Daren and I salvaged the hood of a rusted-out yellow Alfa Romeo at a junkyard in Sun Valley, thinking if we put it on the stage and miked it as if it was a piece of his kit, the car hood would add to this sense of “happening,” of racket come to life. Every few songs, it is Anna’s job to run to the back of the stage and pound on the car hood with a mallet.
Something about it made sense: part revival, part confessional, part circus—that’s rock and roll.
After a few songs, I stop thinking about my feet or my clothes, my bad hair, my inadequately low, scratchy voice, and I just think about the songs. Where I was when I wrote them, how it felt to be in those moments, to long to be here. The band plays their parts perfectly, every note. I am so grateful to them. Amber is in the crowd somewhere. The audience is fickle. Some clap. Some don’t. Some pay attention and some talk the whole time. Some come up to me afterward with beaming faces and say something like “I had no idea! Wow!” Others seem unimpressed. I don’t care. I’m just glad they’re here in this room, drifting through space with me. I would take them all home if I could.
It’s a gift to stand and sing, to jump and spit and sweat, to say the things I never thought I could say out loud, to be at the center of this precious moment, this stage, the only place I have nothing to hide.
It feels like flying.
* * *
WE BOOK ANOTHER show. Then another. Most are disappointing and there is a feeling like performing alone to an empty theater.
We are at a record store. Should we set up beside the import rack or just stand next to the counter? Will that block the line? I mean, if anyone shows up.
We are at a small stage in a room adjacent to a Mexican restaurant. Why do they need these heavy plush red curtains? Are they worried people will see us eating chips back here? There’s no one out there but the waitstaff anyway.
We are at the Elks Lodge in Palm Springs. I remember this. I used to sit and listen to speeches about the future in rooms just like this, in another lifetime, when I had a future.
We are at a radio station in Seattle that has started playing one of our songs. Who brought the set list? Are you sure your cousin doesn’t mind if we crash on his floor? We have to leave by 5:00 A.M. so Daren can get back for work.
We are trudging through alleyways, unloading cars, lifting amps, unwinding cords, tuning strings, twiddling reverb knobs, waiting impatiently at the bar for the other bands to finish for our heartbreakingly brief half an hour onstage, for this one moment to stand onstage for the scores of people, the handful of people, the one person who may look at us as if to say,
Tell me about when you were young and you stared at a violet sky wondering why it made your heart turn in your chest. Tell me of the private loves you had, when you thought you might live forever. Tell me how this thought came crashing down one day and destroyed you. Tell me how you rose from those ashes. Sing to me.
* * *
THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE. A feeling that follows me through those squalid rooms and half-empty halls: the ever-increasing sense that I will fail spectacularly. That in doing so, I will embarrass myself and reveal a naked ambition, an inadequate mind; to try so hard, to care so much, to be so serious about this bit of silliness, will only make me look silly too.
I tell Dad about this feeling one day at Hollywood Park, sitting in the box seats. He likes the box seats. He says it means you’re serious. It’s a little strange because I know he likes to sit on the benches in the sun like the other regulars on the days I don’t come with him. But when I come with him once a month, to eat lunch and make our bets, always going in together on the Pick Six, he likes to get a box, like we are landed gentry from another time.
He doesn’t know about the bright room I carry with me in my mind a thousand feet beneath the racetrack, the dreamscape I go to visit my F-A-M-I-L-Y, feeling like everyone is young again and we will never die. I never tell him about that. He’s not one for metaphors. It’s like we’ve divided the world between us and we come here to share it, to tell the other what we’ve seen. He gets V8 engines and classic cars, football, World War II, Mussolini, black-and-white movies, Old Spice, fistfights, Mexico, “calling people on their bullshit,” George Carlin, Jackson Browne and the Allman Brothers. He seems content to leave metaphors to my world, along with “college,” long-distance running, Russian literature and indie rock.
He loves that I started a band. When I sit next to him in the baby-blue 1959 Chevy Apache he restored with my uncle Donnie, he likes to put on Eat a Peach by the Allman Brothers and crank the stereo. It has to be loud for the sound to get over the purr of the five-hundred-horsepower engine that can be heard for blocks. He’ll cock a thumb and rock his elbows, look at me and say, “Now, that’s one smokin’ guitar. You guys should do something like that.”
He and Bonnie come to the shows and sit backstage smiling at everyone like it’s the most natural thing in the world, to be sitting there, cowboy boots propped up on the table in the greenroom while the bands scurry around him drinking beer, going over set lists in their hoodies and tight jeans.
I tell him I feel ridiculous sometimes, that I have friends who think I’m kidding myself, that I’m squandering a writing career or something more responsible like law school in favor of something so impossible as rock and roll. He cocks an eyebrow at me and says, “Fuck ’em. What do they know?”
“I don’t know, Dad. I’m just scared all the time. Maybe it won’t work out and I’ll look like an idiot for committing so much to this silly thing.”
“Good!” He looks up from the program, leaning back in the metal folding chair in our box near the finish line, and smiles at me. “It’s good to be scared! That’s how you know you’ve risked something. That’s the whole point of taking a gamble on something: you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. There’s no payoff without risk.”
“I just feel like people are laughing at me, Dad.”
“Let them. Listen, being scared to fail, taking a big chance when you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, that’s how every great story begins. If you already knew the ending, it wouldn’t be very good, would it?”
“I guess not.”
“Anyway, at least you’re not bored out of your mind in some cubicle, or locked up in a jail cell.” He stares down at the horses promenading onto the track, manes braided, hides oiled, all glistening muscles and bright colorful numbers. “Don’t ever forget that I believe in you.”
* * *
TONY COMES TO all the shows. I see him standing at the side of the room with his shirt rolled up at the sleeves, his strong tattooed arms crossed in front of him, a thick silver necklace joined by a small padlock around his neck as he bobs his head with the drumbeat. I know the necklace is supposed to be some kind of punk statement, a new look he’s adopted since moving away from Playa del Rey to an übercool industrial loft building in downtown L.A., but the padlock seems more immediate than that, like he knows he’s chained to something.
He’s not one for the theater of competitive irony of the Silver Lake rock-and-roll scene. He just stands at the side of the room watching his brother.