Rock of Ages

Part One

Dud November

1

Maybe a Hat?

Friday Night

The drum solo had gone on so long that it seemed to be taking place in geological time, and there was no indication that it was nearing an end. On the contrary, every time my hopes rose, someone in the sparse audience screamed something like "Faaaaar OUT or Go, Boomboom," and the message seemed to get through the wall of noise because the drummer—who went by the name of Boomboom Black, although (as I had recently learned) he’d been born Morton Fefferman—did the impossible and played even louder.

And then he did it again.

Still, whenever I was gripped by a really compelling need to flee the theater, I looked at the guy holding the sticks—Morton or Boomboom—and felt a grudging admiration for his willpower and his stamina, while withholding the laurel wreath for taste. With the sparse, stringy, shoulder-length gray hair, the seemingly frail arms, and the ropy neck, he looked like he was moments away from having a special soft-food breakfast delivered on a tray in a place with a name like Perpetual Acres or Sunset Highway. Instead, he had embarked on a solo that, from my perspective, threatened to outlive him.

The evening had begun on a note of discord and had grown more cacophonous ever since, a bad joke that had slowly turned into a worse one. When there were butts in the relatively few seats that had been sold, the lights had gone to half and the absolutely massive speakers that had been hung over the stage erupted with the enormous chords of Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, better known to the generation—some of whose members had (in part, at least) embraced this band—as "the 2001 music." A follow spot lit up, pointed at no one, and then, after a jiggle or two, jerked spasmodically to our left, to the area downstage where a silver-haired little guy, who might have been five feet two inches tall and maybe seventy years old, was standing, mike in hand, looking out at us.

Good evening, good evening, he’d said in a voice simultaneously sweet and ragged, like a flute being played through a wet dishcloth. I’m Oscar Fiddles— and from behind us, a guy who obviously gargled with rocks yelled, So what does Oscar fiddle? and someone else shouted, Can you play ‘Melancholy Baby’? Oscar Fiddles nodded wearily a couple of times, cupped a hand to one ear, raised his eyebrows, waited to see if they were finished, and then said, Boys will be boys. With friends like mine, who needs enemies? But seriously, folks, we’re all glad you’re here, and I hope you’re not packed in too tight. A little wave of laughter sputtered over the seating area, indicating the presence of the easily amused and the extremely polite. That’s better, Oscar Fiddles said. "This is the last time we’ll be doing this show, but don’t forget, we got two completely different shows coming up tomorrow night and Sunday. Tonight, though—tonight’s a monster—"

Speaking of a monster, shouted someone, probably one of the midlevel thugs whose damp idea the concert tour had been, get a load of that nose. You could park your car under it. Someone else contributed, Or sit under it so you shouldn’t get sunburned.

A feathery ripple of laughter was the result, but Fiddles wasn’t having it. Glad you folks think that’s funny, but I gotta tell you, twelve weeks, three times a week, and you know what? You guys can go fuck yourselves, or maybe each other, why should tonight be any different? And he dropped his microphone on the floor with a remarkably loud bang and stalked off the stage.

One of the guys who’d been harassing Fiddles shouted, "Oscar’s gone to fiddle around with himself, folks, so let’s get this thing started. Here’s a band I know you all remember. Let’s hear it for Goat Motor and the Cranks."

A tepid sprinkling of applause, no more enthusiastic than the beginning of a drizzle that’s not fated to swell into anything like actual rain, started and then faded away as nothing happened, and then a stagehand darted out to recover Oscar’s dropped mike. He waved to the crowd as though his mother was in it, getting a few sarcastic cheers in response, and then, as he ducked offstage, the ancient LA DJ, who was supposed to announce the bands when he wasn’t up packing his nose in the men’s room, said, "Booooyyyyyssss and GIRLS! Welcome to Rock of Ages, and let’s hear a big Los Angeles welcome for a band you all love, Goat Motor and the Cranks!" And the center-stage curtain rose to reveal four harassed-looking musicians who were hurriedly plugging in. The audience was clapping in impatient unison by then, and after a good three minutes that felt like a quarter of an hour, Goat Motor kicked off with the riff that announced Chainsaw through the Heart, one of its sparse little cluster of hits.

The business of the evening was finally underway.

Goat Motor’s set stretched over several generations and the rise and fall of great civilizations. Their standard for being called back for an encore was, in my experience, uniquely modest. Still, eventually they yielded the stage to Rat Bite, and any expectation we had that the evening would get better flew south in seconds. The theme of the performance was the apparent loathing between the drummer, Boomboom, and the lead guitarist. They’d been stepping on each other’s toes for what felt like an eon when Boomboom embarked on The Solo That Would Not End.

Three times already, the lead guitarist, who obviously sensed time’s winged chariot hurrying near, had launched into the raggedy six-note riff that had briefly owned much of AM radio, back when the heavy chains around the drummer’s neck had been de rigueur, which is to say when my parents were in high school. Under traditional circumstances, the decades-old riff, the song, and the band that played it would be half-remembered curiosities for a few people tottering on the edge of geezerhood, long replaced by newer, and often better, music. But rock and roll ignored the rules and refused to fade away as virtually all earlier forms of popular musical had. Rock was, after all, both the choice and the creation of the largest and richest generation in history. So here we were, fifty-some years later, watching the drummer swivel to turn his back on his bandmates and bang away even more loudly, exploring as-yet-unused features of his kit, which was bigger than some people’s apartments. This time, he went for a long line of cowbells, each of which, presumably, had its own unique sound and meaning, at least, to a cow. Looming all the way to the left, just beyond the cowbells, big and black and ominous, was the famous Ultra Boom®, a massive amplifier that was, apparently, being saved for the Big Finish, if any of us lived long enough to hear it.

George Santayana once defined a fanatic as someone who doubles his effort when he’s forgotten his aim, and the drummer was well into Santayana territory. The guitarist, whose skintight black pants bulged over something that looked suspiciously like a large blackjack, gave it another despairing try, a screaming series of minor chords, complete with an attempt at a Pete Townshend arm-windmill that suggested impending rotator cuff surgery. The drummer responded by moving one step closer to the Ultra Boom®, stopping at some tall burnished-wood African drums that had once probably summoned far-flung children to meals across the rippling infinity of the veld. The drummer and the guitarist, as I already mentioned, had hated each other since FM radio was still something most people picked up on their fillings.

An elbow nudge from the right made me aware that someone was trying to say something, and I cupped a hand to my ear and leaned over. My daughter, Rina, shouted, "How long can this possibly go on?"

It’s a tradition, I yelled. There were three prices for every Rat Bite concert: those who were under eighteen, those who were over eighteen, and those who turned eighteen during the drum solo.

You made that up.

Someone behind me tapped me rather forcefully on the shoulder, and I turned to see a man in either late middle age or early old age. He wore a mustache that curled up at the ends as sharply as a fishhook and then degenerated into a pointy little goatee straight out of Frans Hals. This display was framed by a set of hair parentheses—sideburns thicker and bushier than the Forest Primeval, all of it topping off the first Nehru jacket I’d ever actually seen on a person who wasn’t Nehru. The jacket’s high collar suggested that the sideburns might actually extend down to the tops of his shoulders and possibly keep going across the backs of his hands.

"Some of us want to listen to the music," he said. He wasn’t shouting, but he had a remarkably loud voice.

"Oh, I’m sorry, Rina yelled. If I’d known it was music, I wouldn’t have dreamed of—"

Wow, Nehru said, poking me again with a thick index finger. She’s got a mouth on her, doesn’t she?

Brushing at the spot he’d poked, I said, Sometimes it feels like she has several.

To my surprise, Nehru laughed. He said to Rina, "I’d probably be trying to chew my way through the floor if they were playing your music."

I’m sorry, Rina shouted. I was rude.

Aaaahhh, Nehru said, waving it away and cupping his hands to his mouth. "I remember wanting to back a car over my parents when they played the stuff they loved. The music you grow up with is like your first boyfriend or girlfriend, you know? It takes you years to figure out why nobody understood what you saw in them."

A shrill, glass-endangering scream of outrage from the direction of the stage yanked me around just in time to see the guitarist swing his gleaming black Stratocaster at the drummer’s head. He struck with the kind of accuracy that comes only with years of practice and/or extremely vivid wishful thinking. It was a seriously solid impact that sounded like someone slamming a car door; the drummer’s head, if it hadn’t been attached to the rest of him, would have probably flown over the edge of the stage and ended up in a lap in the third row. But, since it was attached, his body simply followed it stage right at a remarkable speed, dragging his torso and his thin black-clad limbs—he seemed like the kind of guy who, as Baby Morton, had probably insisted on black diapers—straight across the exotic part of his drum kit, knocking over the cowbells and the African drums and the Indonesian rain stick, and into the nightmare hulk of Ultra Boom®, which emitted a sound so low and so loud that the concrete floor beneath my feet actually shivered. As the room continued to shudder and the African drums toppled in all directions, the keyboard player, who up to now had been essentially scenery, abandoned his instrument, wrapped his arm around the guitarist’s neck, and wrestled him to the floor. The low vibration from Ultra Boom® increased, only to be augmented by the still-amplified guitar, which had clearly shorted out, emitting a deafening, unwavering squeal that felt like a wire inserted into one ear and shoved straight out through the other, and then tugged back and forth. With knots in it.

By the time I got my hands over my ears the stage was swarming with beefy roadies in plaid shirts and—wearing a skintight T-shirt—a serious bodybuilder I’d met, not very happily, the previous evening. Lots of roadies are big guys, but the bodybuilder dwarfed them all; he looked like the Mr. Universe finalist from the planet Steroid, and he brought a measure of primitive, blunt-force order to the scene by kicking the keyboard player’s legs out from under him, grabbing him by the back of his belt, hoisting him one-handed into the air, and carrying him, kicking and shouting, arms and legs flailing toward all points of the compass, into the wings and out of the audience’s sight. I’d learned that the weightlifter’s name was Bluto when I first met him, and seeing him in action made the moniker seem even more appropriate. In his absence, the plaid-shirted crew, who apparently drew their fashion inspiration from the halcyon days of early nineties Seattle, joined the other band members in milling around and shouting at each other. The bassist took a few halfhearted swings at the person nearest him, but nobody noticed. Nobody ever notices bassists.

Come on, I shouted to Rina as I stood up. Let’s go meet the guys.

She said, You’re shitting me, but she got up and joined me in the aisle.

The guy in the Nehru shirt cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, Hey, where you going? It’s just getting good.

We’d come a little early and had been honored with seats in the seventh row, much too close to the stage for my taste, and so, walking up the aisle, I got my first real look at the band’s surviving fan base: heavily male, many of them so battered they looked deep-fried. Some of them might have arrived on cobwebbed antique motorbikes after three or four amphetamine-fueled decades on the road with the Hell’s Angels or some lesser group, crisscrossing deserts at high noon, boldly swiping bags of Cheetos from convenience stores, and improvising other inspirational feats to burnish their legend. They wore cracked and peeling leather jackets over much-worn bug-spotted T-shirts, their eyes were haloed by pale raccoon imprints, courtesy of a lifetime’s worth of sunglasses, and they sported an improbable ratio of walrus mustaches, perhaps to compensate for receding hairlines.

The biker guys and their dates shared the rows of seats with an assortment of rail-thin possible former crack enthusiasts, superannuated hippies, and, here and there, a sprinkling of men, and a few women, whose grooming and attitude suggested that at some point in their lives it had occurred to them that they might eventually get older, prompting them to seek out the narrow road to the middle class. They seemed keenly aware that they’d dressed wrong, even though some of them gamely sported heavy earrings that must have required some painful reopening of the piercings of yesteryear.

From my brief survey I estimated that the place was about 70 percent male and 30 percent empty. I’d been told that most of the tour’s twelve earlier stops had been, if not always sellouts, still pretty solid and occasionally packed to the rafters, but that LA was an exception. LA was supposed to be the big finish, but things were clearly winding down with a whimper.

Behind us, down near the stage, some optimistic fans set up a rhythmic clap that spread across the audience like oil on water. It was then amplified by foot-stomping and, here and there, cries for more.

Rina shouted, "They’ve got to be kidding."

It’s been a long time, I said. Fifty or so years ago, they loved those guys.

I thought music from back then was all rainbows and unicorns, Rina said, practically yelling into my ear. Pacifists smoking pot and growing flowers in their hair. Meals of vegan broth around ecological campfires.

That’s tomorrow’s show, I said. We had almost reached the door. It’s a three-day tour, different music, different audiences. Gristle and heavy metal tonight, beads and incense on Saturday, Brits and nervous, skinny-necktie rock, quasi-new wave on Sunday.

These guys don’t sound like heavy metal.

Yeah, well, they might have been more dangerous when they had their teeth.

The crowd began to chant: RAT BITE! RAT BITE! RAT BITE! The chant was in time with the claps and the stomps, and was audible even over the feedback. The floor of the theater was actually shaking.

Kind of a cool name, though, Rina said.

I’m just sorry you’re not going to get to hear Wet Spot and Teeth of the Nameless.

You made those up.

Afraid not. I got my hand on the door to the lobby, eager to put it between me and the shrill guitar feedback. Before I could push it open, I was frozen by an ear-scraping chorus of screams, one of which belong to Rina. I wheeled around just in time to see a roughly built set wall that suggested the interior of an old Midwestern farmhouse—complete with a red gingham curtain over its only window—knife down from the flies, where it had been hanging the preceding day when I first explored the theater. It landed, like an enormous and somehow homey guillotine, on the unconscious drummer. One of his legs flew into the air, a spasm of some kind, but before he could do anything else—if he was capable of doing anything else—the wall tilted toward the audience and, slowly and majestically, its red curtain fluttering, fell forward onto the stage, spewing a thick cloud of dust that rolled out over the audience.

Santayana also said that those who fail to understand the past are condemned to repeat it. If the melee on the stage was any evidence, it looked like old George was right again.

When we got outside, we discovered that it had started to drizzle, the moisture creating halos the precise color of breath on glass around the streetlights and lending a kind of temporary charm to a neighborhood of right angles executed in aging concrete. Like all good Californians, we paused instinctively beneath the theater’s brightly lighted canopy, waiting for the almost-rain to lighten. God forbid we should get damp.

Rina said, with a little wobble in her voice, Do you think he’s dead?

Yeah. And if he’s not he’ll probably wish he were. That thing must have turned about a foot of his spine to powder.

Is it bad karma to be kind of grateful that we get to go home? A car splashed by in what would usually be the parking lane, and we stepped back. The middle lanes were taken up on both sides of the street by a gaping black hole almost half a block long, turning the parking lanes into splash territory.

It’s not just bad karma, I said, it’s also impossible. The minute I can figure out what to do with you, I’ve got to get backstage.

"What to do with me? How quaint. And anyway, why in the world would you go back—"

I guess you’ll have to come with me, I said. I took her hand and dragged her into the drizzle and around a corner of the theater into a little alley about as wide as two small cars side by side. We had the theater wall on our left, and ahead of us, at the end, stood a small two-story stucco office building that I believed to be the source, geographically at least, of all the trouble. I said, Maybe Lavender will take care of you.

"Lavender? You know someone named Lavender? And since when do I need—no, no, wrong question. What in the world is going on?"

Tell you later, I said, breaking into a trot toward the door that opened onto the stage. Listen, if we don’t find Lavender, stay close to me, and I mean close enough to touch. You hear me?

Yes, Daddy, she said in a high little-girl voice. Whatever you say, Daddy.

I broke a rule about not swearing in Rina’s company and said, Oh, shit.

Rina said, What? and then added, Oh. No kidding.

Bluto, the bodybuilder I’d glimpsed on the stage, bulled his way out through the hangar door, pushing through the welter of people, some fleeing the stage area despite the drizzle, some barreling out of the little office building and heading for the noise. At that precise moment, the feedback squeal, which was bouncing around between the walls of the alley, was cut off. Bluto stepped in front of us, his massive arms spread wide.

Who’s the chicklet? he said in his oddly wispy voice. Too young for you, Jack. And no, she can’t go in. Only people who—

You are out of your weight class, I said. Whoever your bosses want in there, you steroidal vacancy, I’m guaranteed to be one of them. Or do you want to talk to Cappy about it?

I’d thought that Cappy’s name would get his attention, but he wasn’t even listening. Rina had stepped right past me to stand in front of him. Wow, she said, looking him up and down with a hand on one hip. "You’ve done a lot of work."

You gotta take it serious, Bluto said.

"And these ones? she asked, her voice higher and younger, sounding like she had at twelve or thirteen. She reached up and touched the top of his left shoulder. These ones, right here?"

He did something to make them look even bigger and said, The traps, sweetie. The trapezius.

"The trapezius," she said, as though he’d just quoted her favorite sonnet. People were still running past us in both directions, and one of the guys fleeing the stage turned up the alley and lost his dinner against the theater wall.

That’s right, Chicklet, he said, the trap—

Well, I mean, she said over him, "I’ve never seen them this . . . this huge before. But, I mean, when you get them just, you know, wayyyy big like this . . ."

Yeah, he said, and this time he inflated them one at a time.

Well, Rina said, "when they get this big, they make your head look really weensy."

He backed up a step. Whaddya mean, they make—

"I mean, I’m sure some girls really like a small head, probably means less competition or maybe they think it’ll be easy to hold up their end of the conversation, but it’s not an automatic sell for most of us. Still, it’s good on you, you know? It suits you. She reached back, took my hand, stepped around him, and led me, as though she were the parent, into the backstage area. Over her shoulder, she said to him, Maybe a hat?"

2

One-Way Ticket to a Broken Heart

When you’re in an audience, looking at the stage that’s in use, you’re not really seeing the stage at all. Despite its size and its cumbersome mechanics and the fact that it’s the space to which all eyes are drawn, the stage should no more draw attention to itself than a picture frame does. The stage’s job is to disappear and become whatever is being presented: a gathering of people beneath open umbrellas in low light becomes a New England funeral; a follow spot on one musician, such as the one that had been directed at Boomboom when the wall fell, makes you forget everyone else onstage. You’re in a realm where time and space seem to be malleable.

But under work lights, with the act curtain lowered—that’s the big one between the stage and the audience—a stage has all the mystery and allure of an auto repair shop; it’s just a wide, largely empty rectangle with a much, much higher ceiling than we’re used to seeing—the flies, in theater jargon—from which can be hung huge set pieces called flats, such as the Midwestern farmhouse wall that had floored the drummer. That and the other flats, so-called because they’re mainly painted canvas framed in wood, hang well above the audience’s sight line, waiting for the cue that will lower them into position, usually while the curtain is down or the audience is looking elsewhere. As I led Rina in, I glanced up at the other flats hanging there, identifying the ones I’d seen the previous day: the Yellow Brick Road, dwindling in perspective as it bisected the lush landscape of Oz; the high green towers of the Emerald City, their spires shrouded in clouds; and the densely decorated interior walls of the Wizard’s palace, its details lifted from the classic movie.

On the stage floor downstage right, where a slice of a Kansas farmhouse had fallen on Boomboom, I saw the current drama: around the fallen drummer a little knot of men had gathered, tight as a flexed muscle. It included some of the roadies, a few musicians in their outmoded stage outfits, and two or three apparently curious stagehands. The energy, though, flowed from a tense little coterie made up of three dark-suited guys in their sixties and seventies who were definitely not rock musicians and were deferentially orbiting the man who called himself Sparks: the men in the dark suits were, in fact, three of the four thugs who had put the tour together. They were walking the fine line between being right at hand for whatever Sparks might suggest while also maintaining a safe distance from him, even though one or all of them had surely hired him. Staying out of his way required a certain amount of choreography because he was pacing back and forth with a cell phone pressed to one ear, apparently taking orders, which he relayed to everyone within shouting distance. The red zigzag of lightning on his briefcase shone all the way across the stage, a sort of portable beware beacon.

As if on cue, a bubble of chatter rose from the knot of men, and one of the suits—Jack Gold, if I correctly remembered the photos Irwin Dressler had showed me—whirled and ran toward us, heading for the door. I stepped in front of him and he stopped; he’d seen me the previous day with Sparks, and he had no way of knowing what our relationship was.

I said, What just happened?

He moved his legs, Gold said, shifting from foot to foot like someone who desperately needed directions to the men’s room. Big and beefy as he was, he had the tight, panicky eyes that identified most of the people who spend any time around Sparks, and a pointy little face that looked like it might have been pushed briefly into a giant pencil sharpener. "Well, he moved one leg, he said. Sparks says that means his back isn’t broken."

And that means what?

"Sparks says it means that his back isn’t broken," Gold repeated, louder. He started to step around me, but I put a hand on his arm.

I said, "And that means?"

"That we can move him, he said, actually miming picking something up and putting it down again. Get him the fuck out of the way, you know? Get the show on the road. Where are the bands s’posed to play? You want they should dance around him? Sheesh." He feinted to his left and then went right, and I resisted the impulse to put out a foot and bring him down, just for fun.

In response to some command I’d missed, stagehands swarmed onto the set and began to wheel Rat Bite’s piano upstage and into the stage left wings. From the other direction, two guys who had been pried away from gaping at Boomboom shoved an electronic keyboard toward center stage. Opposite us, a couple of roadies were breaking down Boomboom’s enormous drum kit at hyperspeed, and over the PA system I heard the cigarette rasp of Robert W. Natural, the ancient classic rock DJ who’d made me want to clear my throat for decades and who was doing the between-acts patter. He was a guy who had stuck faithfully with amphetamines for forty years, refusing to be seduced away from them by the stronger and more lethal uppers that came and went, often taking their users with them. His hands shook like personal seismic zones and he had eyes like fried eggs, but he was still alive.

Don’t worry about Boomboom, boys and girls, he said, sounding like the world’s biggest match being struck. He’s up and laughing it off. From where I stood, if Boomboom was laughing it off, he was doing it while he was being hoisted none too gently onto a stretcher, his head flopping back and forth bonelessly and one arm hanging off the edge, limp as a windless sail. The DJ, who had never known when to shut up, said, "Hold the vibe, folks, we’ve just begun to rock out. Coming up—the one, the only . . . Wet Spot."

Rina said, "They’re not really just going to keep playing, are they?"

The show must go on, I said, "unless they’re planning to hand out refunds, and that’s not going to happen. See the guy with the briefcase over there, the one with the lightning bolt on it? He’s essentially the not-so-secret weapon of the four old mugs who financed this thing, and he has never heard of a persuasive reason not to just maim anybody who gives him an argument, so, yeah, I’d say they’re just going to keep playing."

That’s disgusting, she said. I mean, he wasn’t very good, but still . . .

As the guys carrying the stretcher started toward us, I realized who was missing. I snagged a passing anorexic, whose skintight pants, dead-black hair, and thick pancake makeup marked him as a performer.

Where’s Doc Bellman? I asked. I saw him in the audience.

"They want a real doctor, don’t they? the anorexic said in a British accent. Beneath the makeup he was working on a museum-quality collection of wrinkles. Old Doc Belly was fine for the tour, you know? He could put ice on things, you know? But he was on the bus mainly because he had a prescription pad, you know? He could write us up for everything short of the big sniff, and the fans always had that, bless their souls. Anyway, Belly’s a fookin’ veterinarian, isn’t he? Boomboom seems to need someone who’s familiar with, you know, people."

You don’t sound very upset, Rina said.

"Well, hi, sweetie, where’d you come from? With the exception of a landmark-crooked set of British National Health teeth, dyed a vivid smoker’s yellow, he had fine, even features that must have provoked their share of screams back in the day. No, I’m not upset. Boomboom got floored a couple of times already on the tour, although this is the first time a house fell on him, but that’s showbiz, innit? I mean, he’s been getting coldcocked on the stage by old Franky for bloody decades. Practically in the script, you could say. And he’s a shit drummer. What’s your name?"

Charles, Rina said. "This new makeup is fabulous."

Well, Charles, the Brit said, you’re close enough for me. Most of the girls I’ve met on this tour were only girls in the sense that a bunch of bones in a museum is a Tyrannosaurus rex. What are you doing after the—

A woman behind me said, Pay him no attention, darling, and I looked up to see Lavender, wrapped in a dress that seemed to be made entirely of pink bows and that was held up at one shoulder by a clasp in the form of a large, rhinestone-studded alligator. You’re talking to a man who dyes his pubic hair.

And you’d know how? the Brit said.

"Oh, please," Lavender said. "It was in Rolling Stone."

A bit sullenly, the Brit said, "I had a lot more fun when I was young."

Lavender extended a finely groomed index finger and touched him gently, even affectionately, on the tip of his nose. You certainly did, she said. "And I was there for some of it. Twice, I think. Not that you’d remember, of course. What’s your name again, darling?"

Nigel, the Brit said. You’ve forgotten my bloody—

"Oh, no, how could I? It’s burned into my soul. The Holiday Inn, in Phoenix, an unlikely location for paradise, sometime in March of 1974. But actually, the name I was asking for belongs to this lovely young lady, the one you