Notes on Becoming(a Rock Musician)

 

I was ill with severe asthma during my childhood. I was frequently hospitalized and often received gifts from my parents upon returning home. On one of those occasions I received a cassette player/recorder. I began to spend time alone in my room listening, again and again, to the tapes I’d made off the radio. Immersing myself in music became a means of survival. When you’re young, when you feel like you’re different from everyone around you, it’s necessary to create weapons to protect yourself from reality.

I read a lot about rock music in books and periodicals I’d find at the library. The crucial (perhaps unfortunate) turning point for me occurred when I read about Johnny Thunders and the NY Dolls. At once, I tried to find their albums, but at that time, it was impossible. So, I saved money from my paper route and found a record store in Hartford that could order from Japan a copy of their first album. 

Perusing the cover, dropping the needle on the record, reading the liner notes I understood immediately, even as an unsophisticated teenager, that a big part of the Dolls’ appeal was their failure. Doom followed them as in Greek myth. I couldn’t understand why that was so beguiling.

My mother’s first husband had been a jazz drummer who went to jail for drug smuggling. By the time she asked me – perhaps, begged is too strong a word – to become anything in life I wanted except a musician, it was too late. In time, I would wonder if something like a curse had been placed on her (or myself). Nevertheless, while living under her roof I abided by her wishes. When I left home and moved in with a girlfriend I immediately bought an $85 Hondo Les Paul Junior copy. Quickly, I discovered that standing behind a guitar or microphone could shield or conceal you. Especially from the rigors of self-analysis. The form of life known as rock musician, I intuited, did not involve the therapeutic activity known as ‘self-expression’. Instead, it was an ontological condition. Rock and roll required a mortification of the spirit and the flesh. If I was to write songs it would be for the same reason I continued to breathe.

Hartford was – and is – a wasteland. I met the young men who would eventually make up St. Johnny by putting an ad in the Hartford Advocate. I met Grasshopper (later of Mercury Rev and a short-term member of St. Johnny) by hanging a flyer in a record store advertising for a ‘William Burroughs-style bassist’. At the time, he was living in Hartford with his brother making a living as a court reporter. I was a clerk typist. If music is your life – when you have an overriding obsession with it - you become more than simply a laborer, a furniture mover, a garbage man or a clerk. What is strived for, while not costing much money, transcends mundane existence.

Many years later in New York, I met a certain Z---. Z--- was from Los Angeles and his band was gaining prominence by leaps and bounds. He had oversized, numinous blue eyes. He could extemporize about himself indefinitely. His wife was a model. He’d grown up in a mansion with servants, gone to college on a baseball scholarship but quit after tearing his rotator cuff. On a whim he picked up a guitar. There was something of the spoilt child to him, a kind of exceptional petulance that made him stand apart. Z--- not only believed he was better than everyone else, but, everyone else believed it as well. He inspired envy and gave the impression that it was a burden for him to walk among mortals. Admiring him was almost easier than hating him.
And then, inevitably, he became a drug addict and lost everything, even his teeth and his looks. 

At that point I began to listen to his records. That he’d brought incommensurable harm upon himself gave him a kind of renown, like that of a cashiered officer or a priest who’d lost his faith. This allure, this destitution remains intertwined in my eyes with rock and roll.
But, I suppose that is neither here nor there. Let me begin again…