and attached a screen to the sucking side and then used bathroom caulking to secure a length of plastic tubing that utilized a dozen other gasketed tubes into a makeshift Home Depot hookah, a light purplish contraption reminiscent of a steaming octopus. The finishing touch was a plastic tarp that was stapled to the deck of his wooden boat and a small crawl through space allowing 7 or 8 fun lovers to enter, wrap their greedy lips around the tubing and partake. Now, here’s the deal, you’d put a dime bag of pot on the screen, turn that fan on and the pot would immediately turn to smoke in less than 10 seconds with a whirring and sucking sound. The hugest and most effective marijuana shotgun I‘ve ever witnessed. Eventually they added a turntable, amp and a collection of vinyl in this latex clubhouse and of course the longer you stayed in there, with no means for this dense smoke to dissipate or escape the higher you got. Genius. Lake culture. Hell, I didn’t know, I abhorred water sports, (outside of the bedroom) as much as I abhorred winter sports. But I caught on quick enough. I witnessed games of “chicken” where boats were sawed in half. Cabins set on fire. Our drummer, who had a camp out there invented some kind of giant man-size kite that you attach yourself to and ski for awhile and then rise up out of the water like some weird bastard drunken Pterodactyl and try to chug a 40 0Z. Our band was pretty mediocre but I honed my front man skills, all the while doing “cover songs” that were particular favorites of the locals. It was a lot of fun and very educational. Now that I think about it there was one whack case girl at the lake I did get involved with. She was married to a guy ten years older than her but she was a wicked alcoholic and I was too young at 21 to have any scruples regarding marriage. I mean I wasn’t married. She’d have to work this stuff out for herself. Which she did, mostly in the back of my van. She eventually got strangled over a drug deal gone bad.

This is also where I got my very first roadie, Otter. His pay was free draft beer. He carried some gear into the club from the van at the beginning of the night. He wasn’t quite as spry at the end of the night being just shy of comatose vomit induced suffocation. He was a great guy, had a beautiful laugh and in his very primal intellect he knew that life was too short not to get the most laughs as humanly possible. He was a bit like Lenny from Of Mice and Men. You probably don’t want him babysitting your three year old, but if you needed heavy stuff shifted around the yard, he was your guy. His way of getting sympathy or attention was always to get injured in some way. One week he’d be wearing an eye patch, the next week he’d have a cast on his leg and sporting crutches and the next week he’s somehow have 16 stitches in his cheek. On and on, time after time, but of course he’d soldier on roadying, all for the love of rock and roll. I lost touch with Otter when The Lake gig ended. I’d see him in bars or out seeing music and we’d take up where we left off, rekindling our friendship in minutes. Years later, after I moved out of my hometown I had heard that Otter had gotten three DWI’s which in Upstate New York meant mandatory incarceration. Otter was NOT cut out to do jail time. He possessed a beautiful childlike soul, and despite his boundless energy and barrel chested strength he was no hard ass, a big hearted softie and jail was going to eat him up. While gigging once in My Hometown area I stopped into The Music Store where I had worked for so many years. A new guy behind the counter said, “Hey, your man died.” I didn’t know what the hell he was referring to. Sure enough, Otter was headed to jail and he and his girlfriend rented a U-Haul to store his possessions. He rode in the back with his stuff while his girlfriend drove. Ever the practical joker Otter climbed out the back of the truck as his lady was navigating a particularly curvy stretch of country road. He climbed over the top of the truck and stuck his face down in the windshield in an attempt to startle her as she was driving. It was highly effective because it scared the shit out of her, she slammed on the brakes and he flew off and into a tree, breaking his neck and killing him instantly. There was a lot of gossip flying around town because she was seen a couple weeks later “entertaining” a man at a bar and some close friends of Otters got up in her face about it, but I always feel that people grieve in different and personal ways. Between the guilt and the loneliness, the turmoil of emotions she probably needed some company. And if I know Otter he wouldn’t have wanted her to be lonely or suffer, he would have wanted her to laugh as soon as possible.

GROWING UP

2009-07-31T11:57:22Z

My first very vague memory is being pushed down a snowy driveway on a sled by my mother. This had to be in Springfield Mass. where I was born. My next memory, I must have been around 4, is arriving at the house in Syracuse where I spent the next 25 years of my life. Snow, as anyone who lives in Upstate New York knows plays a major part of your life. It snows from pretty much October until May. If you don’t enjoy winter sports, which I abhorred, then you hang around and read and find comfort in books, radio and records. If you’re an only child which to a large extent I was in light of the fact that my sister was 15 years older than I was, than music and literature become your best friends. And so it was with me.

My father was consumed with his job as an engineer at Carrier Air Conditioning. Those were different times. The mother raised the child; the father put food on the table and acted as the primary disciplinarian. Because my mother had me so late in life we were pretty close. She was no fool despite the fact that she hadn’t graduated from high school, a fact that bred a deep insecurity in her and caused her to constantly upgrade her vocabulary, but she went to her grave thinking I never smoked a cigarette which either speaks to my great ability to cover up all my drug usage or her desperate desire to believe she was raising a “good kid”. My joke about our relationship can pretty much be summed up as follows: I would arrive home and say, “I got in a little fight with Mother Teresa.” And my mother would say, “What did that slut do to provoke you?” My father and I got along pretty well, he didn’t seem like he wanted to hang around with me much but that was okay because I wasn’t killing myself to hang around with him either. He had busted his ass, not finishing high school himself, but working constantly during the depression, including tons of night school, to get a position as head of Tool and Design at Carrier. A white collar position just above blue collar, and although I think he was proud of it and hung onto it for dear life, I think his real love would to have been a doctor. He was brilliant but this inability to become a doctor, as I said before one of the few professions he admired, bred in him a frustration that manifested itself in cynicism. He could be a cruelly impatient sarcastic son of a bitch. But most of the time when he was drinking he was a happy drunk. And while at home both he and my mother were pretty drunk. My mother on the other hand was a pain in the ass when she was drunk. Almost a completely different person. Not mean, just dumb as hell and it frustrated the shit out of me and led to a lot of resentment on her part because she thought I thought I was smarter than her. Her alcoholism and her insecurity led to some pretty cruel statements on her part. C’est la vie.

Despite the fact that neither one of my parents went to college it was drilled into me from as far back as I can remember that I would be attending. I despised school starting in kindergarten and it never got any better. Sunday evenings were the scenes of massive depression. Once I discovered the exciting world of radio, an exotic land here magical moments were conjured at a drop of a hat I found solace and refuge. My father seemed so incredibly miserable when he arrived home for dinner that I felt I had to avoid his lot in life at any cost. In my father’s capacity as head of Tool and Dye he dealt with salesman constantly. This was during a time when Carrier was supplying the air conditioning for the war effort. All the ships and planes needed air and anything that wasn’t cost effective to be manufactured in the confines of the Carrier factory were purchased in large quantities from small manufacturing firms typically on the East Coast. These were big accounts. They say that most business deals take place on the golf course, over drinks and it was all lubricated through jokes. Both my father and I, I guess a trait I inherited from him, had a great ability to retain these jokes. I think I inherited my sense of humor, dark and irreverent from him. And probably my alcoholism. My father told me a specific joke when I was 10 and when I understood it and laughed; he was incredibly proud and considered it a rite of passage. The entire joke goes as follows: A cannibal passed his brother in the jungle. End of joke. I guess he thought I had “passed” into manhood then.

Despite his sarcasm, my father was not a bitter man. I can truly say he was a “people person.” He could talk with great ease to the garbage man and the president both; he seemed intimidated by no one. He learned to converse, ever so slightly in several different languages. And although he loved music, particularly Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller and would occasionally dabble at stride piano he was dead set against me becoming a musician. He thought until the day he died that it was a phase that I would grow out of. My mother was even more adamantly opposed. I realize now in retrospect that having both of them gone through the depression they felt that being a musician was at best an undependable career, stock full of liars and gypsies, (and I do have gypsy blood in me, my grandparents being from Budapest), they were only looking out for my best interest. But it was a constant source of aggravation from the first grade on. I witnessed The Beatles on Ed Sullivan and it was a life changing moment. To say I was consumed is an understatement. I thought of nothing else but rock and roll, the dress code, the guitars, the gear, the fashion, etc. I longed to live in London. Anywhere but here. Despite the fact that we couldn’t play, I formed my first band in the 6th grade and spent endless hours drawing pictures of the instruments and the stage plot when I should have been paying attention to academics. I still can’t remember taking any kind of geography class, something that causes me embarrassment to this day at dinner parties. I don’t remember much prior to The Beatles, it all seems grainy black and white. There were some Western Movies on Saturday morning that I lived for and I got heavily into secret agents because there was a slew of shows, I-Spy, The Man from Uncle, Honey West, Wild Wild West, Get Smart, It Takes a Thief, Mission Impossible that I bought into totally, but nothing could overwhelm the sound I was hearing over my transistor radio. Particularly The Who. They seemed to personify everything that I wanted to see and hear in a band. I lived to be some kind of amalgamation of Pete Townsend and Keith Moon. The maniacal intellectual if such a thing exists, and if it didn’t I would create it. Despite their strong objections to my musical aspirations my parents were pretty forthcoming about letting all my bands practice in the basement. And so it began. A series of feeble attempts, my rock and roll college if you will, to get me to learn how to play. And I was desperate to learn. I wasn’t shy about asking anyone who knew more than me on the instrument to show me how to play. This led to a very pleasant and productive experience working in a mom and pop music store from the ages of 14 through 19. It was a wonderful time. I hate those corporate Guitar Center places now, all those ‘80s hair metal guys dying to show you how they can “shred” and cursing Kurt Cobain for rendering that crap obsolete for the bullshit that it is. The music stores that I love, and I’m lucky to have one right around the corner from my house here in Ossining, are the ones where passionate players of all ages, lovers of music, trade stories, anecdotes, tips and licks and spread the gospel. Like an old school trading post where the people set awhile and whittle, if you will, and you walk away feeling that your soul has just had a gas station like “fill up”. Such was the place I spent the majority of my childhood years when I wasn’t in that hideously boring waste of time: school. Sidenote: If you’re looking for one of these places now I highly suggest Lark Street Music in Teaneck, New Jersey. The place is filled with glorious instruments; each possessing a soul of their own and you can feel the history and stories as you enter the place. I walk out of there inspired, as in an answer to that horrible existential question: Why are we here and what’s it all for? I’m briefly calmed and sedated and ready to dive headlong into the next horrible challenge, whatever it might be. Try it sometime, I wouldn’t steer you wrong, at least intentionally. Unless you’re some kind of corporate rocker, then it’s every man for himself.

The music store I worked at, although not particularly lucrative as far as a pay check went, (bear in mind I was only 14 so this was all under the table) was a mother lode of knowledge. My duties were small, answering phones, polishing guitars, sweeping up but the attributes in terms of copping licks were great. All kinds of players came in and I unabashedly hounded them for tips. I got the key to the place so I could open on Saturday morning but it gave me access to the basement and sex with young ladies that fancied up and coming guitar players. It was a cherry gig and beat the hell out of working at McDonalds. A lot of the time the owner, who was a great guy, was away, I had the run of the place and as a 14 year old kid it was heavenly. Cranking amps to 10 and doing what we in the business call comparative analysis. For you geeks out there I have to say this. The store had one of the first Peavey franchises, also Earth franchises, we had Randall amps, tons of tweed Fender gear, a couple of Dual Showman’s, Kustom amps, (one of which reportedly owned by the great John Fogerty himself), Marshalls, Vox Super Beatles and AC-30’s, even some LAB amps as proclaimed hot shit by Ronnie Montrose. You gear heads will know what I mean. The rest of you I’m sure are bored to tears but if your curiosity gets the better of you, you can check all that shit out on Ebay. However, I’ll go to my grave saying that Plush Amps were the greatest. They didn’t last worth a shit but God they sounded great. Tone like a Matchless produces now, which in my humble opinion is the best out there. Sorry that I geeked out on you but I’m still like a kid in a candy store when it comes to gear. Matter of fact I’m going to check Ebay right now and see if Plush Amps are anywhere to be found. Hold on, I’ll be right back. Nope, no go. You’ll have to take my word for it, although the mighty Jeff Beck Group used them when Rod Stewart, (the Richard Burton of Rock and Roll) was singing lead and Ronnie Wood was playing bass so if it was good enough for them it was of colossal proportions as far as I’m concerned. Sorry about the tangent there, I’m sure it holds no interest to a non-player but it should give you some indication of how the smell of an ancient guitar case or the aroma of a hot amp tube can still give me a boner.

Working at the music store was pretty uneventful. The owner was extremely anti-drug so there were never any indiscretions there. He was however, very pro-sex so there was a lot of that flying around. Nothing of any great consequence although there was a major fall out with the folk mass group that I was involved in. Turns out one of the young ladies had written some descriptive depictions of some oral sex we were having in her diary and this fell into the hands of her mother. Her mom was head of the church group folk mass so this didn’t go over too well. I got a frantic call from one of the young ladies girlfriends telling me all the things we had supposedly “done” and “hadn’t done”. She hung up panicky and quick and I immediately called my old man because he would have killed me if it was trouble that was drug related but as far as sex and alcohol he was “proud of his boy”. Anyway, once he was assured that this was highly consensual he told me not to worry, he’d cover my ass. Sure enough, within minutes I was visited by a priest, also heavily involved with our little folk mass who grabbed me aside, forcibly I might add, and pulled me into one of the guitar lesson rooms and told me that it was all he could do to keep from jamming his fist so far down my throat that I’d never be able to get it out. According to him the things that I partook in married people don’t even do. From what I understand now, Catholic married people don’t have oral sex. Scratch that off the Sacrament list. What a pity. The owner of the music store, no fan of Catholicism and a huge fan of oral sex was overhearing the heated, albeit one sided conversation and yelled, “You my priestly friend are in no position to comment on what married people do and I think it’s time for you to leave my store.” And threw the fucker out. Hallelujah. Unfortunately there’s more to the story. Luckily I was only 15 because a bunch of church related parents were up in arms and wanted to have me sent away. They arrived, unannounced, at my parent’s house to see “what could be done about the problem.” I wasn’t there, thankfully, I was at the Everson Museum being pushed into John Lennon and having him tell me to fuck off. All in all not my best week. So my old man, an atheist if there ever was one, grabs the priest by the collar as he’s at the threshold of our door and says, “Did you threaten my son by saying that you’d stick your fist down his throat?” Now my old man has got the priest by the balls and he knows it. My father continues, “Doesn’t it say in the bible ‘He who is without sin cast the first stone?’” Now the priest is stammering and sheepish as my father says, “Are you to tell me you’re sinless father?” The priest who is now confronted with an intellect that is WAY beyond his element grunts in front of this hillbilly production of the Music Man like Ladies Auxiliary Club, “No”, and my father says “Well c’mon in and welcome to our home.” Despite the fact that the old man can be tanked to the gills his verbal skills and psychological chess finesse is top notch and he reduced this little meeting to a failed lynching within minutes. Nary a tar and feathering to be had. At one point when one of the mothers alluded to the fact that I may have been overly aggressive or even forceful in my sexual approach my father actually said, “You can’t get a hard dick through clenched teeth.” Okay, so it’s not the “I have a dream” speech, but I still get a huge kick out of it. My father then produced a large stack of love notes from each of their daughters letting the mom’s know that not only was his son not the seducer but if anything they ought to keep an eye on their 14 year old girls, it appears there’s been some negligent parenting going on here. As I was not even 16 at the time my father was not having any entertaining thoughts of me being sent away to any wayward home for boys, these people might want to refigure their parenting skills, and thanks very much for dropping by. I’d appreciate it if you’d let me get back to my drinking, I work hard for a living. End of story. Oh, except for one thing, eventually the priest left the church and married the girl’s mom. Go figure.

That wasn’t the only run in my father had with a priest. My sister, as I said 15 years older than me, came home crying one day because she had gone to confession and told the priest that after three children she and her husband were going to start using birth control. The priest, I guess, starting yelling at her and told her he was going to throw her out of the church. When she arrived home and my father saw the tears and heard the story, he got in his ’58 T-Bird, headed down to Blessed Sacrament, grabbed the priest out of the confessional booth and threw him up against the wall. He asked him, “What about all those people that ate meat on Friday? Did they let them out of hell?” He actually got the priest to apologize to my sister. I think the appropriate word here would be, “Jesus!”

The only other eventful thing that happened at the music store was a guy came in early one Saturday morning. I was alone, hung over having had a gig myself the night before. He pulled out a shotgun from behind his back and demanded this beautiful blond Johnny Smith Gibson from behind the counter. You had to admire his taste. It was a great guitar. I told him, with all the stupidity that youth and a hangover can muster, “Go fuck yourself.” This was not the response he was anticipating. Despite the fact that he shakily raised the gun higher and demanded it once again I groggily told him to get the fuck out before I called the cops. Amazingly, he did. I went about my day, not thinking a whole lot about it until the owner came in, I related the story and the cops picked him up. Another day at the coal mines.

Another source of income was playing for the Parks and Recreation High School Band. It was a big band in the tradition of Tommy Dorsey or Glenn Miller, did all the old standards, in the winter you would rehearse once a week, pick up a check of maybe 40 bucks and then in the summer you would do two concerts a day at different parks around the city on a flat bed truck. Pick up a nice check of about $200. Between the music store gig and the Parks gig I was bringing in some good cheese for a 17 year old.

Of course there was always a series of bands I was playing in. Usually “cover” bands. Just really trying to learn the ropes. Nothing of any great consequence. Some guys had real talent, could learn things note for note off of records and play like their heroes. It didn’t come easy to me. But what I lacked in inherent skill I more than made up for in passion much to my parents chagrin. I worked hard at it. It’s funny because now, one of the most comfortable places I am anywhere in the world is on stage. It’s my own little world that I’ve created and nobody can bother me but initially I used to get horrible stage fright. I knew, however, that it was going to have to be something that I was going to have to work myself through. Through a great series of trial and error and many many mistakes I developed a style I find great comfort in. One would think in light of the two music related jobs I was working, at the music store and in the Parks band, not to mention the various rock bands I had on the side that my scholastics would have taken a nose dive but the reality was that with very little effort I could pull a “B” average which was enough to placate the old man, and so I put in very little effort indeed. As a matter of fact I got a call at the music store one day from my father. As he might have called me a total of three times in my entire life I figured this was serious. He must have heard a rumor that they were administering SAT tests at school, something I neglected to take. He said, “Have you applied to college?” I said, “No”. He said, “Are you going to apply to college?” I said, “Where do you suggest?” He said, “LeMoyne”. It was cheap, and it was close. I could live home, helping with the reduced budget. I said “Fine. What would you like me to be?” He said, “The kid next door went to LeMoyne, became an accountant and makes 100 grand a year.” “Fine” I said. I hung up, applied to LeMoyne, got accepted, four years later got my Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting, handed it to my father and said, “Are we done with this now?” He stuck it in a drawer where it remained ever since and I went back to pursuing my music career. I realize now that he didn’t want me cursing him as I waited tables or delivering pizzas at the age of 35, but I knew I had made my own bed and I was going to have to lie in it.

THE PSYCHO

2009-07-29T03:07:54Z

It was a quiet night as far as The Band went no gigs, no rehearsal. I wasn’t really living anywhere at the time, a lot of people’s couches and hotel rooms on the road although my books and records were still at my parent’s house which technically meant I was still residing there. Their drinking had escalated to mammoth and extremely chaotic and dramatic proportions and despite numerous interventions it had only gotten worse and I avoided “home” at all costs. I was constantly looking for a party. It was as if I could never keep still. I decided to visit The Firebarn, I can’t remember if there was a band playing that I wanted to see or if I felt I could get “discount” drinks from the bartender. We used to call it “the dollar with the string” which meant you’d put the dollar on the bar, get your drink and pull your dollar back with the imaginary string. Free booze. In reality we knew all the other bartenders, they were either musicians themselves or good pals who knew it was infinitely more necessary for you to get drunk on your limited budget than it was for the owner to make a profit. Patrons of the arts if you will. Maybe that’s why so many places went under.

I had a not so subtle pick up line. Oddly enough it worked. My father used to tell a joke about a guy selling apples on the street corner for a million dollars a piece. When somebody said to him, “What are you crazy selling million dollar apples?” the salesman replied, “I only gotta sell one!” So the pick up line went as follows: “Do you think you cum if I ate you?” Bear in mind many a gal would have been offended and walked away, although not as many as you might think. I realize now that there’s plenty of subtext hidden in that question. It means you are willing to pleasure the woman, and your pleasure is not necessarily at stake. You’ve chosen her, above all others in the hazy 2 AM din of the drunken barroom to be your spiritual partner for the evening. Bear in mind this was prior to the Aids crisis. Or Aids wasn’t a big topic in my hometown. I don’t recommend this laissez-faire attitude but I think it goes without saying that a lot of things I’m guilty of in my sordid youth I don’t recommend. I can only hope this book gets published before my child can read, and then he reads the classics before he delves into his old man’s past. (Detroit, if you’re reading this, don’t do this shit, be a lawyer and fight for justice, be a journalist and seek the truth so on your death bed you can say you’ve led a righteous life.) Hunter Thompson says that you should make a beast of yourself to get away from the pain of being a man. I’m paraphrasing here but you get the jist. Shit, we can rationalize anything. World leaders do it all the time. So I guess I’m justifying my immature sexist ways. But more often than not, (that’s a higher than .500 batting average) the woman would say, “I bet I could” and you’d be off to the races. It was precisely that dialog that led me to The Psycho Waitress That Stalked The Firebarn.

I waited around for her to finish. She didn’t have a car of course. I had this really cool ’72 Impala that my father had given me so we grabbed a couple of 6-packs, “on the house” and drove down to The Projects which were located on the other side of James Street. This was considered the bad side of town although I don’t know where the “good” side of town was in my home area. The only good section was a group of houses in the Sedgwick area that I would cruise around, gazing longingly at mansions with The Persuader, him telling me which ones were easy to break into, which ones had alarms and dogs and which ones had cool friends who we didn’t want to take advantage of. I never partook in these sordid adventures, as to whether he did or not I didn’t venture to ask but he sure was knowledgeable. Anyway we arrived very intoxicated to The Psycho Waitress’s apartment. I got the impression that she didn’t live alone, there was a roommate somewhere sleeping. I asked her if someone else lived there and she said, “Yeah, my mom, she’s upstairs sleeping. We’ll have to use the couch because she and I share the bed.” I felt more than a tad uncomfortable and said maybe I should go, or at the very least be a bit quieter because The Psycho immediately turned on the stereo and blasted “Fun House” by The Stooges. She screamed over the racket, “Fuck it, I pay the rent, if she doesn’t like it she can leave.” Such was the relationship I guess.

Rarely do I regale my friends with my previous sexual exploits. There’s nothing worse than some old guy talking about his sexual past. It’s fucking sad. I’m relating this particular story of T.P.W. because I think it led to some kind of an awakening, an epiphany, if you will, of a good kind. “Glory Days” as Springsteen sings. I’m been faithful for 25 years now as amazing as that seems to me. But in those days it was no holds barred. The Golden Ache and I had a weird magic touch when it came to talking girls into threesomes. We met some girl at a bar once, I remember arriving at the bar, walking, because neither of us had any vehicles, Christ we didn’t even have licenses, and with empty pockets and a severe lack of finances. We had tried to convince this girl, attractive if I remember through the fog of alcohol and history, into leaving her fiancé who also was elsewhere in the bar, they were to be married next week, and going to “party” with us. The argument went as follows: “Look, next week you’re going to be shacked up with this guy for THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. Tonight, we can entertain you sexually in a way you’ve never been loved before, a one time, no commitment deal, who even wants to exchange names? Wadda ya say? A once in a lifetime offer!” She smiled, thanked us but refused. We were walking home, somehow we had gotten rip roaring drunk, as I said with no money, had a big bag of pot in our pocket and were carrying a case of beer. We heard the beep of a horn behind us. Sure enough it was the engaged girl, alone in her car calling out the window on a hot summer night, “Where’s the party?” You can guess the rest. Sure enough, never saw her again. Hope she’s still happily married although admittedly I’m skeptical. This was not a one time deal either, between The Golden Ache’s angelic looks and devil may care grin and my gift of gab we should have played the slots in Vegas, although we might have been equally as lucky we wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun. Anyway, back to The Psycho.

So we’re going at it on the couch pretty good, she’s beyond enthusiastic but I’m sensing more “theater” than actual abandonment. I’m eating the hell out of her and I sense a fictitious orgasm on her part. So being the sensitive guy that I am, not to mention a major Lenny Bruce fan I ask, “Did you cum?” “Well no” she says, “keep trying.” So I’m back at it for another 45 minutes and there’s a lot of yelling and a lot of sweating and writhing and sure enough another quake. We’re taking a breath, I’m kind of satisfied with myself and I say, “Hey was it good? Did you cum?” “Hell no!” she says breathing hard, “keep trying.” Jesus. My tongue is as numb as an over zealous Novocain dentist visit so I suggest she throw something sexy on, she runs upstairs, grabs some of her mom’s lingerie, comes running downstairs, reaches under the couch, pulls out a steak knife and says, “cut these off me and hold this to my throat.” Now Iggy’s screaming full blast about being in a Fun House, Mom’s about to lose her best Victoria’s Secrets stuff, which by the looks of the furniture in the dump set her back a couple of months wages and I’m drunk enough that if I slip we’re about to have some kind of weird INXS fiasco. But still, diligent lover that I am, I soldier on. I attend to her needs as instructed and start to get what I perceive to be a genuine reaction out of her. That’s when she grabs the knife and says, “Let me cut you.” This is WAY before piercings were hip and I really really like my blood to remain on the inside and I was out of there faster than you can say, “limp dick.” I still have a vision of her stark naked with strands of torn Victoria’s Secrets underwear hanging off of her, mad as fucking hell, yelling out her front door for the entire projects to hear, “YOU DIDN’T MAKE ME CUM YOU LOSER! YOU DIDN”T MAKE ME CUM!”

It was on the way home that I started thinking, “How did it GET like this? Where am I headed?” Maybe we should start at the beginning.

AS CLOSE AS I COULD GET

2009-07-25T05:28:30Z

In 1980 our band opened for Badfinger in Albany New York. I was certainly aware of them because of their hits, and the fact that they were The Beatles baby brother band, they were on their label, Apple, and were heavily touted and influenced by them. I also knew that they were broke and this led to the tragic suicide of one of their founding members, Pete Hamm. It was not a pretty sight. They arrived late to the venue with their gear in a rented station wagon with a small U-Haul trailer attached. They had to borrow cymbals from our drummer and rumor had it that they had never met one of the guitar players; he was an L.A. session guy who had learned the tunes via tapes. They were extremely quiet, not even insular, not only were they not talking to us, they were barely talking to each other. The club held a thousand and maybe 150 were in attendance, half of whom were our fans. We played an okay set; I don’t know if any of Badfinger saw it, we took no offense, that was typical. After our set I retreated to the dressing room and did a couple shots of bourbon and smoked a joint which was also typical. I began talking to the bass player who grunted one word answers. I don’t know why I was so persistent, it was obvious the man wanted to be left alone, but I think I was weirdly trying to cheer him up or at the very least show him I respected him. This one sided banter went on for an embarrassingly uncomfortable length of time until I asked him where he was from. He grunted, “Liverpool.” I dumbly asked “Did you ever see The Beatles?” It was as if the veil lifted. He smiled a broad grin and said in that oh so familiar accent of anyone that has ever seen A Hard Day’s Night maybe a couple of thousand times, “Sure, everyday, at The Cavern. They played lunchtime for our school. I saw them hundreds of times. It was the thing that made me want to play music.” He opened up completely. He regaled me with stories of the songs, the jokes, the girls waiting for hours outside. It was a phenomenon, this was just a local band, they weren’t famous yet but it was obvious that Beatlemania was right around the corner. He was there the day Brian Epstein walked down those sweaty crappy cellar steps and witnessed the scorching heat that was John Lennon for the first time. Badfinger had to do their set and I called to our bass player, The Bass Player, and said “We have got to go watch this.” The Bass Player had had the first pair of Beatle boots I had ever seen in the flesh in fourth grade. We had been best friends ever since. Our love of music that was from England was all consuming. We had Freddie and the Dreamers albums for God’s Sake. He was as buzzed as I was, (probably more) and we made our way down to the audience area. Badfinger started out with 3 or 4 of their hits. They played them reasonably well and everybody seemed satisfied if not a bit relieved. The Bass Player and I felt we had heard enough and were turning to go when the band announced, “And now we’re going to do some of the songs we used to do back at The Cavern Club.” They launched into “Hippy Hippy Shake”. The room exploded. It was The Mersey Beat. The sound that changed the world. I had heard it on record, I had witnessed how it had changed styles but this was it in the here and now. And lordy lordy it was exciting. The proceeded to play “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” and “Whole Lotta Shaking.” The bass drum sounded like it was fending off the German army. The guitars wanted to teeter off the track but held just firm enough where you were in awe. Suddenly all the pain of the singer was either washed away or crystallized into a sheer angry force that rendered the audience spell bound. Then they did a couple more of their biggest hits and were gone. They were drenched in sweat and so was I. I’ve been to Liverpool and I’ve been to The Cavern Club although it’s now just a replica, the original was torn down much to McCartney’s grief. But that was the closest I ever came to the real deal, a memory of a lifetime. (Sidenote: The bass player from Badfinger committed suicide a few years later.)

Not long after Badfinger I found out that Little Richard was preaching at a church in my hometown on Easter Sunday. How the hell I found out about this I don’t know. I certainly wasn’t in the inner Baptist church circle. It wasn’t in the paper. Nobody I knew even went to church. Anyway I went to see Little Richard with a gal and The Bass Player and his gal and we drove all night from some gig hours away. I had taken some speed to stay awake. We got to the church just a half an hour early and the place was mobbed. “No more allowed in”, an usher told me, “There’s close circuit TV down in the basement.” Who the hell wants to watch anything on closed circuit TV? So I did the same thing at the gates of that church that I’m going to do at the gates of heaven: I lied my ass off. I told him we had traveled for two days straight, with barely any gas or food but we NEEDED this as a religious conversion. He let us stand in the back. We were the only four white people there. It was really cool. Just like what I assumed a ‘50s rock show would be. You could see how effectively early African-American rockers had “borrowed” from the church. There was a local woman who did a couple solo pieces on the organ, very Aretha Franklin. Then they brought out a local gospel quartet, very Temptations. Excellent stuff. Then Little Richard had a couple of openers that traveled with him. Once again two dynamite quartets, totally rocking, all for Jesus. Then the star of the show, the most beautiful man in show business, arrived to preach: Little Richard hisself. And what did Richard preach about on the day that Jesus was resurrected? Homosexuality. I gather he was against it despite the fact that his is flamingly gay, but like us all; he was looking for a check, the cash, the payola, the bling to make it to next the gig. So, if anti-homosexuality was what you wanted to hear, that’s what you were going to hear. He even said, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Hallelujah. Then people brought up gifts to the alter, someone even carried a lamb but in retrospect I realize it was just great theater but I bought it at the time. This really attractive Black woman in the pew ahead of me with a cool leopard dress said, “I can see it in your eyes baby, you want to accept Jesus.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her what she saw in my eyes was Crystal Meth. After that I became a Gospel freak for awhile, it was such a great musical experience. There was a group called The Mighty Clouds of Joy that had a real Philly Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes vibe that I dug and followed as often as I could. Those revival meetings were the closest I ever came to seeing an old Alan Freed rock and roll show in Boston or Cleveland. I gotta find me a cool swinging over the top Baptist church to go to in my current area. That shit was fun.

As the band progressed we started expanding our geographical touring, and began playing Boston. We were looking for a producer to capture the raw energy we were getting on stage that appeared to be so infectious to our audience. This led, somehow, to some conversations with the great producer Jimmy Miller. The Keyboard Player, who I said before was by far the best musician in the band, (he actually had many a private lesson with Johnny Johnson, Chuck Berry’s astonishing keyboard player who was so integral to the sound of those Chess records, and I think he got a lesson from Eubie Blake once just by knocking on his door. Eubie’s advice was to ‘take a year and work on your left hand’ which seemed an eternity at the time but now I realize what brilliant advice that was….) had a good vision as to how smoozing could help, and had made contact with Jimmy Miller’s agent. Miller had produced five of the great Rolling Stone’s albums, specifically Exile on Main Street, our favorite. This was exciting. Unfortunately this was not Jimmy Miller’s peak. Heroin had ravaged his soul and mental ability and he was probably just looking for a check to go shoot up. We had these meetings at a club in Boston called The Channel where we played a few times and we became friends with the management there who invited us to their 5th year anniversary. Several bands were playing, to be headlined by The Replacements, my favorite band at the time. The Responsible girl, The Keyboard Player and I all drove to Boston in a beat up Mazda to spend the day with The Replacements. We had to borrow $5 from Chris Marrs their drummer for gas to get home. If the look in his wallet was any indication it was his last five dollars. We caught their soundcheck which was incredibly powerful, and then proceeded to hang out with their genius albeit tortured guitarist Bob Stinson all day. I had a few brief words with Paul Westerberg who was quiet but nice but couldn’t be engaged in conversation really. Bob, on the other hand, couldn’t have been any sweeter, and basically told me his life story. By the time the club filled with a thousand people the excitement, particularly at the front of the stage had reached a fever pitch. Of the thousand attendants, maybe the first couple hundred closest to the band were hard core ‘Matts fans the rest were curiosity seekers. The Replacements had won the Village Voice’s prestigious Pazz and Jop poll the prior year and just put out a new album “Tim” that had received a 5 star review from Ira Robbins in Rolling Stone. In the land of Aerosmith and The Cars, (bear in mind this was prior to The Pixies) there were a lot of rock star wanna-bes in the back of the club with skeptical disdainful glances wanting to see what all the fuss was about. The Replacements were known for their brilliant songs, genius guitar player and drunken chaotic shows where songs weren’t always completely performed, anything could change at the drop of a guitar and the band was flying off the rails at all times. The closest thing that compares now is a band called The Black Lips, I recommend them highly. This was not a band that played up to the industry. They were going to have fun at all costs. They were MY TEAM. If the opposing teams at the time were U2 and R.E.M., well, you can see who won. But God I loved those ‘Matts. Westerberg would wear his heart on his sleeve, wash it down with a shot of whiskey and play it at a tempo that made Johnny Thunders look tame. Bob was wearing green tights with no underwear and kept flashing his dick at the front of the stage. This seemed to annoy Westerberg who yanked Bob’s guitar cord until his amp toppled off the drum riser and into the audience. I still have a vision of Bob drunkenly fishing his guitar out of the audience by the cord as the band played on. Somebody in the front must have been heckling Tommy, or spitting on him or belting him in the foot because he put down his bass and dove into the mosh pit to confront his tormentor man to man. The band played on. They were doing what at the time had been the closest thing they ever got to a hit which was “I Will Dare” but Westerberg stopped singing and dove into the pit to assist his pal Tommy. These were Minneapolis boys and they stuck together. The Band played on. I had a great side stage vision of their roadie taking this all in, and he charged out from the side to, I assumed, rescue them. No such luck. He grabbed the microphone to finish singing the song, letting the bandmates fend for themselves. As I said, the band played on. It was the closest I’d ever come to being in the center of a rock and roll hurricane. It was a fantastic show.

In our continued pursuit of a producer we heard that Nick Lowe was to playing at a local club. We secured the opening slot. Nick had produced one of our favorite albums: Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model. We felt that it would be good to leave Nick a note, letting him know that we were interested in having him produce. We were never known for our subtlety. We planned a full fledged attack. We bought cans of black spray paint. At 4 o’clock in the morning The Persuader broke into the club, a no brainer for him, there wasn’t even an alarm to trip. The World’s Bitchiest Man, The Wolf, The Persuader and I entered donned in black ninja gear. We completely covered the dressing room with LARGE notes to Nick. “NICK PRODUCE US” “NICK WE NEED YOU” “NICK, THIS WILL BE YOUR BIGGEST HIT!!” The next night the club owner was furious. He was an elderly Italian guy, I liked him, but he was so angry I heard that he hit his head against the wall. Repeatedly. How could they do this to me? He made us paint it over and docked us two weeks pay. Needless to say Nick Lowe never called. But it was the closest I ever got to mindless terrorism and I regret none of it.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON (VIDEO)

2009-07-23T00:51:30Z

THE KINGS

2009-07-22T10:28:33Z

We were always getting the opening slot for some up and coming recording band that was traveling through promoting their new release. They were typically defined as “New Wave’ whatever the hell that was. We were drawing astonishingly well for a band that didn’t play any “covers’ so the agent was making a mint putting asses in the seats and giving us a whopping $100. Suckers ‘til the end. It was fun however to play for that many people and take the challenge to blow the more successful radio played band off the fucking stage. Such was a band out of Canada called “The Kings”. Admittedly this was not The MC5 mopping the stage at The Grande with Cream but it fun none the less.

City Limits held a good thousand people. I used to have one of the first wireless guitars and would do lengthy solos, leave the stage and parade up to the owner’s office where he would cut lines of blow the size of La Guardia airport which I would snort, all the while playing my solo and head back to the stage “rejuvenated”. I’m sure if Red Bull had been invented I would have been a choir boy. It was also a great place to take ceiling tiles out with the headstock of your guitar. Made for a great show.

The Kings seemed chockfull of attitude which was a bad stance to take with both us and the crew. We were hometown boys but more importantly we were on a mission. This was mortal combat. They had worked too hard on their haircuts and poppy radio hooks to leave the venue unscathed. We hit the stage like an invading army, game face intact, taking no prisoners, making every move, chord and lyric count. This was blood lust. Sweating so much that it looked like someone had fire hosed the stage and your Chuck Taylor’s squeaked like you had worn them into a swimming pool. The rhythm section played and swung like a well oiled machine, and I took the liberty of working the crowd into a frenzy, getting each half of the room to compete with each other in terms of singing along, shouting along, laughing along, and rocking until they could take it no more. And then we turned up the steam. The piano player who was the best musician in the band could play while he climbed the wall behind him with his feet so that he was ultimately standing upside down from the ceiling while he played. The other guitar player and I had worked up a couple of solos where we would play each other’s guitars at the same time. Then I’d fall to my knees in a simulated stance of exhaustion only to get up and turn it up a notch one more time. It was a sure fire crowd explosion and in front of 1000 people it was deadly. In a good way. A bit of stage diving, a few jumps from the P.A. stacks, some smashing of some gear and its goodnight friends. I watched as The Kings turned white from the side of the stage. I’m sure they redesigned their set list so they could play there “hit” “Slip into Glide” (or some fucking thing) at the beginning of the set. I think they might have actually done it three times throughout the evening as the crowd got sparser and sparser. I didn’t mention this to anyone but one of the strippers that I was “entertaining” up in Canada was the girlfriend of The Kings lead guitar player. I had to hear about how successful they were, usually as foreplay. I sent that boy back across the border with his tail between his legs. I bet I fucked her better too. When the promoter gave me the $100 I slipped it back in his shirt pocket and said, “You obviously need this more than I do.” It was time to get back to The Roadie House, get drunk and celebrate.

CRACKBALL BOZ

2009-07-21T13:12:22Z

When that insidious little mistress cocaine entered our circle it was the beginning of the end. For those of you that have stared at the ceiling for hours pleading to the heavens, “Please let me sleep, I promise never, ever to indulge again” you know what I mean. Nobody withdraws money from the ATM at 4 in the morning for any good reason. How many of us, in a fatigued hallucinatory state have had that conversation with the ATM where the bank machine, acting as your conscience starts reprimanding you, “How are you going to pay the rent?” “Didn’t you promise to never do this again?” etc, etc.

The band discontinued it’s residency at the Cornerstone and began playing often at a club called The Pretty Thing. Once again the place was packed and once again the patrons were invited to the after hours parties. The owner, Boz, had a lucrative sideline business where he sold a large quantity of very high grade pot to 7 dealers in town, making a very quick sizable profit and because he wasn’t selling on the street but to 7 men he had dealt with and trusted for many years including a high profile local lawyer his risk factor was kept low and well in check. He was storing his pot in an apartment above him but somehow the girl who was living there rent free eventually balked at the risk, an apartment was vacant, and he offered the digs to me. A major step upwards in terms of quality of life for me but needless to say it came with highly illegal strings attached. I couldn’t pass up the offer and moved in. It turns out my position as “mule” was short lived because he sold this aspect of his business to someone to concentrate full time on his Pretty Thing bar and yet because he loved my band and the money we put in his till, (our crowd were notorious drinkers) I lived there at a highly reduced rent charge.

Boz was a strange bird, a husband, father, body builder, businessman in addition to owning a horrible addictive personality. He was rumored to have had a lengthy tenure with Crystal Meth which he kicked; the only tell tale signs being all new teeth. I’d smoke pot, the best pot I had ever smoked, out in the car with him and his lawyer buddy and he would lecture me on the evils of chemicals, how pot was pure and organic and ultimately good for you. Who was I to argue? Where he got his first taste of cocaine I don’t know but I can tell you he dove in hook line and sinker. It may have had something to do with the fact that despite his marriage, and to a wonderful woman I might add, he found he could lure gals into bed utilizing coke as bait. One of his strange idiosyncrasies was that he wouldn’t snort it. He found the bending down to be demeaning. His method of choice was to boil the coke down to a crack like rock and sprinkle this into a joint. He came up to my apartment once at 10 AM and offered me a toke. One hit and I was devastated and I was no amateur. It was brutally apparent that I was going to have to cancel any plans I had for the rest of the day. I asked him, barely able to form the words, “Are you as crazy high as I am? “Always!” was his reply. Yeesh.Scary and I don’t scare easily. It began getting creepy because I could hear the gas burner on his stove below me going on and off at all times of the day and night so I knew he was neck deep in addiction and cooking coke constantly. His wife was the consummate enabler because he was in much better spirits when he was high then when he was withdrawing. Highly typical.

For those of you that are insiders in the entertainment field you know that it’s a thankless bitch of a job on every level The artist has to bust their ass to get paid. The agent only gets 10% of that after a multitude of phone calls trying to get their act on the stage, the promoter has the same problem and the bar owner might have it the toughest of all. Believe me when you see a packed house on a Friday or Saturday night there’s very strong possibility that they are paying off debts for when there was only 8 people in the place on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, the air conditioner went, the beer cooler broke down and BMI and ASCAP were there to collect money. You better love this business because it ain’t gonna love you back. Old joke: How do you make a million dollars in the music business? First you start with two million dollars. So needless to say with the usual problems of running a bar business and a $200 a day crack habit Boz had to find another source of supplementary income. He started dealing coke, making him the most popular guy on the North Side.

Some odd renovations started taking place in his apartment. He got a house repairman hooked on blow and traded him for work. There were all kinds of hiding places and weird sex seats. I would have moved but the rent was so ridiculously cheap and actually when he was buzzed he was kind of fun to hang around with, not to mention generous. But ugly shit started happening, wild eyed girls showing up at his door and screaming to his wife about Boz’s sexual exploits. Strange looking characters knocking at all hours of the night in the hopes of a score. Rumor had it that he got busted, turned informant and people were out to kill him. It was as seedy as I’d ever encountered. Finally his wife got caught embezzling money from the bank she worked at and was hauled off in handcuffs. You’d go down to his apartment and see 4 or 5 guys, all nervous and glassy eyed, completely comatose waiting for a shipment to come in. Really yucky depressing shit. Kind of like a crack house but with rented furniture.

The Persuader and I were hanging out in my apartment one night. We had the stereo cranked and we discussing the various nuances of Jerry Lee Lewis recordings. The Persuader is a Jerry Lee Lewis freak. I have thousands of his recordings the majority of which are astonishing and it makes for great musical conversation, particularly with a bag of pot and a bottle of Rebel Yell. I need mention that the door of my apartment was not attached to the hinges. There was in fact a door but it was propped up against the hole that was the “portal” I guess. The Responsible Girl and I got into a fight one night months prior, I had locked her out because I didn’t want to hear her bitching any more but she felt the need to continue bitching and the only way to realize that to full effect was face to face. Or so she figured. So she kicked the door down. I’m not what you call “handy” and particularly in those days I didn’t have much worth stealing so I just propped the door up against the frame. Certainly didn’t have to worry about forgetting my keys. The Persuader at one point said, “There sure is a lot of noise going on downstairs.” But I paid no attention. There was always some bullshit going on downstairs and besides I was too wrapped up in the Killer to care. But sure enough there was enough noise to make my front door fall to the floor. We just propped it back up and continued listening.

Back story: Somehow Boz was getting major coke dealers to front him large quantities of cocaine. This worked alright for awhile as he would sell the majority and skim some off the top substituting baby laxative and then cook up the excess for head stash. But his habit had accelerated in a huge way and he had taken his last large package of coke, 3 thousand dollars worth and about 7 grand street value and smoked it all. Major dilemma. So he hired a couple of guys to come into his house, tie up his wife and 5 year old, beat the tar out him, steal a bunch of stuff, (not the coke of course, as it was already consumed) and leave him there to call 911. Which of course he immediately did because it was then reported in the police blotter in the newspaper the next day. This means he could go back to his dealer and say, “Look, I got robbed. They took the coke. What can I do?” Unbelievably he got away with this shit. The cops on the other hand were not that dumb, they took Boz aside for questioning and when he started to detox they became his suppliers and he became their informant. One hand washes the other, it’s a dirty business.

So what The Persuader and I were hearing when were listening “Wild One” by The Killerwas the sound of Boz’s wife and child getting tied up and him getting the shit kicked out him. I moved out soon after.