Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) (13 page)

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t the St. Augustine Amphitheatre in midsummer, you could boil a pot of grits by just setting it on the stage. Plus, it would be impossible to find an acoustic environment less musical than this venue, or more hostile to sonic clarity. All that concrete, aluminum and vinyl serves only to amplify and compound the blowback rather than enhance the music coming off the stage.

Nevertheless, the band, inspired by the wildly responsive, obviously snockered Friday night crowd, laid down the grooves behind the singers and soloists, who were all on fire. For a couple of hours, five thousand people forgot their problems, their grief, the fear of their inevitable appointment with oblivion and were lifted up and out of it by seeing and hearing a hot band play some good music. So there.

The South I get to see is so strange and fascinating. The ancient, white-bearded stoner unloading the trucks, the backstage cooks, the slinky, tattooed and tank-topped Daisy Maes who work in catering. It's so tempting and so awful at the same time, like that old Jimmy Durante song: Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go, and still have the feeling that you wanted to stay?

Back to Alabama. The last stop in the South, the Tuscaloosa Amphitheater, couldn't have been more different from St. Augustine.

In the seventies, Walter and I wrote a tune, “Deacon Blues,” that toyed with the cliché of the jazz musician as antihero. It was kind of a takeoff on that old essay by Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” not to mention our lives up to that point. I'm sure we thought it was hilarious: the alienated white suburban kid thinks that if he learns how to play bebop, he'll throw off the chains of repression and live the authentic life, unleash the wild steeds of art and passion and so on. The chorus sums it up:

I'll learn to play the saxophone

I'll play just what I feel

Drink scotch whiskey all night long

And die behind the wheel

They got a name for the winners in the world

I want a name when I lose

They call Alabama the Crimson Tide

Call me Deacon Blues

The idea being that this loser is saying, Well, yeah, if mainstream America can buy into this grandiose epithet for a football team, then I want an equally grandiose title. I'm the ultimate outsider, the flip side of the dream, boy-o . . . call me Deacon Blues. (At the time, there was an awesome defensive player on the Rams named Deacon Jones.) The conceit was a bit random, but it sounded good. Though the tune ran really long, it was a hit.

Decades later, when we were back on the road, it had become a thing that when we played in Alabama, especially in Tuscaloosa, where the University of Alabama is, we'd have to play the song. Chances are that none of the people drunkenly screaming for us to play “Deacon Blues” knew or cared what it was about. They just wanted to hear the words Crimson Tide in a popular song.

Anyway, the Dukes never rehearsed the tune. Somewhere along the line, someone had tried to remind me that the Tuscaloosans would be expecting to hear it, but it didn't register. I mean, the song's got, like, a thousand chords. But now, for some
reason, I got into a panic thinking that, if we didn't play the song, a phalanx of huge, boozed-up linebackers would charge the stage and string me up from a poplar tree. I walked over to the band's dressing room. Most of the rhythm section said they knew the tune, but we didn't have the horn charts with us, and those guys always need to be looking at music. I had the piano tech, Wayne Williams, find the lyrics, just in case.

My anxiety remained high when the crowd turned out to be the least responsive yet, especially when we played songs other than the Dukes' hits. It was a Saturday night, but they just weren't in the mood. They mostly just sat on their hands and stared, at least until we played the bunched-up hits at the end. I kept hoping that Boz, who's from Texas, or Mike, who's from Missouri, would get them on our side with some of that good ol' Southern-fried humor. But they seemed just as helpless as I was. Had the entire audience gone to the same libido-strangling Fundamentalist school? Had they been body-snatched by aliens? Seriously, it was as if they'd just crawled out of their coffins, brushed the dirt off and sat down. Or were they just so smashed by eight o'clock that they were literally paralyzed?

Maybe we just sucked. In any case, the Deacon Blues thing turned out not to be a problem. There were just a few savage bellows for the tune during the encore, easily ignored. I guess all those younger TV Babies were no longer familiar with the tradition, so we escaped unharmed. At least physically.

Sunday, flying home to NYC. Tomorrow's off, then two shows at Manhattan's Beacon Theatre. Libby home from Mexico
tomorrow night. My general condition? In free fall. Smoking? Yessiree.

Hometown gigs are a drag. Because of all the guests (friends, relatives, doctors, etc.), there's a climate of agitation that, in my case, I believe, affects the performance itself. Before a show, I try to evoke and maintain a condition of mental clarity and controlled energy, which is to say, I play a lot of R&B records on my computer and drink twelve cups of coffee. The knowledge that all these familiar people will be auditing my every move puts me off balance—it wants to confuse and paralyze, to enervate. It's not about affection for the visitors, or the lack of it, or even self-consciousness, but the difference between feeling free and being superglued to the earth.

The two nights at the Beacon were okay. The first night, Irving was there, stopping off on his way to Ireland to play golf with other leprechauns, or something like that. Also Ron Delsener, the big boss man of New York concert promoters. Although I'm pretty sure he's mostly retired from the promotion business, he's still in the business of being cutely crazy. He wears very natty suits. He calls a cab by standing in the middle of the street and yelling, “Mohammed!”

Also there: my cousin Jack and his family, my friends Pete and Neil from high school, and an elite selection of NYC doctors who've kept me and my wife ticking over the years, including a famous brain surgeon. And a lot more people, too.

On the second night, our friend Rick Hertzberg came with his son (and my old pal), Wolf, who's now fourteen. Peter, an old friend of Libby's who owns a bar downtown, told an exciting story: When he was renting some mansion in LA in 1980, an armed robber strolled in the front door while he and his friends were having dinner and told everyone to get down on their knees. The guy was a nasty fucker, pistol-whipping one of the victims and so forth. Peter, figuring the robber was eventually going to kill someone, made a grab for the gun and, after being wounded in the struggle, actually got hold of the thing and shot him dead. Sheesh. Guys who own bars in the city tend to be pretty tough.

We made a day trip to Red Bank, New Jersey, to play at—get this—the Count Basie Theatre. Formerly the Carlton (it was renamed in 1984), it's another old vaudeville house. When I mentioned to the audience that the band was stoked to be playing in Count Basie's hometown, there was an actual deafening silence. Apparently, TV Babies aren't big Basie fans.

According to the theater's website, the joint is a favorite with many renowned musical artists:

“Tony Bennett has called it ‘My favorite place.' Art Garfunkel said, ‘This hall is to a singer what Steinway is to a pianist.' Lyle Lovett said, ‘This is one of the nicest-sounding rooms in the whole United States of America.'”

Yeah, the place looks good, but it sounds like shit. As I've mentioned before, the old theaters often look great, but “standing waves” and other factors create acoustic chaos. At the sound
check, I was out front with Joe for half an hour just trying to get the drums not to sound like a broken Vitamix blender in a parking garage. There's really no reason to bring all those expensive German microphones to a toilet like this. No decent dressing rooms, either. I had to shave and change on the bus. Again, somehow, we managed to delude the crowd into thinking they heard some worthwhile music. Lucky for us, they're used to hearing crap sound.

Afterwards, Neil, one of the high school friends who was at the Beacon, showed up again. This time, he brought his wife, Hilary, and their daughter and her husband on the bus for a visit. I hadn't seen Hilary in forty-seven years. She was, hands down, the most beautiful girl at South Brunswick High. Of course, we end up looking like what we've been, which, in Hilary's case, was a suburban mom, about to be a grandmom. And yet, she was the same funny, mysterious creature I knew back then. It was great to see her.

A half century ago, she was a heart-stopping, mercurial blond with the kind of verbal acuity and humor that seem to go along with being the victim of a certain sort of fucked-up childhood. Hilary used to juggle friends from several different school factions. Naturally, the actual boyfriends were good-looking jocks, which infuriated me and my beatnik pals to the point of insanity. And yet, she liked to have us around, in a group or one at a time. We were always at her house, draped on the furniture and chatting with her tipsy, somewhat bohemian mom (I was in her mom's social dancing class when I was twelve).

Thing was, I knew Hilary liked me, but I was too insecure and inexperienced to do anything about it. I had a crippling
body image problem: at seventeen, I weighed a hundred and twelve and, even at the beach, almost never took off my shirt.

Once, on a really hot day, she called me up and demanded I accompany her to the Jersey shore. She picked me up in her little green Nash convertible and, scarf and blond tresses flying in the breeze, drove us down to Point Pleasant. Lying there on a beach towel, with Hilary's pale teenage body three inches away, I was afraid I might pass out, the victim of some grievous cardiovascular event. We talked for a while, went in the ocean, brushed off the sand, and then she drove me home.

Wolf Trap is an opulent shed in Vienna, Virginia, near D.C. Supposedly, colonial farmers dug a lot of baited pits on the land to deal with the heavy wolf population. They're gone now, I think, leaving only the cool name.

In the afternoon, before I got there, some guy came up to Pasqual and handed him an envelope. He said his late mother was a friend of my mother in the forties, and that he'd found a bunch of photos in a trunk that he'd copied and brought along. Sure enough, in these washed-out printer copies, there's my mother hanging out with a gang of friends at the Tamarack Lodge in 1945, which I assume was a Borscht Belt hotel. They're all sitting on the grass in bathing suits. My mom was definitely a babe back then, with the forties hairdo and the dark sunglasses. Only she appears to be hanging out with some sketchy-looking guy with big ears identified as “Bob.” I told Pasqual to get the guy, Stan, some tickets, and I saw him after the show. It turns out that Stan's mom, Florence, was the sister of Les Mintz,
also a friend of the family and my eye doctor when I was a kid. But who the hell was Bob?

A trip to the Sands Steel Stage in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I was here last summer with the Dan. The venue is in the shadow of the old steel mill, a gothic castle made of rusted metal with mighty towers and terraces and catwalks and odd little rooms filled with dead machines. It's really something to see. I guess they have plans to use it to attract tourists when the area is further developed. Last year we were climbing inside the thing and taking pictures, which was amazing, because it's a textbook death trap for stupid kids. No access this year, though.

Meanwhile, I keep getting these e-mails from a man named Karim in Irving's office having to do with this solo album of mine that Warner/Reprise is “releasing” (they must think of entertainment product as prisoners or wild beasts or something) in October. All these questions: Do you like what the art department did with the cover? Could you check the copy for the liner notes? We know you won't do regular TV, but will you appear on Stephen Colbert? How about
Fresh Air
on NPR? Which, normally, would be fine, but I'm so wasted at this point, I actually can't grasp much of what's in the e-mails, which, for some reason, are partly in blue type.

Then there's some really eldritch stuff, like: Are you okay with mastering for iTunes? What does that even mean? The album's already mastered, which was already a pain in the ass. And why bother? Everyone listens to music on rotten little computer speakers or those miserable earbud things.

In 1964, long-playing vinyl records sounded great. It was the age of high fidelity, and even your parents were likely to have a good-sounding console or tube components and a nice set of speakers, A&R, KLH, and so on. All the telephones worked, and they sounded good, too. Rarely did anyone ever lose a call, and that was usually on an overseas line. Anyone could work a TV set, even your grandmother. Off, on, volume, change the channel, period. By then, just about everyone had an aerial on the roof, and the signal was strong: ten, twelve simple channels of programming, not all good, but lots of swell black-and-white movies from the thirties and forties, all day and most of the night. No soul-deadening porn or violence. Decent news programs and casual entertainment featuring intelligent, charming celebrities like Steve Allen, Groucho Marx, Jack Paar, Jack Benny, Rod Serling, and Ernie Kovacs.

Yeah, call me old Uncle Fuckwad, I don't care. William Blake's “dark Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution may have enslaved the bodies of Victorian citizens, but information technology is a pure mindfuck. The TV Babies have morphed into the Palm People. For example, those people in the audience who can't experience the performance unless they're sending instant videos to their friends:
Look at me, I must be alive, I can prove it, I'm filming this shit
.

You know what? I refuse to look at you. You're a corpse. And you prove that every day, with everything you do and everything you say. Wake up, ya dope!