But let’s cinematically freeze this little man on his suitcase.
I’d like to honor my two years in New York by closing my eyes to see what images light up before me. The same way I write a song or watch for lightning bugs. I’ll list them as they appear.
Okay. Here goes…
Drops of sweat staining open classified pages, searching desperately for work while living in a one-room attic apartment in Montclair, New Jersey.
The smell of the subway system, and how it sticks to the skin. And a neighbor who tells me in his severe Jersey accent, “My friend, that smell’s what I call the wax!”
Snatching the wig off my friend Ana’s head onstage in the musical Buddy—The Buddy Holly Story, in an improvised moment that nearly got me fired. Laughing, unable to deliver lines. (You see, I’d answered an open call in The Village Voice, and when the company saw I could play most of the instruments and do a little acting, I was hired to do everything but the role I auditioned for, which was, of course, Buddy Holly.)
Looking at an empty wonderful open-loft apartment for rent out in Williamsburg. The apartment, which rattles beneath the train, is cheap (those were the days!). I’m thinking I can start a band and move there with my new drummer friend who works in the tape room at Sony. (I didn’t end up moving there.)
Times Square, and that weird row of movie marquees on 45th Street with messages about the end of the world, and seeing a transvestite slammed against the Port Authority wall by a cop. Blood everywhere.
Police clearing people who blocked the sidewalk on St. Marks Place, there to get a glimpse of Jeff Buckley at an alcohol-free café called Sin-é, where he performed each week. Capacity: forty. The sound of his voice too good to describe.
The faces of my four actor friends from Buddy coming to support me on Wednesday at Sin-é. My crowd is about twenty people shy of capacity. Broken keys on my Wurlitzer electric piano.
First blue glow of morning on St. Marks Place and a shirtless muscular man with long hair whirling a rope above his head like a helicopter blade—at the end of the rope was his pit bull, sailing around him in circles, hanging by his teeth.
Here’s one more.
A Christmas card from my friends Rob and Rob, a couple who also worked on Buddy. The card was a cartoon of them both dressed like Santa and dancing with their asses pressed together. It read “Bells on Robs’ Tails Ring.”
That’s actually a pretty good summing up of my time in the New York area. But there’s one week that I shouldn’t leave out. The week that led to my sitting on a suitcase, right before I left town.
So let’s keep the poor little man frozen on his suitcase for a few more moments and back up to a gig I’d played the week prior.
* * *
—
The Bitter End, on Bleecker Street, is legendary for being many performers’ first New York gig. From Woody Allen to Lady Gaga. But it’s anything but glamorous, or even cool. Mostly you’ll see cover bands trying out their originals, hoping to be discovered, six to ten bands a night. Such was my experience. And having just rocked twenty people, mostly friends and families of the other acts that night, I went to collect my fifty bucks, only to be told that I owed the Bitter End a hundred. The soundman had discovered the strings I busted on the house Yamaha piano and was charging me fifty bucks apiece, which I didn’t have. My single guest that evening was a music manager named Alan Wolmark, whom I’d met recently in the elevators of Sony Publishing. He saw me struggling to deal with the Bitter End management and he stepped up and took care of it. I don’t know if Alan paid the club manager himself or if he just told him to leave me alone in some convincing New York language. Alan and I sat down, had a drink and a chat. He seemed very interested in my idea to start a piano band, no guitar. I explained it wouldn’t be a jazz trio, like you might expect, but would have distorted and grungy bass and drums. It would be a piano band for the nineties. One that rocked.
Nearly a week later, Alan and his wife, Annette, came rocking up to Sin-é, where I had established a Wednesday-night residency. Alan and Annette had plenty of space to park their motorcycles, because, unlike Jeff Buckley’s gigs, mine didn’t spill out into the sidewalk. They sat down right in front of my Wurlitzer electric piano, expanding the crowd to about six. When I finished my set, I was introduced to Annette and prepared to receive my compliments, but instead Alan said, “Not so good tonight.”
“Really?” I laughed, assuming he was joking.
“No. Sorry. I’m very serious. It wasn’t at all what I saw at the Bitter End. Not very good.”
Actually, I had to agree. I’m a real-piano player, and not an electric-piano player. I felt like Keith Richards being forced to play banjo. The Bitter End baby grand Yamaha, even out of tune, was far more exciting. But New York was not the place to lug a baby grand around, and so I had to make do with an electric most of the time.
North Carolina, however, brimming with musicians and great rock venues, was a place you could lug a piano around. The commercial music world was completely upside down in 1993 with the indie/grunge revolution. No music scene was more liberated than Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which never quite got on board with the polish of the eighties in the first place. As soon as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and that host of others busted the mainstream door down, all eyes were on places like Chapel Hill, where records were made—rough-and-tumble ones, not demo tapes.
I told Alan that as I listened to Liz Phair’s new record the night before, it felt as though my “people” had arrived. Finally, some grit, some antiheroes, contradictory lyrics, rough edges, imperfect singing—something new. My rough plan had been to move to Brooklyn where artists were taking over cheap lofts and start a band, but a storm of creative visualization was gathering again, and I could so clearly envision a band back in North Carolina instead. Alan egged me on.
“Do it,” he said. “What have you got going here? Just go while the time is right.”
“Well, what about my plans for a band here? My upcoming theater auditions?” I asked, since this old man (he was in his early forties!) seemed to know things. My work in the musical-theater piece Buddy had gotten me into Equity, the stage-actors union, and that was opening up a few opportunities. Alan saw those opportunities as distractions. I should be focused on my music.
“Nah. Do it. Go back to North Carolina.”