Chock a Block in the School of Rock

I spent the past few days hanging out with my buddies in Skybox, a band that I predict has the potential to make it in the industry. And for those of who have been reading The Hereafter from day one, remember I predicted Mozart would be huge too, and now look at him!

My only concern is that the guys in Skybox are young and not incredibly business savvy. They're a lot like the American Democratic party; they're honest, they're reliable, and they lack the sleaze factor that helps propel people to the top. This is both good and bad; the guys in Skybox are nice, but nice guys get taken advantage of. Nice guys finish last. Nice guys get elections stolen from them (read: Al Gore). So toughen up, Skybox! Go by some nightsticks and beat the crap out of each other.



But this post isn’t about shameless promotion of my friends’ musical talents (for more about Skybox see below). This post is about the rock 'n' roll fantasy. The rock dream. Being on tour with Skybox reminded me of my own musical days. My salad strumming days.

When I was younger, my mother forced me to take piano lessons. We had a piano so somebody had to learn how to play it! Aside from helping me understand the movie Five Easy Pieces, which, along with Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger is the best Jack Nicholson movie of all time, piano lessons didn’t do much for me.

Later I became fairly proficient at the trumpet and was first chair in my middle and high school band, and though playing jazz solos at high school basketball games didn’t turn exactly help corral the cheerleaders for easy pickins, the strengthening of my jaw muscles and the lithe agility my tongue developed from playing staccato got me plenty of make-out praise.

Musically, however, I would never become an accomplished bugler for two reasons a) I didn’t listen to acid jazz and had no appreciation for free form composition, and b) [more importantly] I refused to learn scales. I clearly understood what it meant when music was in the key of E or the key of C, the infrastructure and mathematics involved in composition were intelligible to me, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what notes made up the scales. And I never made any effort to learn.

As I got older I fantasized about being a rock star. Forget that I wasn't a sloppy musician and couldn't sing very well the Sex Pistols, Nirvana and Bob Dylan all proved that precision and vocal range are secondary, nay, tertiary tools in the rock arena. And so I bought myself a guitar and a Crate amplifier and started a band. Honestly, we sucked. And to congratulate our suckiness we came up with a name that advertised our suckiness, so that should anyone hear the name of the group they would be immediately repelled, lose interest, and thusly save us the ignominy of actually having to perform for an audience. This helped us save face, as all the members of the band played their respective instruments rather primitively. The group was called The Assman and it was composed of myself on guitar and what barely-passable vocals, a pathological liar on bass (who would later become an astrophysicist) and the world’s laziest drummer (who would later do nothing). Our fourth member was a slew of vulgarities. Our fifth member was pot. Our fourth member made us cool (or so we thought) and our fifth member made us sound bitchin’ (or so we thought whenever our fifth member showed up to rehearsal).

And so I dreamed of being on stage and back stage and passed out in a pool of my own vomit. It seemed like heaven. The life of a rock star is appealing in ways that the life of a writer is not. Rock stars are highly recognizable. Sure, writers like Stephen King get spotted all the time. But can any one of you tell me whether or not Dostoevsky had a mustache or not? What color were Faulkner's eyes? Ha! Rock stars are celebrities of a different pedigree than writers.

Secondly, rock stars, should they so choose, have what's professionally known as "ubiquitous fornication opportunity." In laymen’s terms, rockers routinely boink the members of their audience after the show. It's a fairly balanced way of making sure everybody gets a chance to sing.


Of course, not always respectable is the type of women willing to fornicate with strange, loud men who live in vans with other strange, loud men, men who smoke a lot of cigarettes and argue endlessly whether Graham Parsons was single-handedly culpable for the Eagles (and also whether the addition of Joe Walsh to the group spelled redemption for the other members). You all know the type of woman I'm speaking of. We've all seen her. Men know this type of woman because the mere sight of her actually compels the male brain to begin thinking of its own genitals in reptilian terms. And woman know this category of female because they downright hate them and consequently refer to them as “groupies,” “sluts” or some variant and/or combination of these words.


The groupie is an interesting phenomenon; ordinary women hate the groupie because she is able to sexually out-compete them, and men immediately recognize the groupie as the type of woman who, like a wooden roller coaster, they want to ride at least once in their life even if it leaves them with terrible back pain the following day.


But ultimately, fornicating with throngs of dethonged, nameless, faceless women is not an appealing enough offer to encourage me to put down the pen, pick up the pick, and struggle financially for the rest of my life. And neither is the constant exposure to toxic cigarette smoke, the likelihood of jaundice from years of free Bacardi shots, nor the weakening of one’s immune system due to the repeated cellular insurgencies led by gonorrhea, Chlamydia, and syphilis.

Nevertheless, being on tour with a band is fun. For a writer, it's an escape. Musicians and writers are both creators, but musicians, for the most part, are children and being in the tour van allows you to act like a child and get away with it. Hanging out with musicians is uncomplicated, which is probably why musicians love being musicians. Wandering caravans of minstrels and musicians have been a reality for thousands of years. Musicians are ultimately children who have sex, take drugs and, by necessity, have learned how to operate a vehicle. And they’re happy being children; they have no responsibilities save for playing a gig and consuming enough calories (either in solid or liquid form, preferably from a bottle [again with the regressive behavior]) to make it to the next gig in time to slough a beer before, during, and after the show. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It comes as no surprise that a few insightful musicians wrote songs like “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and “Band on the Run.” These songs epitomize the rambling, wayward nature of musicians.

Why I Would Make an Amazing Rock Star!
1. I don’t have allergies. You can’t “bring the thunder” or spearhead a “rock assault” with allergies. How many times have you heard Robert Plant say, “Throw all the joints you want on stage, man, but seriously, stop throwing peanuts, I have a condition.” And I’m not certain but I don’t think Gene Simmons of KISS ever screamed through tear-streaked face paint, “Okay, who brought a f**king cat in here?!”
2. I love to hear crowds chant my name. I’m a Scorpio, so the world revolves around me. It’s and Bizzle-centric universe. The only thing larger than a Scorpio’s ego is Jupiter and the only thing more active than his libido are Mars’ volcanoes.
3. Aside from a hammer to the shins, music is the only thing that can actually make me cry. I believe in the power of music. Music is life in your ear.


Why I Would Make A Terrible Rock Star
1. I can’t gyrate my lower extremities in a way that make women swoon and tremble like wind socks. Mostly this has to do with my outright refusal to wear pants made from animal hide of any kind.
2. I can’t drink all night and be functional the next day. When I’m hung over I curl into a ball and wait for a friend to notice that I’ve gone missing. A good friend will show up at my house with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol and some Advil. Usually I take the Pepto-Bismol willingly, but my mouth has to be jarred open, the Advil thrown into the back of my throat, and my neck massaged to complete the recovery process. Like the sickly runt kitten you kept in a shoe box and nursed with formula when you were six, I have to be nurtured back to health.
3. I would get political on stage. And when people go to concerts they think about two things: woman think about how sexy the band is and men think about how the only true aphrodisiacs are jewelry and live music. (And since concerts are usually held at night - when all the jewelry stores are closed - men are banking on the power of the music to razzle dazzle the women) Nobody’s thinking about the Iran Contra or genocide in Third World Africa. Concerts are like movies and sports; people attend them to rejoice and escape their crummy realities. They don’t want to be reminded that their lives - their very ordinary, mundane lives - are waiting for them as soon as the show’s over. Me reminding people of their crummy realities would get me booed off stage night after night.
4. I’m paranoid enough about Mad Cow Disease, I don’t need the compounded fear of viruses setting up shop in my genitals after an indiscrete Green Room encounter with a girl who swore she was 18!
5. I like my privacy and I can’t read unless I’m alone.
6. I refuse to sleep on the floor. I like my bed, thank you very much. And I like two pillows and a sheet. I’m finicky and I don’t try to hide it.
7. I’m happiest falling asleep next to the same woman every night and waking up next to her. And if I remember her name, that’s great too.
8. I’ve written some interesting songs, but I can’t always remember how to play them.
9. I’m far too much Apollonian and not enough Bacchanalian.

To find out more about Skybox, click here.