Let it Break

My friend Raf, who I consider one of the wisest women in my life said, “Look at it this way, when it’s time to let go of one friend, you make room for a new friend.”   My luck has changed, for if I hadn’t let go of an old friend I wouldn’t have opened a chasm that deepened horribly neglected friendships.  Rightfully, this thing had to break. I readily opened my heart to make room for new friendships.  Surprisingly there they were, ready to, well, be friends. And I got a job.  If you know me, employment has been a rough road I have traversed for a solid two years.  When you are in your 50s and you find yourself behind a hostess booth at a seafood restaurant something has gone desperately wrong. I now book The Delancey nightclub on Wednesday and Thursday nights.  My shows start in February, the very first one features Joseph Arthur (an old friend) and Leona Naess (possibly a new friend). 

This job sought me out. I was in the right place at the right time. The owners approached me when they figured out that this person sitting in a freezing doorway had a legacy as a successful A&R executive.  At first I thought it was horrible that I was forced to sacrifice this particular friendship, but it wasn’t my decision.  This was a choice made because someone did not want to play in the same sandbox. Instead they thought the way to have fun was through slanderous, bad behavior.  This behavior isn't pretty at my age.  I can no longer, "he said, she said..." I've done it (millions of times), but now I don’t.  Pour the poison and drink it.  I've drank the kool-aid, and it hurts. The other disappointment is I hate playing alone, and I wanted to do this job together.  My mother tells me I always had to have a friend around.  At four years old I went looking for community.  While working for The Delancey I want supportive people, nutty people and especially people with ideas to play with.  Georgie, one of the owners, is someone I am proud to call my partner.  A larger then life personality, a person brimming with ideas, a music fanatic, a man who respects and supports me, and a man who is not threatened by the ideas of others.  A man who when he’s sad listens to The Bay City Rollers.  Right, right, right on! I am in a place that is beyond my wildest dreams.  Right now.  Today.  Living present.  “Be present,” that is the motto my friend Ellen whispered into my ear at the very moment the first notes of “Lust for Life” tore through The United Palace Theatre.  Both her words and that song have stayed at the forefront of my mind.  I’m lucky, even when I refuse to see it.  I am.

Booking The Delancey is a learning curve for me.  I’ve never produced live music.  I have found artists, made records, helped market them and the stuff that we used to do when major labels and A&R people existed.  Whoa, this time around I opened the door and the wildest west greeted me. However, when I opened that door I knew Art is going to boom in 2017.  We are about to experience some of the best of what our new and old artists can offer. The music, visual art, film, television, social media, technology, science, all the artistic communities across nations are in gear to astound us.  In gear, groovy, a revolution we have needed for decades.  I should kneel everyday in honor of what we have and what is coming.  Having a very small place in this playground is an honor. If this new president guy blows us all up I want to be in the basement of the Delancey with Sam in the DJ booth, surrounded Charley Roth, Jesse Malin, Miss Cid, Miss Kitty, Gary Harris, Michael Alago, Asif Ahmed, Juli, Stevie Nick’s impersonators (for color), and a whole bunch of folks who inspire me everyday.  This list is far too long to write down, but you know who you are (and a lot of you get pissed off when I mention you in my blog).

Many of you dear readers know what it’s like to piece your lives back together.  First something breaks. Then we get to work fixing it.  I see mental, emotional and real toolboxes everywhere.  We are not building objects that hurt humanity, frankly we’ve seen too much, too readily, too easily and we’ve said, “ouch, this hurts,” far too often.  We are re-building ourselves and repairing our community.  Stop for one moment and look around.  It’s all happening.  If it isn’t, break something. 

You don’t have to break a relationship.  Break your nail.  You may realize you don’t need to get them “done” every week and that 90 minutes could be spent tutoring a kid who doesn’t speak English.  Break a guitar string and pick up a drumstick.  Damn, you didn’t know you had that in you, right?  Break an agreement.  There’s a better one out there for you.  Break a bad habit, suddenly you might start a blog, or become Patti Smith’s best friend.  If by chance you do break a heart, well, maybe you’ll realize you needed some time to your self.  I broke my knee, kind of, and all of a sudden I had time to find a new job.  That was pretty weird.  Hobbling around in a brace led to sitting at home behind my desk booking cool shows.  I hope you’ll come to some of them.  Maybe one of those shows will rock your world, make you laugh, get really drunk and find a new person to love, or just have some great sex. 

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  Things change when they’re supposed to.  I did find out that when I broke a few things; a heart, an old friendship, my knee, my desperation, (and hopefully my penchant to write run on sentences), that all these fabulous people and opportunities appeared.  The Damned tells us to “Smash it up.”  They are onto something.

Dedicated to Ellen Marino who daily reaffirms my lust for life.

Sharing a cigarette and some feelings with Iggy Pop

Iggy Pop bummed a cigarette off of me at a Marianne Faithful show.  That silly Marlboro Light made me feel special.  A couple of years later in L.A., I finished swimming my morning laps.  On emerging from the pool there was Iggy Pop sprawled out on a lounge chair soaking up the sun.   After all, he is a lizard.  I quickly wrapped a towel around my hips, and approached him. “Excuse me Mr. Pop?”  We had a conversation about the lyrics to “Gimme Shelter.”  Monster Magnet was recording the song for a charity record.  The night before, Dave Wyndorf swore there were sounds not words in parts of the song.  Dave was flummoxed and asked me to get the lyrics for him.  That very next morning the rock gods presented me with a Speedo wearing solution specifically designed to address our dilemma. Mr. Pop conceded, “He’s right, there aren’t real words in a lot of that song.  If I can’t find words to sing what I feel I don’t use words I just sing whatever comes out.  Whatever I feel.  Tell Dave he can sing whatever he wants. But he has to feel it.” 

I haven’t had any conversations about the new Iggy Pop record Post Pop Depression.  I am surprised, given my past working relationship with Josh Homme who produced it, plays on it and is now touring with Iggy, but then again I’m not.  I don’t think most of my friends have actually listened to it.   The story might be enough- Josh & Iggy went to the desert...blah, blah, blah.  When Bowie produced Iggy’s records we listened to them, but that was before we could spend all our free time streaming on Netflix or Hulu or On Demand.  And look, I realize that by pointing one finger at you three are pointing back at me.  What the non-conversation about Post Pop Depression makes me think is that maybe all this hullaballoo about Spotify, Apple and Tidal killing music is nonsense because teenagers don’t pay for music and Gen X no longer listens to it.   Go listen to the record.  Like it or hate it, go feel Iggy.  The apocalypse, political, LGBT, trying to get by comedic guy/gal, or mobster thing you are addicted to will still be there by the time the 9^th song fades. I promise.

Iggy kicked off the “Post Pop Depression” tour in Texas.  The show’s opening lines were, “Hey baby we like your lips… All aboard for funtime.”  By the time the tour makes its way to New York in April funtime may translate into a 72-hour binge of “Game of Thrones.” I am going to see Iggy.  Not because of the obvious, well okay, yes because of the obvious.  Plus, I like to think that, “I just do what I want to do.”  On Post Pop Depression Iggy declares, “All I’ve got is my name.”  Mr. Pop, I can hit pause for that.

Blog the truth. Get caught in the lie.

I read an article today about a millennial who lied to his boss about a death in the family.  He needed the time off, really, to build a tree house, which he blogged about.  Of course his fellow millennials read the blog.  If you are a millennial, not a blog goes by unread especially if it appears on Medium.  Tree House dude got a slap on the hand and eventually praise for his marketing prowess.  I do love all the millennial companies with their sexy three or four letter names.  Or two names each made up of three or four letters.  In reality, I would like to work for one.  However, I began to think about what might have happened if back in the day we blogged the truth, and got caught in the lie.  

If I blogged that all those Motley Crue tickets were used for my brother's bachelor's party and not to take Nick Zinner and some other hipsters out on the town, how would my boss have reacted?  One of my very cool bosses sat in front of me signing off on travel requests.  He came to one and said, "this one's fake," signed it and moved on, but the lie was never rubbed in his face.  What would have the consequences been if I blogged about the fake request he signed off on: claiming to see a new and hopeful young band.  In reality I was heading for Memphis to see Dgeneration, when I no longer worked with them.  I even hopped the bus and travelled to Nashville for the next night's show. It would have been a good blog; I painted Danny's fingernails red on the journey to Nashville.  Good blog or not, I don't think I would have been slapped on the back for my marketing chops.

We live in a state of over share.  I remember when it was something I did on the phone with my best friends.  Now I've done it on this site.  There are like 200 people that I don't know who have insight into my sex life.  We've all done the Facebook cringe.  We tweet, snap chat, Instagram, vine, everything we do. We give ourselves no room to lie.  Everyone knows where we are all the time.  You cannot tell someone you are working tonight because they are going to see the photos you post on your FB page of the party you attended tonight.  And we blog stuff.  I like to blog.  However, I think when I have a desire to over share I am keeping a burner phone handy and programming it with direct dial to SlugLine.

1976

There’s always something to do.  I constantly experience the feeling that I’m missing something.  There are gigs and readings and gallery openings and now closings too.  Someone has organized an anniversary celebration for something.  There are special screenings for films that seem to come and then disappear as though they’ve been sealed up in a bad vault too long.  The phenomenon of social media works its magic on me.  I see photographs of people doing things that I feel like I forgot to do.  I wasn’t there.  I never received the memo.  Maybe the opportunity got lost in the pile of unopened invitations in that invitation folder place I never look at.  Or, sigh, maybe no one ever sent it to me. I wonder if a subscription to Time Out would make things easier.  But then I would have to read it.

In 1976 life was much simpler.  I was thirteen going on fourteen.  It was the year of the bicentennial.  Jimmy Carter was in the White House.  In the New Jersey suburbia where I lived, a commuter city, there was still an air of 1950’s white picket fences.  Kids rode their bicycles in the streets after school.  We all had curfews and allowances.  Dads bought cheap fireworks for the bicentennial Fourth of July celebration.  Wisps of innocence floated through the air, and I had no idea how quickly one experience would change my life forever.

I’m not referring to my virginity.  That was gone.  Lost it young, in 1976, drunk on cheap, dark rum on Brian Basil’s floor.  Brian looked like a teenage, bow-legged, Brian Jones.  He even had a poster of Brian Jones on his ceiling.  I thought that was weird. I wasn’t sure if he knew how much he resembled Brian Jones and that poster served as a door to an alternate universe, or he just dug the dude.  Brian’s mother committed suicide.  She closed the garage door, attached the hose to her exhaust pipe placed the other end into her car window.  He was left with an angry dad and a younger brother. 

There was a record store on Main Street.  It was my private after school retreat.  I was in the 8^th grade. I went there to pour through the bins.  Record bins filled with Queen albums and all The Who albums I loved, the older hippie records like Cat Stevens, Crosby, Stills Nash & Young, Jefferson Airplane that I listened to and thought I might still be living.  I could sing the shit out of “White Rabbit.”  Stacks of Rolling Stones records released before 1976.  I loved Hot Rocks, but also Flowers, Between the Buttons, and of course Beggar’s Banquet.  Although those bins were filled with unexplored gems, I could listen to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” ten times in a row.  I held long conversations with the sales guy.  He was tall, thin in his early 20’s.  I knew nothing about him except that he seemed wise.  I wasn’t exposed to twenty year olds, except possibly my teachers who did not count.  They seemed miserable and would never understand how important reading an album cover from front to back was.   Or that double albums meant you could roll a good joint, the seeds getting all caught up in the seam.  One afternoon Brian prowled in like a stray cat. 

After Brian made his initial appearance we formed a gang.  Every afternoon from 3:00 to 5:00 the three of us hung out in that record store.  Eventually Brian took my phone number and from 7:00- 9:00 we’d have marathon conversations.  Except for the hours in school, my days revolved around Brian.  At the record store and on the phone he was vulnerable.  He was a broken boy who needed to be fixed.  And he was a bad boy.  Once a bad boy enters a good girls life everything spins out of orbit.  My grades spun.  The guidance counselor with the enormous Afro was called into the picture.  He kept my secret, until he didn’t.

On some evenings I would be allowed to go out.  I had a 10:00 curfew.  I would make my way to South Hackensack.  That was where all the bad boys lived.  It was the Italian area of our district.  In South Hackensack almost every boy had a band.  In 1976, South Hackensack was my suburban version of CBGB’s.  Brian would take me to the corner park.  We’d sit at picnic tables watching for cops and smoking pot with his friends.  I didn’t like them.  They weren’t sweet, vulnerable boys.  They were mean, spiteful, nasty things.  Not teenage boys, but reptilian creatures slithering around with joints in their mouths and bad grammar.  I felt uncomfortable in my Candies and high-waist bell-bottom jeans.  If I stood up I knew they would say something, maybe about my big ass, or thighs.  Say something about what I wanted to hide.   

One afternoon on descending upon the record store, the salesman announced it was his last day.  Maybe he had taken a better job, or was going to school, or both.  I was thirteen and whatever the 20 year old was off to do didn’t have anything to do with me and, therefore didn’t matter.  What mattered was that he was leaving and I would never see him again.  Our little group was going to die.  His very last words to Brain and me were, “You two take care of each other.”  A sixteen-year old high school dropout and a thirteen-year old wearing a “Tommy” t-shirt taking care of each other is a comical image.  Whatever he saw, I cannot imagine. 

We stopped going to the record store.  Instead we spent the afternoons, between 3:00 and 5:00, at Brian’s house.  Unsupervised fun.  This afternoon was particularly out of control.  Many times we drank beer, we always smoked pot, but we rarely drank hard liquor.  I was set up.  Brian had the condom in his pocket.  It might have always been there.  There weren’t a lot of girls on that scene.  The girls who did hang out were older, wrung out and tired.  No warning signals sounded in my head.

The entire day was a recipe for disaster.  I’d brought a friend along.  The fact that her dad was a cop proved my naivety. In a drunken stupor she opened the door, looking for me.  He was directly on top of me.  I was almost passed out.  My head was spinning.  It still hurt.  She gasped and closed the door.  We never spoke about it.   The condom was red.  He asked me if that, “Turned me on?”  Moments later my head was over a toilet.  I didn’t have sex again until I was sixteen.

Denise and I both returned home drunk.  Her parents called my parents.  The guidance counselor with the Afro got involved.  He finally told my parents about the boy in South Hackensack.  I was told, “No more.”  Either in an act of unusual maturity, or revenge I used the payphone at school and told him, “No more,” with strict instructions not to call me or come looking for me.  I went on with my life. He didn’t seek me out.  Not until I was in high school and no longer cared.  The truth was, I no longer cared once I hung up that payphone.  A quick rebound, I was again connected with my middle school friends.  The group I’d forsaken for the short time I’d disappeared into my record store refuge, and spawned a secret life filled with reptiles and suicides.  “Bohemian Rhapsody” still played in the background.

“KISS Alive!” was issued in 1975.  In 8^th grade once we found that record Craig and I erected an entire life around it.  I found my way back to Craig, we’d gone through such awkward years together.  Craig was my real middle-school boyfriend.  He was as obsessed with KISS as I, and came with fringe benefits, kindness and the patience to put up with my crap. In 1976 KISS were all that mattered.  I didn’t want to have a conversation if it didn’t involve Paul, Gene, Ace and Peter, in that order (Craig put Gene first). For the next two years no separation existed between that band and myself.  I was a certified member of the KISS Army and I had the t-shirt to prove it.

Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City!  The date was announced, July 10^th, 1976, and we had tickets.  Me, Craig, Robin and Robin’s older cousin, who was driving age, were going to be in that stadium.  This was the axis our lives revolved round, and finally it was not going to be lived solely through the record player and our imaginations.  We were going to see them, really, really see them!  No passionate journey, actually it was particularly rambunctious, this ride in Robin’s cousin’s green Camaro filled with pot smoke.  But, oh hell, we were driving down hot, summer dusty roads to Roosevelt Stadium in a 1971 Camaro!  I had no idea this was the band’s first stadium show.  I don’t think I knew what a stadium was.  As a matter of fact, I had no idea where Jersey City was.

J. Geils Band opened.  I didn’t care.  It was still daylight.  We got seats. Two rows back from the masses standing in the pit.  I could take in the entire spectacle of the stage.  Scaffolds, giant cats, and odd shapes that wouldn’t reveal themselves until they were ready, a small sinful city encapsulating The Summer of Satan Tour.  And as the demonic night descended, the Jersey air filled with electricity. Thousands of misfits, just like us, waiting for the God of Thunder, we’d found our fellowship.  A shift, a jolt, a lightening bolt; an inexplicable sensation I’ve only felt in the community of rock & roll, for a microsecond, cut through the tension, and then escalated it.  In one orchestrated movement, the unwashed masses stood on guard,  “You wanted the best. You got the best. The hottest band in the land, KISS!!!”  Fire exploded.  Platform boots, guitar strapped torsos descended down two enormous staircases.  The first guitar chord pierced me.  I swooned!  The guy behind me puked.  To this day, like a drug addict I seek the hit of that first concert over and over and over again.

I came home with a KISS bicentennial poster.  There was nothing else I could do in my teenage years that could piss my father off more.  I had gone through my rite of passage.  It was 1976.  It was on.

-Dedicated to Craig who's tongue wasn't as long as Gene Simmon's but his heart much bigger.