Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke Page 9

  My grandmother liked “Bold Thady Quill”; my grandfather preferred dance songs, rebel songs, waltzes. At that ninetieth birthday party, he took the mike to sing “Martha, the Flower of Sweet Strabane.” When I was living with my grandfather, the year he turned ninety, I tried to turn him on to some of the rock bands I liked. The only one he could stand was the Smiths. During that time he told me many stories of the passage to America, two weeks on a boat, which is usually supposed to be a historically dreadful ordeal, except he said it was the happiest two weeks of his life up to that point. He’d never danced so much in his life. He had to wait until he was twenty-four to get out, which was extremely late, working his brother’s farm and watching the Cunard ships sail out of Queenstown Harbor every day. When his brother got married, he got his sister-in-law’s dowry as his share of the inheritance. He spent it on his ticket to America and stayed on the deck for two weeks listening to the musicians play their way to the other side.

  As long as I’ve been listening to rock and roll, I’ve been hearing that Celtic touch everywhere from the Beatles to the Clash to Bowie. I love Bono’s tribute to Bowie: “Americans put a man on the moon. We had our own British guy in space—with an Irish mother.” Dylan was an honorary Celt—he loved posing as Irish the way James Joyce loved posing as Jewish—but it wasn’t until he wrote his Chronicles that I found out that the Clancy Brothers changed his life, as he copped their outlaw ballads and rebel songs.

  All four of the Smiths were sons of the peat, which might explain why my grandfather liked “Please Please Let Me Get What I Want.” Johnny Marr once said the sadness in his guitar came from the songs he heard in his neighborhood growing up. “I was sad when I was a little kid because the area where I grew up was very heavy. A young Irish community. A lot of drinking, a lot of music and a lot of melancholy in the music, which I was really drawn to. These really melodic Irish ballads, like ‘Black Velvet Band,’ which I used to love.” Note: “Black Velvet Band” is one with a relatively upbeat ending, where the hero gets sentenced to seven years’ hard labor.

  One of the things I have learned from Irish music is that these songs are where we express our tempestuous side, no matter how strictly we might try to police our emotions in our own lives. We live out the lives in these songs—killing, boozing, carousing, weeping—that we fastidiously avoid when we’re not singing them. With an Irish song, you do not wonder whether it’s a sad song or not. You can usually tell from the opening notes how sad it’s going to be. In the same way, you can tell the festive songs are going to be extremely festive. As the old saw goes, the Irish songs are full of happy wars and unhappy lovers.

  That’s where we get the tradition of the Irish wake. When somebody dies, my Aunt Eileen in Dublin asks, “Did they put him down well?” In other words, did they sing and tell stories? If the mourners failed in this duty, she’ll say, “Christ, they rushed him in and out of the church before he was cold.”

  We do not, as a rule, choke up. We let it rip. If we’re going that way at all, we may as well go all the way. As the old song says, let’s not have a sniffle, let’s have a bloody good cry. (And always remember the longer you live, the deader you bloody well die.) Sometimes in an Irish pub I might try to sneak out after just a couple of pints (“not the full rosary—just a few Hail Marys”), and one of my cousins will clap me on the back and say, “Ah, it’s as well to hang for a sheep as for a lamb,” which is his or her way of saying, “You’re not going anywhere.” In these songs, at least, we approach our emotions with the same full-commitment approach we bring to a night down the pub. If you’re going to hang anyway, hang for a nice big sheep. One night in Glenbeigh, long after closing time, I told my cousin Kevin to come stay at the guesthouse, rather than stumble back over the hill back home to Drom. He demurred. “Sooner or later, I will have to face an irate female. And I’d rather do it while I’m still drunk.”

  It’s the same principle with these songs. Once you’re in, you’re in for the night. You follow the song all the way to the other side. So let’s not have a sniffle. Let’s have a bloody good cry.

  THIRTEEN

  11:32 p.m.:

  Rock & Roll Fantasy

  It’s November 2002, and I am on a jet plane, crossing America en route to Hollywood. I am going to Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy Camp. For the next week, I will be a member of a band, for the first and only time in my life. We will stay on the Sunset Strip, rehearsing in a real studio, hitting the stage at the House of Blues, getting coached by rock stars. Maybe I’ll even learn to play an instrument. Cowbell? Woodblock? Tambourine. That one’s easy, right?

  I’m officially attending fantasy camp for a possible article in Rolling Stone, which never comes to pass. (The article gets killed before a word is written—in fact, before my return flight. Why? Somebody famous dies and we lose the page, so the space gets cut. These things happen.) But I have bigger, loftier, crazier (and dumber) hopes for this week, and maybe that’s because I’m more rickety and fragile (and dumber) than usual. I’m going through a spell of what is delicately termed “girl trouble,” by people who are into terming things delicately, yet that is not strictly accurate since the trouble is me, and I’m a boy.

  I’m not just hoping Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy Camp will take my mind off things—I’m hoping it will fix things, or at least turn me into a rock star. So here I am, tripping off to L.A. with insanely unrealistic expectations, which I guess is the only way anyone ever trips off to L.A. I don’t know who my fellow campers will be. I’m not sure what playing in a band is like. I’m going as a journalist, but more than that, I’m going as a seeker, a musical incompetent who hopes to pick up a few tricks from the masters. In real life, I may sing like an air conditioner coughing out a pigeon, but they will pass their major arcana on to me. I’m going to learn a few guitar chords, I bet, finally crack how that stuff works. I will solve all my problems. Rock & roll will heal my soul. If that fails, I could always play the tambourine.

  I can figure out this whole music thing. I can also figure out this whole love thing. The idea they aren’t the same thing never would have occurred to me.

  When I’m on my front stoop in Brooklyn, waiting for the taxi to the airport, my neighbors Charlie and Henry walk down Eckford Street, two of the many elderly Polish gents who shuffle around my block in the afternoons. They ask the question they always ask, which is if I have a girl. They see my bags packed and ask, “Where are you going? Where is the girl? You are young, my friend.” I tell them I’m traveling for work. Charlie says what he always says: “Young is the time to sleep together!” They think I’m holding out on them. But I am not going to visit a girl, and I am not leaving a girl behind in New York.

  On JetBlue, I read Swinburne’s “Ave Atque Vale,” his elegy for Baudelaire. But I get distracted by the VH1 Classic on my personal in-flight video screen. I’ve never seen it before. For an MTV obsessive like me, it’s an intense drug—so many videos I haven’t seen in years, others I’ve hoarded on battered VHS tapes. As I contemplate my upcoming debut as a musician, I brood on my life as a fan, as these old songs on VH1 Classic clobber me. I drift between the poetry and the screen, which seem to flow in and out of each other. (Swinburne: “Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find.” The Psychedelic Furs: “Heaven is the home of our hearts.” I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.)

  So I give up on the poetry and let the songs totally rip me to pieces, one tune after another, scribbling in my notebook with my light oxygen-deprived airplane head, crying great big loud ugly airplane tears. It’s traumatizing for the nice old Russian lady next to me, who spends the whole flight watching the TV map as we inch closer to L.A., no doubt praying for a crash.

  I am not in peak shape, obviously. I am taking a fucked-up rock & roll heart to Fantasy Camp. For some reason I worry this will hinder my experience, but if I used my brain for a minute, I would realize that a fucked-up rock & roll heart is pretty much the entrance requirement.

  Over the next w
eek, I will join a band. I will play the tambourine, which will leave gruesome purple bruises all over my thighs. It turns out that the tambourine is actually incredibly fucking hard, like so many other stupid things that look insultingly simple.

  ROCK ’N’ ROLL FANTASY CAMP: Isn’t that redundant? In a way, I feel like I’ve been living in a rock & roll fantasy camp my whole life. When I sing in the shower, I’m Al Green, or Taylor Dayne, or Thom Yorke. When I’m stuck in traffic, I’m John Bonham thumping out “Good Times, Bad Times” on the dashboard. I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all, though I’ve done most of it in front of my bathroom mirror, so I guess I’ve only seen one face, but I’ve rocked it a million times.

  So band camp is my chance to take that air guitar to the stage. Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy Camp, the brainchild of rock impresario David Fishof, is based on the popular baseball fantasy camps, where average joes go to hit a few grounders to the stars (as in the great Seinfeld episode where Kramer drills Mickey Mantle with a fastball). Seventy campers pay five thousand clams apiece to ditch our real lives and jobs for a week. We move into the fabled “Riot House,” the Sunset Strip hotel where you can still smell traces of the seventies’ sleaziest rock-star excesses. We jam with the camp counselors, who are classic-rock vets: Billy Joel’s drummer, Ted Nugent’s guitarist, Peter Frampton’s keyboardist, the bassist from Night Ranger. The dude who sang “Bad to the Bone.” Bret Michaels of Poison. Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe. Sheila E. Like that.

  At the end of the week, we all gather for a massive “battle of the bands” at the House of Blues, in front of an allegedly paying audience. For those about to make total assclowns of yourselves, we salute you!

  When I check into the Riot House on Sunday afternoon, I have no idea what to expect. I resist the temptation to trash my hotel room (the TV is bolted down anyway), and instead I change into a clean purple T-shirt and practice my audition song, “Cat Scratch Fever,” a couple of times in the bathroom mirror. I look confident. This must be a hell of a mirror. And the tiles in this bathroom have magnificent acoustics. I sound awesome. I am going to burn this song to the ground.

  The auditions are downstairs, in one of the hotel banquet rooms. “Relax, this is not a test,” the brochure says about the audition. “All musical levels are welcome at Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp.” On a certain crude level, that’s a bunch of baloney. Everybody here can play an instrument or sing, and everybody brought their axe, so I’m the douche who has to ask the roadies for a tambourine. I am already getting that in-over-my-head feeling.

  My first impression of my fellow campers is that they are mostly white guys on the Lou Gramm/Larry David cusp. Many are here as a fiftieth birthday present, others for a sixtieth birthday or a wedding anniversary. For a few, it’s a surprise gift—their wives drove them here and dropped them off. A few of the wives have stayed on for the week. (Around camp they’re referred to as “the Beths.”) About a half-dozen campers are women, most of whom are singers or cowbell players.

  Everybody steps up to the judges’ table and plays a song, after which the judges will split us up into eight bands. The head judge with the clipboard is Mark Rivera, the saxophonist in Billy Joel’s band, a schmoozy Brooklyn guy fond of Catskills-style humor like “This is the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Meshuggeneh.’” I recognize him from the “Uptown Girl” video—he’s the mechanic who bites his hand with desire for Christie Brinkley.

  When they call my name, I step up to sing. My backing band: Liberty DeVito on drums (another Billy Joel sideman), Bobby Mayo on bass (he played all those keyboard solos on Frampton Comes Alive!), and Derek St. Holmes on guitar. That turns out to be the problem. I suddenly realize I can’t sing “Cat Scratch Fever” in front of Derek St. Holmes, who played on the original Ted Nugent version. I’ve desecrated this song countless times in karaoke bars, but I can’t look this man in the eye and do this to his song. I just can’t. “Hellooo?” Derek says. “What song are you gonna do?”

  In desperation, I call out the first easy song that pops into my brain: “Roadhouse Blues,” by the Doors. I have to confess to my backing band that I’ve never sung it sober before. “That’s okay,” Bobby Mayo says. “I’ve never played it sober.”

  Derek yells “Get this man a beer,” and then he lurches into the riff. I do my best. No microphone, no beer, no shower tiles, no mirror in the bathroom, just me and my pitchiest Lizard King imitation. I keep my eyes on the road and my hand upon the wheel, but I’m driving the song into the ditch and I know it. By the second verse, my fellow campers stare at me like I’m Clint Eastwood in the opening scene of High Plains Drifter. Everybody feels a lot better about their chops right about now. When I’m done, the room is silent until a few campers pity-clap. A guy in a Sabbath T-shirt slaps my back and says, “That took guts.” These are always ominous words, but especially when you hear them from a guy wearing Ozzy’s face across his beer gut.

  So what? We’re all dreamers here. I figure, what the hell—some of them probably suck worse than I do. I’m wrong.

  SUNDAY NIGHT KICKS OFF THE camp festivities with a cocktail party where the counselors put on an all-star jam, cranking out oldies like “Mustang Sally” and “Back Door Man.” To stoke my sense of jealousy, Derek St. Holmes and Jack Blades do an impromptu romp through “Cat Scratch Fever.” Jack says, “I haven’t played that one since the Damn Yankees!” Of course, he nails it.

  The counselors are a fascinating bunch. In terms of the current pop charts, these guys don’t exist. But right now they are unimpeachably famous, because they’re in a Jonestown-style compound with seventy of the world’s most hard-core arena-rock fans. There’s a palpable sense of awe among the campers. Within these walls, everybody who was ever a rock star is a rock star for life. Rock & roll never forgets.

  The professionals are happy to regale us with stories about the good old days of seventies decadence. Bobby Mayo has some hair-raising tales about the Frampton tours, when our hotel was truly the “Riot House” of Almost Famous repute. “One night I jumped off the roof into the pool,” he recalls warmly. “It was fun. Well, I assume it was fun. I just woke up the next day and my clothes were wet.”

  There’s also Marshall the Mean Roadie, who torments me all week. He spent years out on the road with Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses; he’s said to be a living legend in the roadie biz. He supplied me with my high-end tambourine and maracas, but that means he sees right through me as a nonmusician, and he looks at me through his coke-vial glasses with contempt. He knows I write for Rolling Stone, so he keeps telling me Mötley Crüe groupie stories and then saying, “Off the record, man!” Every single one of these stories I already know from The Dirt.

  The cocktail party really takes off when Mark Farner makes his grand entrance. He was the front man for Grand Funk Railroad, and everyone can tell right away: This man carries himself like a rock star, pure confidence, all muscles and mullet. All week, he doesn’t wear a single shirt that has sleeves. Tonight he walks in, not one bit surprised to see a room full of people waiting for him, and assumes they want a song. He walks right up onto the stage, picks up the nearest acoustic guitar, and strums the Grand Funk song “I’m Your Captain,” which I haven’t heard since I was a kid. You remember this one. “I’m getting closer to my hoooome,” that’s the chorus. Everybody in this room knows every word. We’re with the band. Wait—we’re in the band. We’re an American band.

  By the end of the night, some of the half-dozen female campers are already complaining about getting hit on by the menfolk, some of whom were clearly hoping for a little more “Hot Blooded” and a little less “Cold as Ice.” One camper—let’s call him Tommy—keeps orbiting another—let’s call her Gina—and invading her personal space. She’s the only youngish blond California girl here, and she has already shaken off a few dudes, but this guy can’t take a hint. His wedding ring disappears somewhere between his second and third beer. It’s comical to watch, if you don’t happen to be Gina. He snuggles up to
her and rests his beer on the table behind her, so he can casually drape an arm around her. I haven’t seen that move since college. Neither has she. Gina turns her head to me and rolls her eyes over her shoulder. This could be a long night.

  Gina and I become best friends all week. She’s a metalhead and a paralegal. We hang out between rehearsals and trade Bon Jovi stories. Within five minutes of meeting me, she hands me her purse to hold so dudes will stop hitting on her. How can she tell I know how to do this? How can she tell I’m not going to hit on her? I have no idea. She just knows. It’s one of the most maddening things in my life—people’s first impressions of me tend to be more accurate than my own impressions of me.

  When Mark Farner is up onstage singing “I’m Your Captain,” Gina sings along—she loves this song. As that guy Tommy sidles up to slide a hand across her lower back, she turns to me again and mouths the words of the song: “Keep this stranger from my door.”