Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) (8 page)

The thing about Leary's early method was, it had some nice features. Your guide, who remained drugless, assumed a role not unlike that of an empathic therapist. He arranged to have the session in a safe, agreeable environment and stayed with you through the whole experience, occasionally reading suggestive passages from the book that actually seemed, well, important at each successive stage of the journey.

On a beautiful Sunday, I dropped the acid at Pete's house. His family was a real anomaly in Kendall Park, the soul-strangling housing development our families were both living in at the time. His mother and father were classically trained actors who
appeared at nearby McCarter Theatre in Princeton. His dad taught history at Rutgers as a day gig, and the walls of their living room were lined floor to ceiling with fat books and classical records. His mom, who knew what we were up to, kept buzzing around the kitchen, cutting flowers and slicing oranges in half—that sort of stuff.

And what did Donald learn? Well, LSD trips are famously impossible to describe, and impossibly boring to hear about as well. Let's just say that Dr. Leary's method was a resounding success. Afterwards, cruising at twilight through the carefully graded streets of Kendall Park in my beat-up '55 Ford Galaxy, I understood for the first time that all was as it should be, that the future was blazing with promise and that, despite all the jeers, Garden State might be a swell name for New Jersey after all.

•   •   •

S
ometime during my sophomore year, I started playing with several student bands. There was a Chicago-type blues band, a noisy free jazz group and a sort of satirical pop group I'd put together to play the stuff I'd been writing. I decided to switch my major to music. I understood that, as was the case in most colleges at the time, the music department was governed by an unswerving faith in the cult of the academic avant-garde, which is to say postwar serial composition and its contemporary champions: Berio, Stockhausen, Cage, Boulez, et al. Jazz, then in the age of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and George Russell, and more than thirty years after Ellington, was still not considered a legitimate course of study, and it was inconceivable to think of popular music as anything but disposable trash. My guess is that, by the sixties, this policy had
less to do with racism or social class than with the fact that these reactionary musics were—dare I say it?—tonal. Nevertheless, I figured I'd give it a go.

One afternoon in 1967, I walked over to the Red Balloon, a crummy little shack in the woods that served as an on-campus music club. As I approached, I could hear someone playing some electric blues guitar inside, just messing around. But this wasn't the trebly, surfadelic, white-guy sound I was used to hearing from other student guitarists. This fellow had an authentic blues touch and feel, and a convincing vibrato. His amp was tweaked to produce a fat, mellow sound, and turned up loud enough to generate a healthy Albert King–like sustain. Inside, playing a cranberry red Epiphone guitar, was a severe-looking bespectacled kid who would turn out to be my partner and bandmate for the next forty years.

Walter Becker and I had many interests in common: jazz, blues, all sorts of popular music, Nabokov and the writers of what was then called the “black humor” school, science fiction and so on. Walter shared an enormous room in Ward Manor with a dandyish wag by the name of Randall. Randall didn't seem to mind when Walter carted in two humongous Altec monitor speakers through which we blasted, for both pleasure and as a matter of professional interest, some of the great music of the time. We had very similar taste, which ran from Miles Davis to the Mothers of Invention, whom we had both seen during their infamous run at the Garrick Theater on Bleecker Street. Walter hipped me to inspiring stuff both old (Howlin' Wolf) and new (Laura Nyro) for the first time.

We started writing music and lyrics together, mostly on an
upright piano in a small sitting room in the lobby of the Manor. One of us would come up with some clowny idea and we'd bounce it around until we were so convulsed with laughter that we'd have to quit. For whatever reason, the combination of the funky grooves, the jazz chords and the sensibility of the lyrics, which seemed to fall somewhere between Tom Lehrer and
Pale Fire
, really cracked us up. Of course, at that point, what we were doing was pretty crude compared to some of our later efforts, but it was never less than fun.

We also played a few pickup gigs. One was for a student art show opening at the Procter Art Center. I had borrowed a Fender Rhodes keyboard from a big blond named Dinah. After pounding on the thing for a couple of tunes, the heavy instrument slipped off the table it was sitting on and crashed to the floor. Mortified and fearful of facing Dinah's wrath, I walked out of the place, leaving Walter to finish the set on his own. Unbeknownst to me, he had prepared for the performance by ingesting a powerful psychedelic and had to face the crowd in a state of total ganglial exposure. Sorry, W.B. And sorry, Dinah.

There was a lot of trouble back then with tripping musicians. Another time, we were booked along with a drummer, Ike, to play an NAACP benefit at the Beekman Arms, an old hotel in Rhinebeck, just across the Hudson. In this case, it was the drummer who'd thought LSD would enhance his performance. For an hour or so, Walter and I struggled to lock in with Ike, who was sounding like Elvin Jones, literally, on acid. For the '67 Ward Manor Halloween party, we assembled a dance band that included our classmate Chevy Chase on drums. Chevy looked like a frat boy who'd wandered onto the wrong campus, but he was professional,
talented and compulsively funny. He kept excellent time and, at least that night, didn't embarrass us by taking off his clothes or doing any of his Jerry Lewis bits. On the other hand, I, in a misguided attempt to effect holiday cheer, had stapled a string of large black faux-feathers to my long thrift shop overcoat. I ended up looking like an accident involving a giant crow and an electric fan. No matter—half the crowd was tripping anyway.

Walter dropped out at the end of the academic year in 1968. I began to lose interest in school. Missing the input of an actual jazz instructor, I started skipping classes, and despite the support I got from Jake “The Rake” Druckman, I was finally tossed out of the music department. I switched back to English, arranged my classes so they were all bunched together on Thursday and Friday, and moved to Brooklyn with Walter and my girlfriend, Dorothy White. We found two apartments in Park Slope, which had yet to become the Hipster Heaven that was to be. Back then, it was still Archie Bunker Heaven. It was the sort of neighborhood where shoulder-length hair could provoke comments like “Are you a boy or a girl?” and “Go back to the Village!” We persevered, and began our two-pronged assault on the music business: we began peddling pop tunes on Tin Pan Alley in midtown Manhattan and, at the same time, searched for players who might fit into the group we wanted to use as a vehicle for our prime stuff, the stuff we thought of as “the dynamite.” But that's another story.

•   •   •

I
n May of '69, I was up at Bard for the weekend, working on the last draft of my senior thesis in an off-campus house I had rented with a couple of other students. At four in the morning,
the house and several men's dorms on campus were raided by deputies of the local sheriff's department, along with some state cops, under the aegis of the Dutchess County DA's office. Led by soon-to-be Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, then running for assistant DA, they were looking for any trace of marijuana, at that time still seriously illegal. Though I hadn't smoked pot for quite a while, much less peddled any, they had a warrant for my arrest that included the testimony of a witness—in fact our landlord, one Beau Coggins—who said I had sold him drugs, “to wit, marijuana.” Never mind the fact that I'd never met the man (one of my roommates had rented the place and paid the rent). By sunrise, some fifty kids had been paddy-wagoned over to the Duchess County jail and locked in a cell block, including me, Walter and Dorothy, who were both visiting. The guys were shorn of their long, treasured locks by a trustee barber. After a day or so, the college bailed out all the students, including former student Walter. They refused to do the same for Dorothy, a nonstudent.

I called my father, then living in Ohio, who arranged bail for Dorothy and then flew in so we could consult with the school's attorney, Peter Maroulis. (In 1972, when that toxic little weasel Liddy got popped for masterminding the Watergate break-in, Maroulis was the guy he'd call.) A month later, our cases having already been dismissed, I sat on a bench with Dorothy, my father and Maroulis, watching the graduation of the class of '69. Because the college had refused to bail out Dorothy, and because they'd let the sheriff's office place an undercover spy with the building and grounds department—he had been disguised as a janitor—I'd decided to boycott the ceremony. Yeah, good times . . .

In December 1980, I was living three blocks away from the Dakota, watching
Monday Night Football
, when Howard Cosell announced that John Lennon had been shot in the back. I walked over and watched as a huge crowd of sobbing New Yorkers gathered at Seventy-second Street and Central Park West. This pretty much set the tone of the decade to come. After delivering my album
The Nightfly
to Warner Brothers, I came apart like a cheap suit. The panic attacks I used to get as a kid returned, only now accompanied by morbid thoughts and paranoia, big-time. I could hardly get through the day, much less write music. I started seeing a shrink and gobbling antidepressants.

Fast-forward to 1988. (Please!) I was feeling a lot better. A friend of mine, Libby Titus, was producing a series of what she called her “horrible little evenings” of music and comedy at restaurants around Manhattan. To make a long story short, we started collaborating; the project turned into the New York Rock and Soul Revue, which toured nationally for two years; and then we got married. Mike McDonald and Boz Scaggs were in the lineup of the 1993 tour. In 2010, we revived the concept as the Dukes of September Rhythm Revue. During the 2012 summer tour, I started keeping the journal that follows.

This hotel, a Four Seasons on a highway in St. Louis, seems to be adjoined in some way to a casino and theater. Outside my
seventeenth-floor window I can see an electric sign advertising future attractions down the way. An enormous picture of Eddie Griffin, the comedian, is followed by one of Tracy Morgan, and then Margaret Cho. There's also a video pushing a “mixed martial arts” event. Every minute or so in the rotation, there's a shot of a competitor slamming another man's red, swollen face down onto the mat with his elbow. This is followed by a picture of some well-shredded, half-naked Chippendale lads in a living room setting, relaxing on leather couches or on a plush carpet, recounting, I imagine, wild anecdotes about the previous night's performance.

I'm in town with this band, the Dukes of September Rhythm Revue, which is Michael McDonald, Boz Scaggs and me performing a program of moldy old R&B and soul tunes that we like, with some of our own hits thrown in to keep the TV Babies happy. The other players are mostly guys and gals I play with in the Steely Dan band, the group I started with my partner, Walter, which is off the road this year. The Dukes' first gig of the summer is on June 20, but we got here a couple of days early to do some tech rehearsals and clean up some loose ends at the Fox Theater, where the gig's going to be.

Aside from the rehearsals, I never leave the hotel room. Mainly, I've been lying in bed and thinking about cigarettes. I quit a couple of months ago and I do feel better except that it's like I'm always waiting for some square-ass civilian to finish a boring dinner story so I can go outside and have a cigarette, and that the square-ass civilian is now me.

That's not really true, about thinking only about smoking. Actually, right now I have a lot to do. It's my job to rehearse the
band and make sure the arrangements get done on time and so forth. Also, I've been worrying about the set list, wondering if the sequence of songs is suitably dramatic and if the mix of our hits—McDonald's, Boz's, Steely Dan songs, my solo stuff—and cover tunes, many of which are probably unfamiliar to a lot of the TV Babies, is correct. Plus, although the three of us grew up with this mostly black music and feel pretty comfortable with it, I'm always feeling defensive and trying to minimize any perceived minstrelsy about the project. The fact that we've got two African American musicians, bassist Freddie Washington and singer Catherine Russell, doesn't really ease my mind in this regard, since the three principals are all white singers who have been heavily influenced by black style.

Food is primarily room service, which always involves an awkward phone call with a poor fucker who's been programmed to respond to everything you say with a perky “Absolutely!” and who's sworn to repeat your order to you, no matter how simple. Then there's the dance with the waiter, who's determined to get that cart in the door without your holding it open, and who also says “Absolutely!” a lot. For some years, it's been my feeling that the mechanized, brainless routines of many service people must have started with a cult-owned business, perhaps a restaurant chain operated by some sort of dead-eyed Christo-Fascists or Moonies or Orange People. It's that Sarah Palin talk: “Here's your prime rib for ya. Absolutely!”

At night, to get to sleep, I watch pay-per-view movies on the hotel system. The movies are so bad now that I usually pass out just after catching the first glimpse of the flesh-eating
death-mist (or whatever), even before the archetypal hero has accepted the Campbellian Call to Adventure.

Once an insatiable reader, I don't read so much anymore. I'm now at the age—sixty-four—where so many sad things have happened that I'm too broken and anxious to read. I can still listen to music on the laptop, though, which is how I get to sleep after I've run out of pay-per-view movies.

Back from the show. Basically fine, but we have to change the encore tunes. Mike singing Wilson Pickett's “In the Midnight Hour,” which would have been a sure thing forty years ago, was, as Mike himself said afterwards, a death march. The TV Babies have never heard it, or could not care less. Or maybe it was just too on the nose.

Our next stop is Aspen, Colorado.

By the way, I'm not posting this journal on the Internet. Why should I let you lazy, spoiled TV Babies read it for nothing in the same way you download all those songs my partner and I sacrificed our entire youth to write and record, not to mention the miserable, friendless childhoods we endured that left us with lifelong feelings of shame and self-reproach we were forced to countervail with a fragile grandiosity and a need to constantly prove our self-worth—in short, with the sort of personality disorders that ultimately turned us into performing monkeys?

We (which is to say me and Vince Corry, the tour accountant and my assistant this time around) arrived at the Denver
airport late afternoon yesterday and picked up a proper tour bus and driver. Let me explain: Compared to a Steely Dan tour, the Dukes is more of a low-rent operation. With SD, the venues tend to be a little nicer and so are the travel conditions. While the band and crew schlep around on buses, Walter and I, whenever possible, “spoke” out of a major city where the nice hotels are, like LA or Chicago, and fly back and forth to the nearby gigs on a nifty chartered jet. It's pricey, but it saves wear and tear on the old guys. No jet for me this summer, though.

It was just three hours to Aspen, but on the way Vince got a call that the crew bus just ahead of us had caught fire and pulled over. Something to do with the brakes, the weight and the grade of the mountain highway.

Ten minutes later we picked up the stragglers, who were already drunk on Pasqual's Día de los Muertos tequila. Pasqual is an old friend of Walter's from Hawaii who's been working our tours the last few years. He's one of those indestructible roadies who goes back to the hippie days of glory with Bill Graham in San Francisco. He looks like a bandito, which he once actually sort of was. Lately he's been wearing a black hat that my wife, Libby, bought him last year.

It was good having the crew on the new bus for a while because, even when they're drunk, they walk around looking to see if anything needs to be fixed, test-flushing the toilets and asking me if I want my computer hooked up so I can play my iTunes through the bus's speaker system.

•   •   •

T
he Welkin Lodge in Aspen is advertised as “Perfect for pleasure-seekers. A high-style chill pad where beautiful people
let loose . . . Come experience the secret behind the red velvet rope.”

The truth of this statement is dependent on how you define “pleasure,” “high style,” “beautiful” and so on. For instance, you'd have to be able to extract “pleasure” from a “swim” in a tiny, paramecium-shaped pool surrounded by fake rock formations and filled with a tepid solution of semen and swamp water. At least, that's what it looked like. Nevertheless, needing some sort of exercise, I thrashed around for a few minutes, being careful not to let the water get near my mouth or nose. The only other person using the pool was a very large, Samoan-style man whose burly arms, and only his arms, were densely tattooed. He'd step in the “water” every fifteen minutes or so and lean against the side of the pool, cooling off, and then get out.

The pool is set in a kind of patio with tables and chairs where the “beautiful people” were chilling out and drinking special drinks. As I was getting out of the pool, a surfer-looking dude asked me if I was Donald Fagen. He said he was a big fan, and I gave my standard reply, which is “Oh, thanks. I appreciate it.” Sometimes I'm tempted to affect a Southern accent and stutter a little on “I appreciate it,” like Ray Charles. But I never do.

Aspen, the town, is an ordinary-looking but expensive shopping center where scary rich people are waited on by chunky, big-boned, blond hippie types. It has all the modem conveniences except for oxygen. If you look up, there are some nice mountains (I assume people ski down them in the winter). I didn't even see any pretty girls, although some of the girls I saw were wearing pretty shoes.

•   •   •

T
he show in the Benedict Music Tent was a lot better than the one in St. Louis, even though the sound onstage was atrocious, making it difficult to play. But that happens at least half the time.

Straight off the stage and on to the bus: ten hours to Vegas and a day off.

I woke up on the bus, which was parked in the lot of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. (“If this house is a-rockin', don't bother knockin'.) Then Vince and I moved into rooms at the hotel.

I've been in this room before, or one just like it, with the large portrait of Kiss in the entrance hall and a framed black-and-white photo of the band cavorting with seven or eight groupies backstage. Though I'm not overly fastidious, all this tends to make me apprehensive about the sanitary condition of Vegas hotel rooms. I tiptoe around trying not to touch anything, wishing I'd brought a pair of surgical gloves.

If I wander around or eat in one of the restaurants at casino theater gigs, fans sometimes recognize me and want to talk. So that gives me an additional reason not to leave the room. No matter. With my bad attitude and all, a day off in Vegas is a season in hell. Once, in another lifetime, a gay friend, a philosophy professor, convinced me and my then girlfriend to accompany him on a Vegas weekend. He'd never been here, and he obviously saw it as a fabulous Disneyland of Camp, which I guess it is. We played the slots and he dragged us to a couple of shows. Ann-Margret's laser spectacular at Caesars Palace left me a bit cold. Seventies entertainer Lola Falana, who had to make do
with the Aladdin's modest production values, was cute and kind of sad. Which is about as good as it ever gets here.

This morning, the Dukes rolled into Humphreys Half Moon Inn and Suites, which is on an island in San Diego Bay. It has a little outdoor venue attached to it. After the show, just before we got back on the buses, I was approached by a woman who looked familiar, along with some family members. Back in the seventies, just before the tour for which we'd hired young Mike McDonald as a backup vocalist, we had these two perky chicks singing backup, Gloria and Jenny. Because they'd just come off a job where they worked in animal costumes at Disneyland, we called them Porky and Bucky. This woman was Jenny, that is, Bucky, who seemed to be doing just fine. Before the Disneyland gig, she used to float around suspended from a crane as Sally Field's stunt double on the TV show
The Flying Nun
. A typical CV in Hollywood. Neither of us knew what became of Porky. Last I remembered, she'd married an LA Dodger, Steve Yeager. But Bucky said they'd split up years ago. A nice moment: Bucky meets Carolyn Leonhart, the Bucky of the twenty-first century, or, actually, I think, the Porky.

Nine hours on the bus to Santa Rosa in Sonoma County. I woke up at four a.m. and sat up front with Geoff, our British driver, as we cruised over the Bay Bridge into Marin. Nice country, if you're partial to that sort of thing.

We're spending the day off at the Hyatt Vineyard Creek
Hotel. There are certain hotels in pretty suburban areas like this one where you expect to see Rod Serling sitting in the lobby reading an out-of-date newspaper. As far as I can tell, there's no one staying here but me. No one at the pool, no one at the coffee shop. I know the whole band is supposed to be staying here, but where are they? Even Vince has disappeared. What's worse, I left my wallet in the room in San Diego. It was found, but it will take a day to FedEx and I forgot to ask Vince for money. So even if I wanted to cross the highway and take a look at that shopping center—I don't—I couldn't buy anything. I have no idea where the actual town of Santa Rosa is, but why bother to ask.

I've noticed that, on off days, some band members do their laundry—at least, the girls do. (In the seventies, I used to throw my underwear in the sink and pour in some Woolite.) Walt Weiskopf (sax and flute) and Freddie Washington (bass) play golf. Asking me to play golf would be like asking me to drive over to the town dump and separate all the wrongly placed bottles and cans from the regular garbage. That's how I think of it. So, again, I'm holed up in my room. I can't work on music on the road. It just doesn't happen. So I'm writing this.

I always associate Northern California with the late sixties, when I spent some time here. The hippie stuff was fun for about five minutes and then, by late '67, the barbarism had set in.