Rock On (24 page)

“Can I help you with something, there?”

“There's just this guy where I used to work has a house and . . . I'm trying to see . . . the . . .”

“That place across the canyon?”

“Yeah, this guy, uh, that I used to . . .”

“That's Michael Eisner's place. The Disney guy. He's never there though.”

“Oh.”

Goddamn. He's never there? You should see the size of the place! Seriously, larger than, like, a Safeway grocery store. I think everyone's figured this “success” thing out except for me. I should hijack this sled, yell at the dogs to make a hard right, get across this canyon and break into Eisner's house. Revolution!

“So, where do you two live?”

“New York,” I say, hoping it makes me seem tough.

“What brings you out here?”

I sit thinking of a way to make the answer seem as romantic, fierce, and road-weary as it seems his life has been. Maybe I'll say something along the lines of, “Well, we've been clawing our way through New York City for the last seven or eight years, in the trenches . . . cockroaches . . . rats . . . had to get out of the greed race, just get in a car and drive. Ended up heading into the Rockies — gotta think about our next plan, since I got canned from my job and I'm not too into the idea of going back to living within some bullshit corporate structure.” But what comes out is, “We live in New York and we flew in to go skiing with our friend Kim and, well, we had read about the dog sledding and thought we'd take a rest from skiing for a day and give it a try.” Nice.

The dogs have slowed; you can feel that the speed-and-swerve honeymoon of hairpin turns has faded. This is the long haul that you knew somewhere inside of you certainly awaited, and their backs and legs settle into traversing terra firma in a stoop and hunch so familiar to their bones you realize they knew it was coming. Their haunches dig into a hardworking and predictable stride — the kind of gait that every living thing knows is required if you expect to last.

We talk a little to kill the time, and the guide says he's
thinking about maybe settling down sometime soon, that he knows he can't stay out on the road season-to-season forever. Says living that way has to end at some point. He starts asking us questions about what it's like to live in Manhattan. How many people have dogs? Do we think those people pay to have their dogs walked? How many would you say a guy could walk at once, how many total in the course of a day? He's crunching the numbers out loud, and figuring how it might be nice to settle down a little and make his money by taking walks in the park. The Colorado sun is going down. We keep on. Dogs, all of us.

Back home in New York and I'm waking up after flying in late last night. Maria is already off at work. I have to get some coffee. And some breakfast. Oh, and some work, so I can continue to enjoy stuff like electricity and food. For the last few weeks there have been headlines that the slow-jam-lyric-writing booze-magnate's grandson who bought the company is taking it public in an IPO that he hopes will raise well over half a billion dollars. I put on some shoes and hit the elevator. Our apartment is in a building located right across the street from the New York Stock Exchange, and when I get downstairs, I look up and see a huge blue flag flying with the Warner Music Group logo on it. Today's literally the day? Apparently. And any doubt is erased when I recognize the once-familiar music-biz motorcade of chauffeured black Mercedes sedans and see a stretch limo parked outside of the main entrance to the trading floor. Right now, behind those doors, they're cutting the company into 32.6 million pieces and hoping to sell them all.

Of the planned $750 million raised by today's IPO, the company's SEC filing is earmarking less than 1 percent of that — a mere $7 million — to be put toward the company's operations, with the rest going to pay down debt. But with the consortium having already been paid back more than their initial investment, word on the street is that the rest of the money will make for another round of pocket-lining like last year when,
after posting a mere $7 million in operating income, the new owner paid out $22.5 million in salary and bonuses for the year . . . to the top five executives. This after firing over a thousand employees, not to mention cutting how many bands and artists from the company's roster of talent. Both the
Wall Street Journal
and the
New York Times
have run pieces this week about the band Linkin Park (35 million albums sold worldwide) begging out of their Warner Music Group contract on account of learning that only $7 million of the planned $750 million will be allocated to the company's day-to-day operations. To the band's credit, it speaks out publicly against the executives skimming millions and issues statements about the ethical shortcomings of the men who are whipping up this frenzy of what appears to be last-chance music-business looting. On a more level-headed note, they publicly question the company's ability to even operate effectively on a fiscal level given the kind of decisions that are being made. Linkin Park is quoted in the
Wall Street Journal
as saying, “We feel a responsibility to get great music to our fans. Unfortunately, we believe that we can't accomplish that effectively with the current Warner Music Group.” The string section swells, David is taking on Goliath, and then . . . well . . . they, um, offer to stay if their contract is revised to pay out $60 million. I'm staring at the newspaper trying to figure out if this is simply a brilliant and subversive demand on behalf of the band, asking for the moon, knowing that they would never get it, so that they could get contractually released from a sinking ship. Jesus, the executives have cut over a thousand jobs then lined their pockets with seven-figure bonuses in the face of perpetually diminishing sales, and artists are offering to rethink flipping off the Man for an extra $45 million. Ah, rock and roll.

I keep walking past the line of black Mercedes Benzes, down Wall and into the Starbucks to grab something strong. Right next to the baked goods, on the counter next to the clerk's tip jar, there's a small display of CDs from some new band that I recognize as being signed to an imprint of Atlantic Records. Standing there, still kind of asleep, something finally occurs to me; something that arguably should have occurred to me when I was still being paid to think about selling CDs: do people even want to buy music in a physical format anymore? Then again, maybe this is the last remaining place on Planet Earth where somebody
would
buy a CD. After all, it's filled with adults like me already spending way too much on a product that they could get for a fraction of the price without leaving the comfort of their own home, but for whatever reason decide not to.

It's 11:00
AM
, my ex-bosses are a block away, and by now they have somehow generated hundreds of millions of dollars by selling rock and roll to Wall Street when nobody is buying it at retail; when retail is going out of business.

Out the door, right in front of the stock exchange, I recognize the few usual clerks taking their smoke break outside. Suddenly, for no reason at all, a fat clerk with a beard sets his coffee down next to his foot on the ground, sticks his cigarette into the corner of his mouth, then starts clapping with his freed-up hands as he looks at the door to the stock exchange. It swings open and legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page comes walking out in a suit and tie. For a minute I'm certain this isn't what's happening. Then another clerk starts clapping and in a thick Bronx accent says, “Yeah-yeah. Jimmmmay!” This prompts the first guy, who has now picked his coffee back up, to take the cigarette out of the corner of his
mouth and chime in with a thick New York and New Jersey salute, “Jimmy fawkin' Page.” A photographer comes out of nowhere and starts to take aim with one of the many cameras around his neck. Page breaks into a move straight out of the seventies-rock-icon playbook: the short and fast zig-zagged dash to the limo, which I'm guessing is for the sake of a good action-packed photo, since there are no people or obstacles between him and the limo. My first thought when he zigs right, then zags left, is that I'm about to see a childhood rock-and-roll hero peppered with hot lead in a firestorm he unwittingly triggered with the kind of erratic movement that heavily armed SWAT officers and feds have been waiting to catch in their peripheral vision since September 12, 2001. Dude, easy with the sudden movements. I've got enough problems right now without your ass getting me nailed in the crossfire on my way home. I don't think I even have health insurance right now.

I look up at the armed officers guarding the Stock Exchange. They're wearing Kevlar vests and black riot helmets with face masks, and they have automatic rifles and ammo across their chests; but they're wearing the same slack-jawed amazed look as we all watch
the
Jimmy Page. I wonder if these guys used to sneak Led Zeppelin albums out of their sister's bedrooms, too, only to wind up here on this morning thirty years later. Page ducks into the limo fast and stays in there behind the dark black tinted glass. The door to the stock exchange swings open again, and this time a clean-cut-looking guy, in the same standard-issue Wall Street dark blue power suit that Page is wearing, comes walking out to the limo carrying two Gibson Les Paul guitars in cases. The limo trunk opens slowly, quietly, and mysteriously, and the guy loads the guitars into the trunk, closes it, and pats it with his hand, signaling to the driver that
it's okay to go. It then takes the driver about six minutes to negotiate a very tight, backward and forward, lurching series of little three-point turns to get the limo heading in the right direction to exit the area, on account of the security blockades. Watching the driver slamming this long, fancy limousine into drive, then reverse, then drive, then reverse, and so on, all the while cranking the steering wheel hard to the right, hard to the left, makes Page's dash to get into the limo even more amusing in retrospect.

Back at the apartment I pour myself a bowl of cereal and put in the Led Zeppelin live DVD and watch the footage of them playing Madison Square Garden in 1975. Goddamn, look at them; this was the time before rock stars did advertisements. And these solos! These long, legendary guitar solos would never make it onto a rock record today. I think label executives today would shudder at the idea of interrupting another repetition of a radio-friendly chorus that they researched to death in focus groups and over telephones.

I'm sitting on a living-room floor, eating cereal and watching TV, staring at Jimmy Page, and it feels exactly the same as it did when I was nine. But this many years later I'm staring at Page in High Definition with 5.1 Surround Sound; a motion-picture version of the rock god on the poster I recall staring at on my bedroom wall when I was growing up. The coffee wakes me up enough to think, “Ten minutes ago I saw Jimmy Page on Wall Street in a suit and tie.” It's not exactly the way I ever thought I'd bump into a member of the mighty Led Zeppelin in New York City. But it's not fair to expect the guy to stay the same, is it? This thing I'm doing here, it's a cheap shot, really. On the TV screen right now it's 1975, and Jimmy Page is playing like a man who answers to nobody. A man existing in that
seductive state of extended adolescence that rock legends bask in, a man connected to something in the universe larger than even the sum total of the legendary Led Zeppelin, playing guitar because that is so clearly what he was put here to do. And it's wrong to expect that kind of divine moment to last forever, and to expect an artist to stay in 1975. Fact is, ten minutes ago I saw the guy onscreen right downstairs, coming off the trading floor of the stock exchange with a banker carrying his guitars for him. I sit cross-legged on the floor on a workday staring into my cereal bowl, thinking about how we all change. We all grow up. We all move on, one way or another, whether we want to or not.

THE END

The bathroom stall at the Continental, according to Pat Carpenter

Flyers on telephone poles

Fine print in the contract

A decent map

1. Rerelease CDs as “Very Deluxe Editions” — new packaging to include bonus DVD and two five-dollar bills.

2. Revise “Online Is a Fad” speech from 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005 sales conferences. New title for speech will excite Wall Street: “Embracing Technology as We Rock into the Future.”

3. Presidents and chairmen: If the last hit record you were responsible for was released over seven years ago, your new contract will be cut back to pay only $10 million for five years, plus bonuses, not to exceed $21 million total in salary and bonuses. Suck it up.

4. Top executives to maintain only two homes in North America, and only one in Europe.

5. Please note: If you use luxury helicopter charter service to get out to Hamptons to “See a band,” please ask if anyone else plans on using a helicopter that evening, and try to helipool.

6. Overall: Adapt to getting by on 95 percent profit margin instead of 1,120 percent profit margin.

NEW YORK (AP) — It was a one-two encounter between Axl Rose and Tommy Hilfiger. The scuffle reportedly started after the Guns N' Roses front man moved the drink of Hilfiger's girlfriend, Dee Ocleppo. — Associated Press, Saturday, May 20, 2006