Looking for Lewis & Clark

Maybe it wasn't the explorers, but Gary Lewis and Gene Clark.

Like most stories, this one begins with a song.

In this case, the song was "Looking for Lewis & Clark" by the Long Ryders, complete with its self-referential lyrics and homage to the Kingsmen.

I was working at my first job out of college (a soul-killing endeavor made almost bearable by great co-workers who lived to savage the company's management during beer-soaked lunch hours at a local pub) and was looking for an apartment in Watertown, Mass. Apartments in the area were notoriously hard to find, so unscrupulous brokers charged obscene "finder's fees" and kicked back half to greedy landlords. One broker's teenage daughter drove me to a series of crappy apartments while trying to get me to comment on whether or not I was in favor of "nipple rouge" (I'd never heard of it and kept trying to change the subject). She had a Long Ryders mix tape that she played as she drove us around in a crappy Pinto whose left front light was missing. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


I would have cut the afternoon short after the first crappy apartment, but I liked listening to the Long Ryders and wasn't sure exactly how I was going to find a place to live. Plus, I could always steer the conversation away whenever she brought up "nipple rouge" again. (For the record, she brought it up seven times.)

In the early 1980s, Sid Griffin, Greg Sowders, Stephen McCarthy, and Barry Shank formed the Long Ryders, bringing a Graham Parsons/late-era Byrds country feel to the growing L.A. psychedelic movement known as the "Paisly Underground." (To cement their ties to the Byrds, the Long Ryders even got ex-Byrd Gene Clark to sing on a song on their first full album.)

The teenage wannabe broker chick didn't care about any of that. The only thing she knew is that her boyfriend loved the tape, then broke up with her because she wouldn't agree to wear nipple rouge. Finally, when the second side of the tape was nearly done, she told me there was one more apartment she could show me. (Link -- with bonus panda dancing -- for Gmail subscribers.)


The last apartment she showed me was down a hallway that stunk from cat piss. I tried not to make a face, but I guess I failed. She smiled the kind of smile seen mostly these days on the faces of delusional contestants trying out for American Idol and said: "And the best thing about this place is you can have pets!"

I didn't rent any of the crappy apartments in Watertown. But I did drive into Harvard Square that evening and buy the first Long Ryders album.

As for the band, they were invited to open for U2 on the Joshua Tree tour, but were plagued by personnel problems and broke up instead.

I never saw the wannabe teenage broker chick again, so I never got to tell her that she got the best of the deal -- getting rid of the loser boyfriend and gaining a Long Ryders tape. In an alternate universe, the Long Ryders would have been huge stars and the wannabe teenage broker chick and her new boyfriend (the one who didn't care if she wore nipple rouge or not) would've been in the front row in front of 50,000 other fans. (And if she really wanted to be a broker, she wouldn't have to show apartments that smelled like cat piss.)


Bonus video -- The Long Ryders cover NRBQ's "I Want You Bad":

Wrapped in a World of Imaginary Grace

The feeling is gone... this means nothing to me.

In college, I knew a girl named Eleanor who was famous for having won a prestigious art scholarship (endowed by Andy Warhol with a selection committee headed by Picasso's long-time mistress). In most years, no student in America was good enough to win the scholarship; in good years, there was one. My year, it that was Eleanor.

She was pretty famous for the scholarship, but even more famous for the cult of personality (which she actively encouraged) that emerged around her. And also the fact that she wore stockings and flapper dresses.

I met her in a class on experimental German cinema and we hit it off. (I impressed her with a bilingual pun about the 15-hour version of Berlin Alexanderplatz.) Then she asked me if I thought the stockings were sexy. I did and told her so. She said she only wore them as an ironic statement. But the sexiness wasn't ironic (even if her awareness and mockery of it was). After class most nights, we'd climb up on the roof of the art building (she had a key, naturally), where she'd smoke Gauloises and we'd both drink generic beer.

She told me about the semester she spent in Vienna and how she'd fallen in love with an impoverished Duke who wrote her sonnets while she filled sketchbook after sketchbook with charcoal drawings of his penis in repose. She claimed that he was impotent and had told her he could only make love again after his family regained their long-lost fortune.

Oddly, this passed for a normal conversation at the time.

Then I'd tell her stories about fin-de-siecle Vienna (a phrase I'd learned just weeks before) and describe the meeting places of the great poets, writers, and artists from nearly 100 years earlier. She'd nod, offer me a cigarette (which I'd always decline), and tell how she'd been to that pub and this cafe, and how the alleyway I'd described had been rebuilt and was now part of some resort hotel.

She invited me one night to this bar downtown that she claimed was hosting a combination "funk night" and 80s video dance party. I couldn't say yes quickly enough, hoping this would lead to our magical moment together (during which she would fall completely and irreversibly in love with me). I spent hours trying to figure out what to wear, going for a combination of splashy and nonchalant, but ultimately looking like the dork I really was (only with mousse in my hair).

Eleanor, as usual, looked amazing (but also as if she'd closed her eyes, reached into her closet and thrown on whatever she touched). The one thing I remember is that she wore huge hoop earrings and a gigantic purse that matched their color.

When we got inside, I slowly realized that Eleanor was only half-right about the music. There were no synth drums or 80s tunes, just hardcore funk jams and long-forgotten R&B songs from the early 70s. Just about then, I noticed two things: we were literally the only White people in the place and Eleanor was completely wasted. She later opened her purse -- which was stuffed with about five pounds of marijuana. "Shhh..." she whispered. "Don't tell anyone."

And then she wanted to slow dance. To James Brown. Perhaps because there weren't enough people staring at us. I remember feeling out of place; her wonderful quirky nature suddenly felt crazy and dangerous. I convinced her to leave after about an hour; ten minutes later, there was a huge fight and two people were stabbed. But I didn't know that until days later.

As we walked home, I just wanted to escape; I'd given up on finding our perfect magical moment together. She stopped in the middle of the block and it took me five steps to realize she wasn't keeping up. I turned to see her posed under a streetlight, looking adorably quirky again. And she waved me over and I forgot to be annoyed with her. And then she gave me the sweetest, most amazing kiss, and I forgot I'd ever been annoyed with her. "I stop the world and melt with you," she declared. And for a few minutes, she really did. (Link for Gmail subscribers):


And there was nothing else in the world that mattered. It was just the two of us, nowhere to go, nothing to do but kiss under a street light. With five pounds of marijuana at our feet. Her arms wrapped around me, my heart wrapped in a world of imaginary grace.

She led me back to her small, dirty apartment off-campus. And while she went into her bedroom to change out of her flapper dress, I looked at her books and her record collection. And we were talking the whole time, even though I was in a different room. It was a fairly typical student apartment. But there was no art -- no drawings, no paintings, nothing to indicate that a prestigious scholarship student lived there.

And then I saw her passport. And picked it up. The photo was amazing, of course.

And she was telling me, from the other room, about Vienna and how she'd felt freer sexually there than she could ever feel in America. And I thumbed through her passport, looking for the stamps. But they weren't there.

I put the passport down just before she came out of the bedroom. And she poured us both drinks and I wondered where she'd been the semester she wasn't in Vienna. And why the lies poured so easily out of her. And why she thought she couldn't impress people just by being herself.

And she kissed me again and it felt great. But it also felt bad. And she asked me if I wanted to go in her bedroom. And I really, really did.

But I knew I couldn't.

Her stories were great. But they weren't real.

And I needed the real thing. Because the fake stuff, no matter how wonderful and titillating and exotic, would soon feel much worse than having nothing at all.

"Can I show you something I learned in Vienna?" she asked. And my body was screaming yes but my heart said no. And I followed my heart.

A few weeks later, Eleanor took off in the middle of the night. She never finished school and the story slowly leaked out over the next several weeks. She hadn't painted or drawn anything in more than 3 years. But her professors were so impressed with her scholarship and her prizes that none of them would fail her even though she refused to do any of her work. They listened to her, watched the crowd around her, and believed. Or at least wanted to believe.

And her "semester abroad"? There were different stories -- she got pregnant; she worked in a coal mine; she walked every mile of Route 66. I wanted to believe every larger-than-life story about her (even though I knew deep down the truth would be simpler, sadder, and far less poetic).

Years later, when I finally got to Vienna, I couldn't stop thinking about Eleanor. It was cold and cloudy, a city wrapped in mystery and filled with promise. I'd like to say I thought I saw her around every corner (or at least under every streetlight), but it just wasn't true.

Which makes it exactly the type of story she would have told. But that means nothing to me... (Link for Gmail subscribers):

Mailbag

I get emails.

Joan writes: I noticed that since you wrote about "Here Comes the Kónguló" it became the number 1 song in Iceland. Coincidence? I think not!"

I'm not sure I did that much, but if my blog can help push Hafdis Huld to the top of the charts, I'm all for it.

As many of you know, that song is actually about "Spiderman" Alain Robert, not about the superhero Spiderman.




Terry writes: Do you ever worry that the girls you write about will hunt you down and kill you while playing the song you associate with them?

It never crossed my mind until just now.

And I'm also a little scared of you, Terry.




Sal writes: John or Paul?

John.


Sal writes (back): Ramones or Sex Pistols?

Ramones.


And finally Sal writes: Theremin or tuba?

There are some things a gentleman never discusses.



If you've got a burning question that you don't want to leave in the comments, shoot me an email.

Pushing Too Hard on... Gene Hackman?

Michael Jackson made me think of Gene Hackman.

This all makes perfect sense, although perhaps only in my head.

So Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett die on Thursday. And I find out two days later that Sky Saxon, leader of legendary garage rockers the Seeds, also died that day.

"Pushing Too Hard" was featured on one of my favorite albums Nuggets, a great two-record set of the finest psychedelic and garage music of the 60s. (The record was assembled by Lenny Kaye, who selected the tracks and wrote great liner notes. I remember distinctly having a two-hour argument in college between 2 and 4 in the morning about what made Lenny Kaye cooler: Nuggets or playing lead guitar in the Patti Smith Group... although I can't remember which argument won out.)

Anyway.

This made me think of the great Australian band Hoodoo Gurus, whose 1984 debut album Stoneage Romeos was named for a Three Stooges short and was dedicated to characters from Get Smart, F-Troop, and Petticoat Junction. That album features a great rave-up celebrating all things Nugget-y called "(Let's All) Turn On," which kicks off:

Shake Some Action, Psychotic Reaction
No Satisfaction, Sky Pilot, Sky Saxon
That's what I like...

(and just gets cooler from there, name-checking everyone and everything that made Little Steven want to host the Underground Garage radio show).

But I digress (again).

So... I go onto YouTube to look for Hoodoo Gurus videos and find a song I'd never heard of called "Gene Hackman." I played it (and you should too) because I thought it was the same as the Robyn Hitchcock song "Don't Talk to Me About Gene Hackman." But it's not -- it's a totally different song (which -- as far as I can tell -- first appeared on 1998's Electric Chair album).


Hitchcock's song is a hidden bonus track on the Jewels for Sophia album... and, due to YouTube's recent frenzy of take-downs, I couldn't find it there. But here's a link to a live recording.

Both songs came out in the very late 1990s, both by musical artists I love (and started loving around the same time in the 1980s). Both songs are fun (and very much in character with their creators), but they couldn't be more different. And yet, both of these songs are about the exact same thing: the fact that Gene Hackman seemingly was in every movie that came out for a period of 3 or 4 years.

What are the odds of that?

Probably about the same as Michael Jackson, Sky Saxon, and Farah Fawcett all dying on the same day.

(On a related note, I'm happy to report that Gene Hackman is still alive and well...)

It's a Suicide to Choose

Another band that should've been huge.

If you lived in Boston (or almost anywhere in New England) in the mid-to-late 1980s, you couldn't escape from O Positive.

Their sound was laid back but insistent, desparate but hopeful, grounded but oddly ethereal (like a harder-rocking Death Cab for Cutie). The band -- led by singer/songwriter/guitarist Dave Herlihy and guitarist Alan Petitti -- performed up and down the East Coast, building buzz wherever they went. They signed with Throbbing Lobster (a Boston-based garage-oriented indie label) and released an EP in 1985 called Only Breathing, which was played a lot on cool local radio station WBCN, constantly on cooler station WFNX, and occasionally even on Boston's uncool stations. And while a lot of people compared O Positive to REM, it was clear that there was something entirely different going on.


The first track, "With You," was a tale of a relationship that seemed doomed from the start. I'd get lost in the song every time I heard it (and not just because the captivating intro lasts for over 40 seconds before the vocals kick in). At the time, I never could quite figure out if the singer was berating himself or his girlfriend with lines like "It's your five-week anniversary/Put a rope around my neck" or "Smoke a cigarette/Think it'll get you through it" and best of all: "I could love you/It's a suicide to choose." I bought the EP at the Newbury Comics upstairs in the Garage in Harvard Square in Cambridge (and picked up the great Don Dixon-produced Dumptruck album at the same time). And then I went downstairs and bought a tabouli and feta cheese stroller (a pita wrap that you could eat while walking around) from a place called Stuff-Its. (The Garage and Newbury Comics are still there, but Stuff-Its and O Positive are both long gone.) (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


O Positive switched to Link records for the 1987 EP Cloud Factory (and Link later released the two EPs together on one CD). I've always thought the highlight of Cloud Factory was the great song "Up, Up, Up" (which struck me as a sequel of sorts to "With You," with the same singer looking back fondly at the doomed relationship he tried to escape from in the earlier song). Epic signed the band soon after, eager to capitalize on their growing fanbase (and hoping to find a group that would be as influential as REM). But their 1990 album ToyboatToyboatToyboat sounded a bit too slick and watered-down and the band parted ways with Epic after disagreeing about their future direction. Another indie release and a live album and the band was done. Link for Gmail subscribers.)


Years later, I thought back on a woman I knew who loudly and violently denounced anyone who smoked as weak and pitiful. While I don't like smoking (and have never smoked myself), the virulence of her attacks was shocking. When I learned she'd been a heavy smoker herself, the attacks seemed even stranger. Millions of years after the fact, I remembered how much she'd scared me. And wondered if I was just to weak to love her. Suddenly, in a moment of crystal clarity, I understood what "With You" mean (at least to me) and why it stayed with me after all those years.

When it's a suicide to choose, a little part of you dies no matter what you do.


Unrelated Postscript: Dave Herlihy, who is a huge star in the alternate universe with the best music, is now an entertainment lawyer in this universe. But you can tell he's still cool because his photo on his website shows him posed in front of a shelf of law books with his guitar.

There's Demons Closing In From Every Side...

The chair is (still) not my son.


Has there ever been anyone who achieved so much, had so much talent, then so completely disintegrated in public over so many years in attempt after painful attempt to achieve what he once was able to do almost effortlessly?

Attention, Hipster Doofi

And you know who you are...

When it's nearly 100 degrees out...

And it's so hot that you're wearing shorts and flip-flops...

Do you really need to wear that wool cap? Do you really think making yourself sweat while wearing it convinces anyone you're cool? Is there nothing else that you can do to brand yourself as a hipster doofus?

I'm just asking...